City of Many

Genuine Bread and Specialty Shoppe serves in more ways than one.

by Joel Tannenbaum

Jessica Kourkounis FIRST LADIES OF BAKING: Mrs. Doris Truluck (left), and her daughter, chef Barbara Abel, have run the Genuine since 1996. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

Tucked away on a quiet block of Springfield Avenue, the Genuine Bread and Specialty Shoppe accomplishes much more than its name suggests.

Sure, there's bread. Endless variations. White. Wheat. Challah. Buttermilk biscuits, sticky buns, cakes. Genuine is, first and foremost, a bakery. But its hot platters have become the basis of its reputation — that and its delivery service for seniors, which gets food to more than 100 home-bound customers every day the Genuine is open.

Chef Barbara Abel, 53, serves a menu based on American comfort food, but regularly branches off into Cajun, Italian, Mexican and Asian styles. Her menu, printed in Breadline, Genuine's monthly newsletter, is fixed — the week begins with "Traditional Tuesday," which recently featured beef liver and onions. "Eat Well Wednesday" has seen vegetable stir-fries, while "Tasty Thursday" runs toward classics like fried chicken wings with dirty rice.

On "Fish Friday," generous hunks of whiting are battered in cornmeal and spices and served with corn bread and two sides. On "Grillin' Saturday," friends and family fire up two large grills in the alley next to the kitchen, cranking out pork, beef, dogs and burgers.

And it all started, says founder Mrs. Doris Truluck, 83 — Abel's mother — with a tiny bit of money and a dream.

Back in the 1970s, mother and daughter were living in Chicago, where Abel worked as a financial analyst. Finding the bread in supermarkets not to her liking, Mrs. Truluck decided to make her own. The first few batches went to neighbors. Soon, she was selling it faster than she could bake it.

Mrs. Truluck, a Point Breeze native, eventually headed back to Philadelphia, and from 1990 to 1994, she sold her popular bread from a folding table on 49th and Spruce. She soon called her daughter, who still lived in Chicago. "She told me to come home," says Abel, who had grown tired of the corporate world and was happy to oblige.

After stints selling their wares in various parts of the city, they settled on a single neighborhood — the area around West Philly's Clark Park. Mrs. Truluck remembered the area as it was in the 1930s, when she would tag along with her uncle, a building manager for the apartments punctuating West Philly's landscape of Victorian row homes.

Mrs. Truluck and Barbara started by hiring 30 kids from all over the city. On Saturdays, from 6 a.m. till noon, they would patrol the neighborhood with baby carriages overflowing with loaves of homemade bread, singing, "Bread, we got fresh bread!" as they made their rounds. It was much more than a business model — it was a strategy for tapping into a community from the ground up.

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In the grand scheme, it's still a bargain. This is important for the seniors who began receiving home deliveries soon after the Genuine opened. The drivers, Mary Parker, Tenille Buggs, Wanda Blackwell, Joseph Jackson and Charles Abel, use their own vehicles, dropping off hot meals to seniors in all parts of the city except for West Oak Lane and Germantown.

For some delivery customers, says Mrs. Truluck, Genuine meals are the only proper meals they eat. "I always say, in your twilight years, when you're having dinner, have a good-tasting dinner," she says.

This isn't easy, or even necessarily profitable (they deliver exclusively to seniors). But profit has never defined this business. The Genuine has always recognized the importance of reaching out, from those high school kids in the beginning to the seniors today. Mrs. Truluck understands what they go through better than most. Many delivery recipients live in West Philly high rises — the very same complexes that Mrs. Truluck visited with her uncle as a child. "This is how I started this," she says. "I knew those apartment buildings."

(editorial@citypaper.net)

Genuine Bread and Specialty Shoppe, 4529 Springfield Ave., 215-382-3133.