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| Beth Purifoy in the kitchen |
For Beth Purifoy, Every Kitchen’s a Classroom
by Molly O'Neill
For this cooking teacher at the Viking Range Company, kids are the best students of all.
It would be enough to drive a lesser woman bat-crazy, but for Beth Purifoy, 55, teaching cooking to a classroom full of children is a piece of cake. Chalk it up to a lifetime of training; Purifoy is not only one of four daughters but also a member of large extended family, one that spanned the length and breadth of Greenwood, Miss. Her relatives were all boisterous communal cooks and enthusiastic eaters and she grew up feeling at home in a chaotic kitchen. Her mother, Martha Massey, a caterer who specialized in home-style Southern foods, used inexpensive ingredients and family techniques passed down from previous generations. When she was little, Purifoy hung around the kitchen so often her mother decided to teach her how to cook.
As a young woman, Purifoy worked for her mother for several years. Under her tutelage, she learned catering and just about everything Massey could teach her about Mississippi food. Purifoy has since passed on recipes to her daughter, Maggie, her stepdaughter, Wendy, and her step-granddaughter, Mary. Someday, she will teach her step-great-grandson, John, although days in the kitchen are still far away for the 3-month old.
From an early age, Maggie had an easy affinity for cooking and Purifoy let her pull up a stool and help with whatever was going on the stove, launching her on her path to trained chef. Purifoy’s kitchen was often filled with the sounds of girls laughing and teasing each other as they made fried apple pies or decorated mini-cheesecakes for parties.
As Maggie and Mary, now in their 20s, got older, Purifoy missed being with little ones, especially in the kitchen. Once her kids became teenagers, Purifoy spent a decade as a kindergarten teacher, thereby getting her “kid fix.”
“As a teacher, I never droned on and on. I always tried to find creative activities to keep my students engaged,” Purifoy says. In her classroom, snack time was more than a few Nilla Wafers, apples or raisins; it was a chance to present lessons in unexpected and memorable ways. When the letter of the week was “B,” she served bananas.
As much as she loved teaching kindergarten, it wasn’t until she joined the Viking Range Company as the test-kitchen manager at its headquarters in Greenwood, that she found her true calling. Today, Purifoy combines her love of play and food by teaching children’s cooking classes.
“I don’t think people realize how willing most kids are to get in there and get cooking,” Purifoy says. One of her favorite lessons — as fun to teach as it is to learn — is fried apple pie. Children 8 to 10 years old wear Viking-issue aprons and, with supervision, fry the pies on the six-burner ranges. For classes with children as young as 4, she makes the mini-cheesecakes that her own Maggie once helped her make. They’re a quintessential finger food and these small and creamy treats are as popular at adult dinner parties as they are at children’s tea parties.
Continue to the recipes: Fried Apple Pies and Mini-Cheesecakes
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