In a corner building facing 4th Street in the Brooklyn Arts District, Phillip Jones is separating eggs to create—without a recipe and for the first time—pear-chai muffins. His new bakery, the Jelly Cabinet, which opened in July, had been a stealth carb-and-sugar resource for Jones’s many friends and people in the northern end of downtown. But good bakeries do not remain secret for very long.
The Hampstead-born and Wilmingtonian-bred Jones named his bakery after a cupboard in his grandmother’s kitchen that caught his attention while he was just a kid “playing with his food,” as his mother Jennifer puts it.
If you look directly to your left as you walk in the bakery’s door, you can see it: the jelly cabinet.
It’s only about 4 feet tall, made of dark wood with metal screens on each door. To a 6-year-old, however, it must have seemed like a tower filled with the ingredients needed to make sweets and jams and jellies. A cabinet of possibilities with a vivid and tangible link to the past.
As a cook, I get it. I have my mother’s cutting boards, my great-grandfather’s china and a bright yellow enameled colander older than I am. (It’s got a chip on its foot, exposing the steel beneath, but it’s fine.) There’s one banged-up pot I won’t get rid of even though it’s so old it would fall off the stove, as my grandmother would say.
But man, what I wouldn’t do for something as resonant as a jelly cabinet.
“I remember making chocolate pie with my grandmother, because my papa loved them so much,” says Jones. “The stirring and the baked pie shell. I don’t think people realize that’s definitely a labor of love.” A baker’s first customers are usually family members.
Back when the jelly cabinet loomed large, Jones’s mother did not recognize Phillip was doing more than playing with his food. “I was going to eat it,” he says. “I liked mixing the flavors and the colors and making it look pretty. Looking back, it makes sense. It was the creation of a child.”
Soon he was making dinner for the family, which was put on hold after an attempt at French fries ended with a pot of hot oil under running water. “After that, I wasn’t allowed to cook until my mother got home,” he says.
It’s said one must spend 10,000 hours to master a skill before becoming an innovator. If that’s true, then Jones is well on his way, having spent a great part of his 27 years in a kitchen.
There was the era of a Rachel Ray kid’s cookbook with chicken Florentine and his first dessert recipe: for dessert nachos. “I still have the cookbook,” he says.
Once at Laney High School, Jones found a mentor. “I was able to take culinary arts with Ms. Gore. That was my awakening. We broke down chickens. She really let us experiment; she was key in my baking journey. She had us doing it all.”
At the end of each year, the class would put together a cookbook. Jones offered his recipe for German chocolate cake. “I mastered it, I came up with the recipe and I made the cookbook! I still have the book and make everything. I had to put it in a plastic sheet protector,” he says.
“I think German chocolate cake is underrated. I now make chocolate ice cream sundaes with the extra coconut, pecan sauce I serve warm on top,” he adds.
Terry Gore remembers that German chocolate cake. “Each week a student would come up with a menu for the café we operated for the staff. Phillip came up with German week.” Gore, who is retired, added, “Not too long ago, an assistant principal asked me for the recipe for the meatloaf sauce.”
Jones says it was a sweet-and-sour sauce.
“Phillp, his work ethic, he didn’t leave something half done,” she says. “I had to write him so many late passes.”
Next stop was culinary school at Cape Fear Community College. He remembers teachers were shocked about what he had learned and could do. “You could tell I was extremely passionate about cooking.”
In the Level 2 class there was a cooking competition. “Of course I won it,” says Jones. “I made a pulled chicken with pineapple barbecue sauce, coleslaw, rolls and roasted potatoes. Something very simple.”
The college required internships and Jones worked at Apple Annie’s, the Port City Chop House and Whole Foods.
He excelled at baking. His teachers noticed and in 2017, not long after graduation, he was asked to teach baking and pastry arts.
Jones bakes at work, but he also makes elaborate birthday cakes for his family. A recent triumph was a cake with Beyoncé on a silver horse wearing a cowboy hat, like the poster for her recent world tour, was made for his sister’s birthday.
“It took me a week to figure out how to get it done,” he says. “I don’t think it gets the appreciation it deserves. I want Beyoncé to see it.”
The cake, which was made with modeling chocolate, wires and aluminum foil, can be seen on Jones’ personal Instagram account, @phillupwithphillip.
For now, the Jelly Cabinet, with its tiny kitchen right behind the counter, is open Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; he still teaches four days per week. During the holidays he will take special orders. “It’ll be very limited. But I do make a very good bourbon dark chocolate pie.
This Story Originally Appeared in the Fall 2023 issue.
