I discovered The Pantry on roadfood.com, but I wasn’t planning on stopping — it didn’t seem worth extra effort and we weren’t going to be in the neighborhood until late in the morning.
But as we got closer to Yankton, I mentioned it to my wife. “It’s a kitchenware store with a coffee counter in the back where they sell muffins.”
She responded, “I would like to buy a zester. If I had one, I could make lemon meringue pies.” I’d never heard of a zester, but if it could produce lemon meringue pies, that settled it for me.
We walked into a maze of folksy clutter.
A woman (she wasn’t the owner) came from the back of the store and asked if she could help me. I told her my wife was looking for a … I couldn’t remember the name, so I called to my wife across several other customers. She came over, and the woman showed her three or four options. I then asked about the muffins.
According to roadfood.com, the woman who owns the place put a kitchen in the back for cooking demonstrations. And since she has a kitchen, she figured she might as well offer coffee and muffins for her customers. But she likes to sleep late, so her husband gets up early every morning and makes the muffins in individual crockery pots.
My wife got a coffee, and we each got a muffin. They were light and tasty, with tons of fruit — probably 50% fruit — with a crisp, sugar-covered top. And they were very tasty. And that’s the zester in the photo.
A man appeared mysteriously from out of the clutter and sat down at the counter. He acted like he belonged, so I asked him if he made the muffins. He admitted that he did, and that he likes to use a lot of fruit.
We got to chatting about where we were from and how we happened to be in Yankton. I asked him how old the building was, and he said it had been built before South Dakota became a state, which was in 1889. He was full of suggestions about things we should do on our vacation, and long after our muffins were done, he was still talking. We got up and headed out of the store, and he followed, talking until the moment we exited. In the half hour or so we were there, we felt like we had really gotten to know the muffin man.
From Yankton, we headed north toward Mitchell, and as we drove I had the distinct impression that the world had turned pastel.
