Rae Ann Gaedke: A thousand-watt smile and food magic made all of Rappahannock Rae’s Place

Rae Ann Gaedke spent a lifetime turning food into love. 

At Nature’s Foods, Mountainside Market and Rae’s Place, for potlucks, benefits, fundraisers and barbecues, in restaurants and home kitchens, she practiced her magic. The bibbity-bobbity-boo was equally divided between tasteful and healthful, and a single bite could transform veggie avoiders into veggie advocates, thanks to the likes of Broccoli and Friends, Magic Mushroom and other originals enlivened by the pixie-dust sauce of Rae’s House Dressing. 

It was community-centered cooking.  

Rae Ann Gaedke’s celebration of life will be held at 2 p.m. on Saturday, June 17, at Hearthstone School in Sperryville. Friends and neighbors are invited to join the celebration and share memories.  

Brunch at Nature’s Foods, with guest chefs Phil Drevas and Vinnie Deluise, was a relaxed and comfortable Sunday morning institution in Washington. At dinners featuring familiar faces as guest chefs, many a rural, small-town foodie was introduced to sushi and other tastes then rare or nonexistent in the Blue Ridge foothills. In one memorable collaboration with the theater, which was then Freeman Allen’s Magic Mountain Cinema, the audience gathered at Nature’s Foods for a chili feast before dancing two blocks to “The Last Waltz,” the nostalgic documentary of The Band’s farewell show. 

Folks talk about the old days when Washington had kids instead of tourists and homes instead of B&Bs. That family-friendly feeling was evoked in the 1980s because on weekday afternoons, the school bus regularly dropped off a dozen or so youngsters at Nature’s Foods, where they had bikes, boards, skates and jump ropes stashed for play. Parents set up charge accounts for after-school snacks and drinks, and Rae volunteered as House Mother for the lot, keeping one eye on the store and restaurant, one on the crew, until parents swung by after work to collect their progeny. And the arrangement continued, off and on, into the summer months. 

The county’s young sports enthusiasts owed their first chance at soccer to Rae. The School Board had balked at fielding a high school soccer team, calling for “demonstrated interest” before action. So, Nature’s Foods sponsored a squad in neighboring Fauquier County’s well-established adult league — all high schoolers led by two “grown-up” player-captains with soccer experience. The Nature’s Foods novices learned more than they won, but their commitment proved interest, and Rappahannock County High School added soccer to its schedule. 

Thirsty Thursdays helped make Mountainside Market a magnet for locals looking for welcome, frosty refreshment and good food. And Rae’s Place provided a ready outlet for local truck gardeners with extra tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, squash or carrots, as well as a first job for a score or more of neighborhood teenagers.     

She was often the first connection to the Rappahannock community, as newcomers took a lunch break from unpacking or explored the county’s attractions and had their first Rae encounter. “Oh, that smile and the twinkle in her eyes. You were instantly convinced that she was authentic and generous,” recalled May Jane Capella, looking back decades to when she was a new teacher at the elementary school. It was Friday night, there was music and Nature’s Foods was packed. Her future husband introduced his date to Rae. “She locked on to me like I was the only person in the world, asked me questions about myself, and I felt so welcome.” 

Rae was such a fixture here for a half century that it’s hard to believe she was ever a newcomer herself. 

She arrived in the county from Florida in 1974, a young wife, with her husband Bob Haase, whom she’d met when both were students at Brevard College. It was a dream vision of a dot on the map of Virginia for a town called Washington. And they answered. No job, no house, no contacts, just faith and a feeling of rightness.  

Rappahannock was an employment wasteland back then. Besides jobs with the schools and the highway department, there were occasional openings at country stores, family restaurants, gift shops, and the little garment factory on the outskirts of Flint Hill. Most work was on a farm, in an orchard, in a packing shed.  . . . or you could find a hole, get creative and fill it with a business of your own. 

Her husband started a trash service job in town. Rae, pregnant with their first child, stayed home and taught herself how to cook. Soon she was delivering Hungarian mushroom soup to a sick neighbor and baking baklava for the birthday girl down the street. Orders for dinners came next, and a half century of catering began. When she couldn’t find the natural, organic ingredients she wanted, she opened the first Nature’s Foods and celebrated Take-Your-Children-to-Work Day year-round, bringing first Adam and then Jessica to the store. The business outgrew its space three times and in its fourth jump, Rae added a restaurant. 

Next door to the post office in the center of  Washington, this was both the liveliest incarnation of Nature’s Foods and Rae’s busiest business. It featured the after-school drop-offs, a waiting line for Sunday brunch, live music, pop-up gourmet dinners, Christmas classes making gingerbread houses, baking for the Small Farmer’s Market, sponsoring youth teams and donating to every good cause that asked. 

The vagaries of love, life and business carried that dazzling smile to other outlets. 

Divorced, Rae started a one-woman cleaning service for homes and offices. She partnered in a video rental business and sponsored another soccer team. She sold original jewelry and jeweled treasure boxes on consignment in local shops, incorporating semi-precious stones collected when the three Gaedke sisters spent family vacations traipsing through western deserts, looking for quartz and turquoise. 

All the while, she juggled parenting and jobs. “Rae loved being a mother, and it showed in everything she did,” remembered Theresa Reynolds, whose family, with kids about the same age as Adam and Jessica, lived next door for years. “She had so much warmth and energy that children as well as adults were automatically drawn to her. I saw her pick up Adam and Jessica at once so neither would feel left out. She gave the same kind of attention to my children, always with patience, good humor and endless hugs.”

And all the while, Rae catered. 

“Eclectic, natural and always delicious,” is Jim McCullough’s description of Rae’s food. A chef for the past 25 years, he’s been a long-time follower of Rae’s cuisine, starting as a teenager with Five Easy Pieces, and cooking with her on special occasions over the years. “She came up with amazingly interesting flavors that, even as a chef,  I can’t put my finger on. But always, always delicious.”

“Rae was a pioneer who exposed us to wholesome natural ingredients and proved that meals could be both healthy and delicious,” said Heidi Morf, chef at Flint Hill’s Four & Twenty Blackbirds and Twenty Four Crows and a close friend for decades. “Great soups, tasty-but-good-for-you cookies, spring rolls at the drive-in or simple veggie sandwich in pita with tahini dressing . . . If Rae made it, you knew it wasn’t only good, it was good for you.”

Rae’s version of job-hopping ended with her marriage in 1988 to Brian Ross and their collaboration on Greater Sperryville’s new Mountainside Market. For more than a decade, the combination restaurant, deli and market was a social and networking center. With its inauguration of an annual Rappahannock Music Festival weekend, it also became a showcase for local musicians. When the business closed with the ending of the marriage, Rae stayed in Sperryville, buying a house off Woodward Road, co-parenting Cy and Stevie Rae, and launching new restaurants, first at Rae’s Place next door to the old Emporium and then at Rae’s on Main Street. In 2010, her widowed mother’s declining health took her back to Florida, and Rae was her caretaker for five years until mobility issues necessitated her mom’s admission to a nursing facility. 

Rappahannock’s attraction remained strong. Although a fire started by a freak lightning strike had destroyed her house just a few months after she left the county and her business was also gone, Rae packed up her unquenchable optimism and talent for making the best of things, and came home. 

She picked up where she left off, turning food into love, as soup chef at Headmaster’s Pub, and then moved on to the role of personal chef. She was enjoying her most favorite role — mom and now grandma — where she also excelled. And she was joyfully anticipating a little granny cottage to be built at daughter Stevie’s place on Sperryville Pike. Of course, the little house was to have a little kitchen perfect for making a little magic. The same magic that she worked right up to her sudden and unexpected death on June 2. When Rae was found, looking for all the world like she laid down for a nap, there in the fridge were the meals, waiting to be delivered.