Meet the woman behind Beaumont's famous Jailhouse Rolls

Juanita Ward talks about interviewing with the chief of police for a job working in the kitchen of the Beaumont jail for 29 years. Photo taken Friday, August 29, 2014 Guiseppe Barranco/@spotnewsshooter Juanita Ward talks about interviewing with the chief of police for a job working in the kitchen of the Beaumont jail for 29 years. Photo taken Friday, August 29, 2014 Guiseppe Barranco/@spotnewsshooter Photo: Guiseppe Barranco, Photo Editor Photo: Guiseppe Barranco, Photo Editor Image 1 of / 7 Caption Close Meet the woman behind Beaumont's famous Jailhouse Rolls 1 / 7 Back to Gallery

Juanita Ward can be blamed for overcrowding Beaumont's downtown jails for nearly three decades.

"Local characters" would intentionally find trouble the night before Jailhouse Roll days, said former Beaumont Police Sgt. P.E. Perritt.

If they were in the lockup, the offenders were sure to get a taste of Ward's cooking, he said.

"On the days she made the rolls, it was hard to even walk through the basement around the jail," said Perritt, who started with the Beaumont Police Department in 1976.

But it wasn't just the inmates who clamored for Ward's Jailhouse Rolls. Judges, lawyers, jurors and city hall workers all made sure to have business at the Beaumont jail when Ward baked her rolls.

Ward, 78, is now retired and the city's downtown jail has long since closed.

But Ward still makes her famous Jailhouse Rolls in her Beaumont kitchen.

It takes two days to bake up the bread.

First, Ward prepares the dough. She mixes in the flour, eggs, potatoes, yeast, salt and water. When that's done, she puts a wet towel over the dough, which then goes in the fridge over night.

The next day, she rolls out the dough and forms small balls and bakes them up.

Ward introduced her rolls to the jail a month after she took over the kitchen in 1974.

She first made the rolls for a house luncheon former Chief Willie Bauer hosted. The event was televised and the Jailhouse Rolls became a Beaumont sensation.

"Chief Bauer told me after the luncheon, 'Juanita, the rolls were excellent,'" Ward said last week from her Beaumont home.

She made them only on special occasions, usually for grand juries during trials and sometimes for FBI agents, she said.

When she had enough leftover dough from those occasions, she baked the rolls up for the inmates.

Bauer is the one who coined the name Jailhouse Rolls, said his daughter Carolyn Bauer Allen in an email.

Soon after Ward's television debut, the rolls began to appear on locals' tables by many who claimed to have come up with the recipe.

"They never tasted like mine," Ward said.

Her recipe was passed down generations in her family from mother to child, but the famous version she served at the jail was of her own adaptation.

Ward said she heard about a job opening at the jail while playing cards with friends one night in the early 1970s. The work was only for one day a week.

Ward stopped by the jail the next week and interviewed with Assistant Police Chief Clyde Rush. He hired her on the spot and gave her a Monday shift.

The head cook left Ward instructions to cook the beans and boil the turkey.

"You don't boil turkey," Ward said. "I told the chief I refused to take a part in that."

After that, Bauer upped the number of shifts given to Ward, inviting her to cook Monday through Friday.

"He told me, 'Come until I tell you not to come,'" Ward said.

He never told her not to come back.

Rush even tried to replicate Ward's specialty in his home.

"We ate many a Jailhouse Roll at our house," Rush's daughter, Kay Rush Schmaltz, said in an email. "When they are baking, the aroma fills the house; and yes, like potato chips, you can't eat just one."

Ward worked at the Beaumont jail until it closed in the 1980s and was hired on at the Jefferson County jail, where she continued to bake the Jailhouse Rolls until 1992. She left the jail when she got a cleaning job at Regina Howell Elementary School.

She retired in 2012, but she still cleans offices here and there.

"I enjoy working," she said. "It keeps you healthy."

And she still cooks. Every Sunday her two daughters and their children come over to grandma's for a hearty country meal, which sometimes includes Ward's famous rolls. But not always. Ward's rolls are still reserved for special occasions, she said.

MLibardi@BeaumontEnterprise.com

Twitter.com/ManuellaLiibardi