LAUPAHOEHOE, Hawai'i — Alice Lucas Peters was raised right.

Not only did her mother teach her to bake, but Mrs. Lucas also taught her daughter not to talk stink.

So, when Peters — "Auntie Alice" to a slice of the Hamakua Coast — tasted my first attempt at duplicating her famous Portuguese sweet bread, she didn't actually blurt out, "You call this sweet bread?????"

She did wonder aloud if I'd used eggs. The color was pale, not the rich, eggy yellow she expects. (Commercial bakeries use food coloring to achieve this; Peters, in her baking days, got the desired hue from really fresh eggs.)

"It's good," she said, very politely, "but a little dry, and you let it rise too long." (The loaf was the size of a manhole cover). Then she sweetly murmured, "I give you credit. At least you baked it. All my life I made. I like see somebody else make!"

I had brought bread to the baker, like coals to Newcastle, because 93-year-old Peters, who suffers various ailments including arthritis, can't spend much time on her feet anymore. The bread I nervously presented her at her son's home last month was for picture purposes — and also so she could critique my efforts with her recipe, which I got through a friend of a friend of a friend.

With what I learned in that lively two-hour conversation, the sweet bread I've been making since I got home (see recipe, this section) bears no relation to that first, flawed attempt. (Thanks, Auntie!)

At one time, Alice Peters was among dozens of Portuguese women around the Islands who made not-so-extra money baking bread — sweet bread for festive occasions but also the Portuguese daily loaf of crusty white or "milk" bread. Just as their sisters in other cultures cooked for bachelor plantation workers, operated furo baths, went out as day maids or operated small food carts or stands, these women used skills their mothers had learned in the Azores or Madeira to help support their families, even as they kept up with child-rearing and housework.

"No can help, eh? My husband's pay, plantation, was small. I didn't know how to make money because I couldn't go out to work (she had three young sons)," recalled Peters, who was born in Hilo in 1914, grew up in Kaiwiki, a plantation camp just Hamakua side of Hilo, and married Levi A. Peters in 1937.

Casting about for a way to raise money, she recalled that her mother used to bake bread in the wood-burning forno, or oven, and sell it, and was also known for her blood sausage, made with pounds and pounds of minced green onions, several heads of garlic, pork fat and Hawaiian peppers.

Inspired by her mothers' example, Peters began her baking career about 45 years ago, selling loaves out her back door.

In the 1960s or perhaps '70s — her normally sharp memory is vague about exactly what year — Peters and her late husband built the home that they would share for more than 30 years in the Pualoa section of Laupahoehoe, just off the Mamalahoa Highway. A short while later, to satisfy the health inspectors who had begun to crack down on off-the-books kitchen operations, Peters outfitted a bare-bones commercial kitchen in her home. (It still upsets her that it was someone she considered a friend who reported her to the inspectors; that lady never got another Peters loaf.)

Wrapped in a big apron and with her hair tied carefully up in a kerchief, Peters baked thousands of loaves for clubs and organizations to sell as fundraisers. There was no mixer in that kitchen; she beat and kneaded the dough all by hand, babied the rising loaves by covering them with thin blankets, and kept multiple oil stoves going for hours, baking 11 loaves at a time.

Asked if she ever had any complaints, she says, without undue pride, "No, everybody said Peters makes good bread."

But, she added, "There was only one thing, one thing all the groups told me: No raisins!"

Peters gave up the business only when her doctor threatened to tell her customers not to buy from her anymore, so bent was her back, so swollen her joints.

Even then, she sneaked out to work as a maid and baby sitter for several more years, and she continued to cook and bake in huge quantities for church fundraisers. Her handwritten personal cookbook includes gargantuan recipes for chicken long rice, laulau and, of course, breads and her famous desserts.

Peters baked in batches of 100 or more loaves, starting with 65 pounds of flour, and she used an ungilded recipe: flour, sugar, salt, butter, eggs, yeast, milk. The only concession to modernity she made was that she didn't make yeast from a potato starter as her mother had done. However, she did boost the power of commercial yeast with potato water.

In the old days, Peters said, "they were very, very strict" about how things should be done. Both her mother and her mother-in-law gave her grief about using commercial yeast and cooking with spices, but she just gently replied, "Mama, you cook your own, I cook my own."

Now, with cooking behind here, Peters doesn't romanticize the old days. Just as vividly as she recalls the crackling crust and tender crumb of bread baked in the forno, she also recalls swabbing the ashes out with rags tied to a broomstick. She hated it.

Just as she gratefully remembers how her baking efforts helped pay for the family home, so she recalls the last day of sixth grade, when she came home to tell her mother that she'd passed, and so would be able to go on to "the big school." "No," said her mother, "pau for you. You going work."

And she did, for the next 70 or so years.

"I went through plenty," she says. "I went through plenty."

Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.