Kate McClearen did not expect a muffin to make her cry. During a stop at The Trustees’ Table, the restaurant at Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, she bit into a pumpkin muffin made from the same recipe her mother has baked every fall for years, and the tears came almost instantly.
The moment was captured in a video that Kate and her husband, Jason McClearen, posted on Oct. 27 to their Instagram account, @thechefandwife. TODAY food reporter Joseph Lamour wrote about the clip on Nov. 6, and the story has since reached far beyond the couple’s own followers, striking a chord with anyone who has a family recipe tied to a particular season.
The Moment at The Trustees’ Table
According to TODAY’s report on the video, the clip opens with Jason asking a server whether the kitchen still has any pumpkin muffins. The server confirms there are some left and brings out enough for the whole table.
Kate explains on camera that her mother has the recipe and makes the muffins every year, but that she had never actually eaten one at the restaurant itself. Jason tastes first. Asked whether it matches the version from home, he nods and points out that Kate’s mother originally got the recipe from this very dining room.
Then Kate takes her bite, and her eyes fill up right away. “Tastes like my childhood,” she says, wiping her face, before admitting with a laugh that she cries at everything. Jason closes the video by calling it an instant, amazing memory that came rushing back just from food.
The couple’s original Instagram post drew a stream of comments from viewers sharing similar moments. One commenter described tearing up over potato salad at a local barbecue spot, while another compared Kate’s reaction to the famous scene in Pixar’s “Ratatouille,” in which a single forkful sends a stern food critic straight back to his childhood. TODAY did not report a view count for the video.
A Recipe That Traveled From a Restaurant to a Family Kitchen
Kate told TODAY that her mother, who she stressed is very much alive, cooked most meals from scratch and baked the pumpkin muffins at the start of every fall without fail. Kate now bakes them herself, carrying the habit into another generation. Jason told the outlet that her mother was always deliberate about making whoever was around feel welcome at the table, and he said the muffins hit him hard too, because they called up memories of holidays at his grandmother’s house.
The recipe the family has followed for years comes from a cookbook of the Trustees’ House daily fare written by Elizabeth C. Kremer, who led dining operations at Shaker Village from 1967 until 1986, TODAY reported. Kristen Flick, the village’s vice president of hospitality, told the outlet that Kremer brought a number of her own recipes into the restaurant, among them a tomato celery soup, fried chicken and the pumpkin muffins. Flick said all of those dishes are still on the menu and appear in the village’s cookbooks. TODAY also published the Shaker pumpkin muffin recipe, credited to Kremer, with a prep time of 20 minutes and a bake time of 20 minutes.
That kind of continuity has become rare. Recipes like Kremer’s have outlasted many of the forgotten household items from the past that once filled American kitchens. Many family favorites now survive only on handwritten cards and splattered cookbook pages, guarded the same way people who keep old letters and childhood keepsakes hold on to small links to the past.
Fall baking adds another layer of memory, since the season brings its own rotation of ingredients, from canned pumpkin and warm spices to the apple varieties bakers reach for in the fall. For plenty of households, the first batch of pumpkin muffins is the unofficial start of the season, paired with a slow morning and a fresh pot of coffee for fall mornings and holiday guests.
Kate also explained why the setting mattered as much as the food. She told TODAY that her grandmother, the person who first introduced Kate’s mother to the muffins, had styled her home after Colonial Williamsburg and early American design, and the Shaker Village dining room looked a great deal like the one Kate grew up around. She said it brought back a dining room she knows she will never share a meal in again, paired with a food centered on the woman who started the tradition. The restored village itself, set in the Kentucky countryside, holds the same appeal for travelers as the stops on lists of the best small towns in America to visit.
The Shaker Village Behind the Muffin
The restaurant sits inside one of Kentucky’s best-known historic sites. According to Shaker Village’s history page, a group of Shakers arrived in central Kentucky in 1805 and founded a village they named Pleasant Hill. The Shakers were 19th-century America’s largest and best-known communal society, and the Pleasant Hill population peaked at almost 500 in the 1820s, when the community farmed more than 4,000 acres.
The community was active until 1910, and a restoration effort that began in 1961 turned the grounds into a popular destination, according to Wikipedia’s entry on the village, which lists the site as a National Historic Landmark District. The restaurant’s name nods to the Trustees’ Office, which once served as both the community’s administrative headquarters and its guest house.
What The Trustees’ Table Serves Today
The Trustees’ Table describes its menus as a mix of traditional favorites and seasonal Kentucky dishes made with ingredients from the village garden and nearby farmers. According to the restaurant’s page, breakfast runs from 7:30 to 10 a.m., lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. and dinner from 5 to 8:30 p.m., and reservations are strongly recommended. Dinner is served family style with a rotating selection of sides, and on Friday and Saturday evenings the lawn outside hosts live music around a fire pit.
For most diners, a pumpkin muffin at breakfast is simply a seasonal pastry. For the McClearen family, it is a direct line back to the place where a familiar recipe began, now shared with a wide audience online.
A recipe that left a Kentucky restaurant kitchen decades ago settled into one mother’s fall routine and then came full circle in a single bite. The camera just happened to be rolling when it did.
This article was produced with AI assistance and edited for accuracy against the sources linked above.
Image: Luca Nebuloni – CC BY 2.0/Wikimedia Commons
