Franklin County and the North Quabbin region have so many treasures, we sometimes lose sight of them. Certainly the rural nature of the upper Pioneer Valley itself presents us with scores of wonderful places to go and see and things to do: hiking, motorboating, kayaking, tubing, skiing, swimming, horseback riding, biking, and on and on. The Quabbin Reservoir alone offers almost all of these, for example.
As important, but perhaps more hidden, are the fascinating, accomplished people living and working in plain sight.
Chef Myron Becker of Wendell, whose Myron’s Fine Foods is based in Orange, is just one example.
Myron’s Fine Foods was established in the 1980s when Becker, now a professional research chef with academic degrees in psychology and food service management, created a Japanese yakitori sauce business that grew from a successful yakitori food truck vending business. As he tells the tale, over time, other restaurant and food service chefs tasted Becker’s sauce and wanted it for their own cooking. Becker, left vending at music festivals behind and grew his business to what it is today.
Myron’s sauces can be found anywhere specialty foods are taken seriously, he says. It is used in food service operations as diverse as home meal delivery programs, contract management companies, white tablecloth restaurants, health and educational institutions, convention centers, caterers and country clubs, he says.
Becker and his wife, Kathy, his partner in the company and in life, also hunt and fish — so appropriate for people who have lived in the backwoods of Wendell for nearly four decades and know how to enjoy what the region has to offer.
Becker became infatuated with yakitori grilled meat dishes that rely on the delicate Asian sauce for flavor while serving in the Navy in Japan during the 1960s. As he tells the story, he’d hide in the kitchens of the yakitori houses trying to learn how to make the sauce.
Later Becker gravitated to Western Mass. as part of the back-to-the-Earth movement of the 60s, and like so many of those hippie era baby boomers, he settled here, never left and found fascinating ways to put food on the table. It’s just that in Becker’s case, his livelihood had to do literally with putting food on other people’s tables.
As a chef, he recently told a reporter, he has many “magic culinary words” that he cooks by. Among them were “quality,” “imagination,” “organization,” and “soul,” which he described as cooking with “spontaneity, feeling and passion.”
We get the feeling that those precepts also fuel Becker’s approach to life and have accounted for his personal accomplishments and the success of his business all these years later.
We know there are many other equally creative entrepreneurs hidden in the hills, and we hope that we always will be people like Becker whom we can list among our neighbors.