C & C Part 3

The company started in a storefront in 1981 with a skeleton crew and a pasta machine special-ordered from Italy. Fast casual was not a thing back then when it was either TV dinners, takeout, or cook it yourself from scratch, and with fresh pasta, sauces, salads, and desserts that you could take home to make a quick meal, the place filled a need that people didn't know they had.

When they opened, the owners did most of the cooking, and they hired a couple people to handle the counter and someone to do the dishes and clean up. Robert was a native of the area; he grew up in a big family in Norfolk. He was a hard worker, quiet and smart, and it wasn't long before he was the guy who operated that pasta machine. He mixed durum semolina, eggs, and water in the Hobart, added tomato or spinach powder if need be, and then pushed fist-fulls of the grainy mixture through the twin rollers until it became satin sheets of fresh pasta. He cut linguine or angel hair, pressed ravioli, and could take the machine apart, clean it, and reassemble it in no time.

By the time I was hired five years later, the business had expanded to new location and added catering to their  services, but Robert was still there. Dressed in a white snap-shirt and uniform pants, he was in charge of the pasta and supervising the back of the house cleaning crew, which consisted of his brothers, Seward and Richard, and a friend of theirs, Steven. 

His sister, Recia, was a prep cook. Her station was away from all of the other cooks, a tiny stainless steel table by the pot racks and across from the dish sink where her brother Seward worked. As far as I could tell, she never cooked anything; her job was to prep vegetables, peel shrimp, and pick the shells from all the fresh crabmeat. 

At the end of their shift, Recia might help her brothers finish their lists, so they could all pile into the same car and drive home.

C & C Part 2

Gertrude worked the 6 AM-2 shift, Tuesday through Saturday. A woman of about 60, she was competent and gruff, and kept to herself unless you were doing something wrong. Then she would lumber over and let you know about it in a stern, German accent.   

Her specialty was salad, in particular the signature chicken and almond salad, but she also produced sesame chicken, seafood, Mediterranean, and pasta chinoise salads, thirty pounds at a time. Her station was next to the industrial can opener and in front of the convection oven, just down from the 10 burner range, and a very short walk to the pot sink. By the time I arrived at 9 or 10, she had it stocked with gallons of mayonnaise, mustard, soy sauce, and jarred garlic. 

In addition to chopping celery and poaching chicken breasts in 20 gallon stick pots, Gertrude spent her shift mixing huge vats of tri-colored linguine with tomato sauce, ricotta, and eggs, shaping the mixture into giant fritattas, baking them off and then topping them with more sauce, provolone, and peppers and mushrooms. 

Other days she would hoist 3 or 4 sheet pans of chicken breasts liberally sprinkled with jarred garlic and soy sauce into the convection, poach 10 pounds of small shrimp, cook off a bin of fresh angel hair pasta, julienne carrots and snow peas, crank open number 10 cans of water chestnuts, and pit 300 Calamata olives, in between smoking Kools out back on her breaks. She punched out and threw her apron in the laundry on the way out the door at 2, then drove home in her enormous 1970-something Cadillac de Ville.

She was there the day I started, and she was there the day I left. I wonder where she is today.

C & C Part 1

My first cooking job was as a sandwich maker at a cafe-catering outfit down the street from where I was living at the time. They were that type of place with a large cold case where you could order all sorts of salads and a few entrees (and of course, sandwiches) either to go or to eat in at the little dining area across from the counter.

There were a lot of kooky characters working there, me and my sister included, although we like to think of ourselves as among the sanest employees. The first week I was there a guy named Juan trained me, and the second week he disappeared. One day he was showing me how to mix up the cranberry-mayonaise that was the key condiment on the turkey sandwich and scolding me for mincing garlic instead of using the garlic press, and the next, he was gone.

The owners of the business had the police on the case after he missed a couple days of work, and no one could talk of anything else: they told and retold what he had said when they last spoke to him, who he hung out with, what his frame of mind was. A few days after his disappearance he showed up to work like nothing ever happened. It turned out he was on a cocaine-fueled bender with an ex-boyfriend, a sailor who had recently returned to our port from a six-month deployment at sea. 

He was fired, of course.

Dog Fish

Lucy froze when she caught a glimpse of something in the Tidal Basin this morning. "I saw that, too!" Heidi told her as we resumed our walk.

"What was it?" I asked.

"A really big fish!" Heidi answered.

"Remember that time..." I started.

"With Isabel?" Heidi finished.

"Of course!" I said, and we both laughed.

Back when we were new dog owners, and our first dog was only a puppy, we used to take her down to Jones' Point on the Potomac River in Old Town Alexandria. There was a little sandy shore there, and the spot was used as an informal dog beach. Isabel was new to swimming, and we tossed a tennis ball in the water to motivate her to paddle out and get it. But she was new to fetching, too, so often our tennis balls floated away or had to be collected by other, more water-competent dogs. 

Those dogs' owners were generally very nice and encouraging, though. "She's still young!" one woman assured us, even as her own dog literally swam circles around Isabel, retrieving the tennis balls that she would not. 

The three of us stood on the bank watching our dogs, hers swimming out and back, ours standing chest-deep about 10 feet from the shore. Just then, Isabel ducked her whole head under the water and came up with an enormous fish flopping from either side of her mouth. 

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then we started waving at her. "Drop it! Drop it!" 

She opened her mouth and the fish splashed into the river and swam away.

"Wow," said the other woman. "My dog doesn't do that!"

The Road to Gowanda Part 4

According to his WWI draft card, Heidi's great-grandfather was a slender man of medium height with brown hair and brown eyes. In 1918 the 39-year-old was disqualified from service, because he had been a patient at the Buffalo State Hospital since October 24, 1910. At the time he was hospitalized, his youngest son, Heidi's grandfather, was just a year old. Earlier that year, the US Census records him as working as a barber and living with his wife and five children.

Census data confirms that sometime between 1930 and 1940, he moved 35 miles south to the Gowanda State Hospital in Collins, NY. But there are no public records that suggest he ever came home.

It's impossible to say why he was hospitalized; anyone who knows the story is long since gone. It's also hard to say why his son never mentioned him, although at differing times and in various sources throughout the years, his wife is listed as his widow, and she did go on to remarry, perhaps without the benefit of a proper divorce.

The NY State archives has extensive records about former inmates in the asylums, including details of their diagnoses and treatments. Some even include photographs. Unfortunately, access to these records is restricted to all but "qualified researchers under certain conditions." Even direct descendants cannot obtain information about their family members. 

There is no statute of limitations on the restrictions.

The Road to Gowanda Part 3

Into the 1990s, unclaimed inmates in NY State asylums (and many other states as well) were buried solely by number. The records for many institutional burials have been lost or sealed, but for this particular hospital, the burial ledger was given to a museum in Buffalo, and has since been transcribed into entries on the Find-a-Grave website. 

That afternoon we walked the lefthand section searching the cast iron markers for one that was stamped 584.

The story goes that when she received the notification call that her father-in-law had passed away Heidi's grandmother was confused. "I thought he was already dead," she told the caller, "kicked in the head by a horse years ago." Her husband never spoke of his father, and although she was in high school when her grandfather died, Heidi's mom never met him. Like her mother, she thought he was dead.

The Road to Gowanda Part 2

A sunlit clearing lined with neat rows of cement markers lay at the bottom of the hill. To our right and through the woods was another opening dotted with cast iron Ts and on the left was another. We turned around and headed back up the hill. I gave a thumbs up as the car came into view and Heidi's mom was climbing out before we got there. "This is it," I told her.

After spraying our legs liberally with bug spray, we leashed up the dogs and stepped over the chain again. Once seen, this is a cemetery one never forgets the description had read, and it was accurate. Our search was over, we had found the Gowanda State Hospital Cemetery where Heidi's great-grandfather had been buried at the age of 83 in 1962 after living the last 50 years of his life in one of New York's state asylums.