Faithful readers: Meet our oldest fan

In the dining room, 12 fruitcakes await their dousing of Muscatel. Another four cakes sit atop the kitchen stove, cooling. Helen Porter still has a few to make before her holiday gift list will be filled. She baked early this year to free up time for Christmas cookies in November.

Clearly, she likes to bake, so it's no surprise that Helen reads the Taste section. And at 97, she is probably our oldest fan.

She is also a loyal fan, and has saved nearly all 40 years' worth of Taste sections, thousands of recipes among them.

There are a few issues missing here and there. Perhaps Helen was on vacation or a child was sick, and Taste got tossed.

But the rest of them, stacked in her closet, are in good condition, the occasional coupon clipped from the paper. The issues weren't chronological until she heard the Taste staff was missing a few old ones. That's when she and her grand-daughter got busy sorting. And sorting. (Forty years equals 2,080 weekly sections.) They sorted first by year, then by months, making order where there had been just piles.

Let's be clear that Helen is not a hoarder. But she does save things -- she's lived through the Depression, after all, and she's been in her house for 78 years, which makes it tough to get rid of things.

Helen particularly likes recipes, to the delight of family members, for whom she still cooks. (While sorting, she found a stash of recipes with a Post-It note that read: "Taste recipes to make soon.") There are subscriptions to Taste of Home, Women's Day and Rachael Ray magazines, among others, on her coffee table, though she doles those out to hospitals when the magazines accumulate.

Which is what she found on the pages of Taste. That and the ads that told her where the bargains were. "The ads were fantastic," she said, as she paged through old thick issues and chuckled over the 40-year-old prices for roasts and bananas. Helen still does her own shopping -- and still knows a bargain -- though these days she lets someone else do the driving.

For 12 years she ran her church kitchen and was a firm believer that whether you were cooking for four or 400, the meal should be of high quality. "I had to quarter 125 chickens to serve 500 people," she said, still a bit amazed by that cooking task for a single meal. "We had to serve them in two shifts."

Her advice to cooks is simple: Get your family to help with cooking. "If the family is involved, they know how much effort it is to get a meal on the table, and they have a greater appreciation," she said.