SAUGUS — Longtime resident Leonora (Skauhellen) Dyment made an appearance Friday on Saugus TV’s new series, ‘What’s Cookin’?’
The 92-year-old demonstrated how to make her famous blitz torte cake as part of the station’s new initiative to document local family recipes.
Born in Norway, Dyment took her audience through the process of how to bake her version of the multi-layer yellow meringue cake in SCTV’s state-of-the-art kitchen, which was completed after the station’s move to the Saugus Historical Building last year.
“I grew up with her making these cakes when I would get home from school,” said Dyment’s daughter, Kirsten Wladkowski. “My brother and I grew up on her food.”
By providing people, especially older residents, with a platform to demonstrate how to make beloved recipes, SCTV president Donna Sordello said she hopes to help families preserve their own culturally significant dishes while sharing them with a wider audience.
“When you get together with your family on Sundays and you taste one of the elderly family member’s dishes and you say ‘I need to learn how to make this, I need the recipe,’ they can’t tell you the recipe because they don’t measure,” she said. “The generation that’s in their late 80s and 90s, they just tell you ‘do this, do that.’”
“There’s so much interest in town around the cooking show,” Sordello said. “I’m thrilled to pieces because the kitchen is brand-new. When we were going to the new location and doing all of this refurbishing, never in a million years did I think the show would take off the way it did.”
Dyment is the fourth Saugonian to be featured on the series, which launched in March and has quickly grown in popularity.
“There are so many characters in this town, and most of them have some kind of food behind them,” said SCTV Executive Director Bryan Nadeau. “It’s predominantly Italian around here, but we’d like to expand and do more than just Italian food. Italian food, Portuguese food, Asian food, you name it.”
The station is encouraging any Saugus resident interested in sharing an old family recipe to contact the station to sign up for a slot.
“There isn’t much controversy with food. Either you like it or you don’t,” Nadeau said. “I want to get more of our local cast of characters on our channels. People have been coming out of the woodwork to show us their food and it’s amazing.”
Elyse Carmosino can be reached at [email protected].
