Past or past perfect

Ellen Langer learned from her mother how to prepare a roast. As a little girl, she would watch as her mother cut off a small bit from one end of the meat before placing it in the roasting pan. As an adult, she followed the same routine. However, a question occurred to her one day. Why did she have to cut off the end of the roast? She asked her mother, who just said she’d learned to do it from her own mother. Then Langer asked her grandmother. She explained that when she was a young mother, the only roasting pan she’d had was too short for a standard roast, so she had to cut off the end to fit it into the pan. She’d long since gotten roasting pans in larger sizes and hadn’t cut an end off since. Yet for years both Langer and her mother had mindlessly followed this routine.
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Hello, dear members and Gurus!!

In the above paragraph, the underlined part seems to be awkward.
Wouldn't it be nicer if it is written "shd had" not "she'd had", using simple past rather than past perfect?
I feel that if the past perfect is proper here, then "when she was a young mother" should be "when she had been a young mother" because these two are in the same time span, or time period.