“Getting together at my dad’s house—the backyard, on the patio—just getting the family together and all the grandkids running around, screaming and having fun.” Melissa Nordberg, who goes by Missi, describes what the one-year anniversary of her mother’s death might look like this month. She’s been a pastry chef for a dozen or so years but she’s been her mother’s daughter all her life. In the recipe of life, Missi’s mother—Diane Sheridan—was a key ingredient.
If you dined out at 1889 within the last five years, chances are you’ve had one of Missi’s desserts. Her plates are like works of art, carefully and thoughtfully curated through an open-door policy on creativity. Missi always appreciated working at her friend’s restaurant, having gone to high school with Reed Mooney—owner with his wife Melissa of 1889 and The Keep. Missi spent three years at 1889 as the head pastry chef before winding up as a pastry instructor at Big Sky Culinary Institute at Missoula College with the head chef and sous chef that she worked with at 1889. A serendipitous reunion of friends.
Missi describes teaching from a place of pride. She enjoys the baking, yes, but also seeing returning students and watching them succeed in the real world. “I’ve seen some of them get jobs here at local restaurants—that’s our goal. We’re helping to train chefs and pastry chefs to potentially work at restaurants and bakeries because I know there’s a huge need for help in the local restaurants here,” says Missi. “I have a lot of friends that own restaurants, so I feel like we’re helping them.”
Restaurants, after all, feel like a second home to Missi. She and her big family frequent many of the Missoula staples, and it was she and her mom who planned lots of dinners together. Her love for cooking and baking and all things food reaches back through her family roots, having great grandmothers who made pasties for the miners in Butte. Her grandfather was a miner. As a fifth generation Montanan, Missi takes the extra step in bringing something special to the table just like her mother did all through her life.
“When I was little, she always baked all these fancy birthday cakes for me, like layer cakes and the cake with the Barbie doll in the middle, you know, and the cake is the dress,” says Missi. “I look back at all of these pictures, these cakes that she made me, and I’m like, ‘Oh wow, she was good.’”
While her mother’s talent certainly inspired Missi, it’s the love she feels so deeply in her most inner of workings that keeps Missi in the kitchen. “I used to talk to her every day…I’m pretty depressed at times because I miss her and, you know, it’s my therapy. It makes me feel better, especially when I’m in her kitchen, cooking dinner for my family. I feel like she’s there and it totally comforts me and soothes me. I just feel like she’s there, so yeah, my therapy is definitely baking.”
Missi talks about the family vacations—trips to Hawaii, golfing with everyone—and living with family all around her. Reminiscing is like savoring a decadent flavor. She has three brothers, and those brothers had boys and so did she. The matriarch torch had been passed down to Missi, though begrudgingly. “She did not want to go,” says Missi, who tended to her alongside her father in those final days. She had interstitial lung disease—a rare side effect from a medication that she took—and caring for the family was a tall order that her mother did not want to let go of. “She was the matriarch of our family and worried about everybody all the time. She was in control of everything and so worried about how I was going to be, how my dad was going to be—who’s going to take care of so-and-so? I promised her I would take care of Dad. I’m going to make sure my brothers are ok—it’s all on my shoulders now. It’s a lot of pressure but yet I love it.”
Missi remembers the red velvet cake she made for her mother’s 80th birthday the autumn before she passed. Being with the family and celebrating through food was—and will always be—the way in which love is passed down in Missi’s world. She rattles off intricate names—croquembouche, Pâte à Choux, entrement—like it’s a second language.A language of love. “We were just unusually super close…she was just proud of everything I did.”
"I feel like she’s there and it totally comforts me and soothes me."