Anne’s Dumplings is a treasured North Carolina product

Here’s an early entry for the “2023 Made in NC Awards” sponsored by Our State magazine – Anne’s Old Fashioned Flat Dumplings, which are manufactured near Ayden in Pitt County. 

Look for the distinctive red and yellow box in the frozen food section of local grocery stores. Anne’s award-winning recipe for chicken and dumplings is printed on the back of the box.

 

Throughout the South, the dish is often served for Sunday dinner. Some folks refer to it as “chicken pastry, chicken stew or chicken slick.” 

Meet Anne. She is Mildred Anne Briley Grimes. “Everyone has always called me Anne. I was born with a spoon in one hand and a pot in the other,” she quipped.

 

As a young girl growing up in the 1950s in Greenville, N.C., Anne’s favorite book was the Betty Crocker Cookbook. She would even take it to bed with her to read.

Anne was 9 when she opened a business – baking cakes. “I charged $3 for a three-layer, nine-inch cake and offered five varieties,” she said.

 

What great memories. That was a long time ago, she told reporter Kim Grizzard of The Daily Reflector in Greenville, who “covered” Anne Grimes’ 80th birthday wing-ding event in 2022. 

Grizzard reported: “As a teenager, Anne spent her summers selling milkshakes at the dairy where her father worked.” She served a customer named Bryan Grimes Jr., “the man who would become her husband.” 

Both were students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1961. “Without a lot of forethought,” Anne said, “we eloped…and were married on Jan. 18, 1961, at the First Baptist Church in Hillsborough.” 

“We went down to the Rathskeller on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill to celebrate with a rare roast beef sandwich and a mug of iced tea. Then we both went back to our separate dorms to study because exams started the next day.”

The Ratskeller closed in 2007, but the recipe for the bowl of cheese (lasagna) has been perfected by owners of S&T’s Soda Shop in Pittsboro.

In the late 1970s, Anne opened the Rolling Pin, a bakery in Greenville, that sold cakes, pies, doughnuts and muffins. One day, two elderly women came in to inquire if Anne sold pastry (dumplings). When she told them no, one woman scoffed and suggested: “I bet she doesn’t know how to make pastry.” 

“If you tell me I can’t do it, you’d better believe I’m going to kill myself doing it,” Anne said laughingly.

That “personal challenge” led to the rollout of “Anne’s pastry,” her famous dumplings, and the launch of a family business that the Grimes couple named Harvest Time Foods in 1981. People began to buy them. A modern factory near Ayden opened in 1990. It’s been expanded several times since. 

The company’s state-of-the-art production lines feature cryogenic freezing, in which liquid nitrogen is used to “flash freeze” fresh foods. 

Anne’s son Bryan Grimes III is now running the show. She’s now retired but not tired. Don’t “sourpuss” your life away, she counsels fellow seniors. “Make things happen. Go out there and stir the bushes.” 

Anne has partnered with friend Pamela Eldridge to open Homeplace Events Venue near Ayden, describing the facility as “shabby chic with a touch of rustic charm.” Picture a wedding barn with an elegant chandelier.

 

“I’m working harder now than I’ve ever worked,” Anne said. “Every day I’ve got a list. I get up excited.” 

Pam Eldridge chipped in, saying that Anne Grimes is “an inspiration. There’s purpose in her life. She urges others to do the same, saying: ‘Give it all the gas you’ve got.’ That’s what she does. She gives it the gas.”