I’ve learned volumes at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant Museum in Detroit’s Milwaukee Junction neighborhood.
I learned this pocket of Detroit was the early 20th Century’s Silicon Valley: A hive of invention and investment, a neighborhood where fortunes were made and lost, home to a looping rail line that carried components from parts factories to auto plants. Finished cars rolled out of more than a dozen automakers to the rest of America.
I didn’t expect a pastry recipe by Clara Ford (born, 1866; died, 1950), women’s suffragist, wife of Henry Ford, great grandmother of current Ford Chairman William Clay Ford Jr. and an electric-car driving pioneer in her own right.
But I had the good luck to visit the day a volunteer delivered a plate of delicious date bars based on a recipe in Ford R. Bryan’s biography, “Clara: Mrs. Henry Ford.”…