I Had Forgotten

I recently came across my friend Lunaea's blog and read about a story I'd told her way back in the once-upon-a-time of our friendship. The story concerned doughnuts, and in truth, much about my life can be legitimately examined through the lens of food. I'm not sure why that is, whether it's a reflection of my genuine enjoyment of the acts of preparing food and eating it, or whether it's an echo of the insecurity that came from growing up with a mother born at the height of the Depression, and the odd way no one from her parent's generation was ever able to let go of the memory of being hungry. Odder still is the way I inherited that memory, who really never went without something to eat.

But, the doughnuts: for a period of about ten years I worked in a café in northern Massachusetts, a place that was unusual on at least two counts: first, it was owned, run and mostly staffed by women (the occasional male dishwasher did appear over the years but otherwise, it was a female sort of universe). And nearly everyone I worked with then was there as long as me, and that kind of longevity, in a business that is largely known for its high turnover in help, was also unusual. You get to know people when you work with them that long, and much of the time we all read from the script of dysfunctional family. Like any good band of crazy relatives, we fought amongst ourselves viciously, but would turn equally quickly and as one upon any outsider who dared attack one of our own. We went through holidays together, and a number of births; a slightly lower number of divorces and other betrayals, pregnancy scares, break-ups, new love. Everyone had her thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth birthday there, and the ones who went through menopause spent those years pampering each other with water bottle fans and learning to duck when the hot flashes came on in the middle of stressful hours. There were two things we took care of every first week of January: a new calendar had to be hung up in the waitress area, and someone copied over from the old calendar the entire year's worth of birthdays: ours, and also those of our regular customers. And the owner would go over to the drugstore across the way and buy an entire year's worth of birthday cards, both for the help and again, some generic ones to have on hand for the regulars. If you worked there, you also got cake. If you ate there a lot and we liked you, you'd get a muffin with a candle in it, and all of us coming out to sing "Happy Birthday" to you.

Restaurants are different than other businesses with repeat clientele, and I think that has to do with the intimacy involved in the act of preparing food for someone else to eat. On one end, when you do it for people you love, it's an act of love, when you do it for strangers, for money, it begins as a business transaction, but then when you start cooking every day for someone you know because they're showing up every day, the business end of things softens. Customers understood the difference, too, although it always surprised me how a person who ordered the same breakfast every morning, six days a week, was himself surprised that you knew what to cook for him before he'd asked for it. Sometimes we would see Eric, for instance, pulling into the parking lot, and his 6-egg-white-spinach-and-feta-omelet with dry wheat toast would be already at his place at the counter as he walked into the building. For my part, I liked to bring in food from outside. I used to open on Sunday mornings--typically, one of the busiest days of the week--and most weeks I brought in sweet potatoes for the other cook and the two opening waitresses, and I'd throw them in to bake first thing, and by the time we'd opened and gotten the first dozen customers taken care of, we'd stand in the kitchen together and eat that roasted orange flesh and it was enough to keep you happy all morning long. It was our favorite part of the day.

Our customers liked to bring us food, too, which always struck me as a little bit coals-to-Newcastle, but, there it was. Aaron was one of the boy dishwashers who was with us for several years, working weekends when he was in high school and some years all summer long, if the regular dishwasher had quit. His mother sometimes sent him to work with baskets of cookies she'd made for us, same as if we were all her teen-aged boys. Our favorite were her peanut butter blossoms that she topped with mint chocolate kisses--such an odd combination that you had to wonder if it had started out a mistake, but for whatever reason, it worked. At Christmastime we got showered with candy, so much that most of us spent the holiday weeks with sugar hangovers, and people brought more candy at Mother's Day, a holiday we all worked, mothers or no. Sometimes a customer would come in with a 5-gallon bucket full of clams he had dug, and everyone would go home and make chowder. Every Sunday mornings for many years, my friend Woody treated me to a large cup of coffee from a local stand. It was twice as good as the coffee we served, and he brought it to me full of sugar and cream, which is not how I normally take mine but it was delicious, like having dessert at 6:00 a.m. I drank hundreds of them over the years, until the point where my husband's cancer came back and I had to quit my job because he was too sick to stay home alone anymore, or to manage the kids by himself.

There were two foods in particular we could count on seeing, and they are what make me remember how food is really a seasonal thing, an idea that's too easy to forget in a time when you can get strawberries in December, mangoes in climates where they've never grown. First in the year came the ice cream. The customer who brought it to us appeared otherwise infrequently, but he never missed coming on two particular dates. There was an ice cream stand in our town owned by a family who lived the rest of the year in Florida, but for the summer season they always returned to northern Massachusetts and opened up shop, turning out the most delicious hand-made ice cream I've encountered anywhere. Our customer always brought us in two quarts on their opening day, and then two quarts again on their last day of the season. These days always happened to fall on Fridays, and once he appeared everything else we were doing would come to a sudden stop, despite the throngs of people waiting at the door for their haddock chowder and their fish fry lunches, despite the phone ringing incessantly with people frantic for take-out orders. Who cared?--the ice cream was here! Everything paused for that moment while we all dug into the cartons with their slightly-melting contents, clutching our long iced tea spoons, and ate, and then someone would run the ice cream out back to the big freezers, where it would have to wait until the restaurant had closed down again. Thus our summer season was bracketed not by Memorial Day and Labor Day, but by Chocolate Walnut and Vanilla Supreme.


The other big food event--and this is the one that Lunaea reminded me of--was the arrival of the season's first cider doughnuts. We had friends who own a large apple farm there in town and while it's possible to get their cider doughnuts all year long, the best time is when they've done the year's first pressing of cider. It's late summer when that happens, and while it's not my favorite cider of the year still, it's hard to ignore the lure of the doughnuts that get made from it. The year I'm speaking of one of our regulars was the baker for the farm, and he came in one morning carrying a sack of doughnuts he'd just made from the new cider. In fact he had made this batch, pulled them from their oil bath, bagged them up and run...when they got to us the bag was still blisteringly hot from its contents. I can still see us as we were then, two cooks, three waitresses, the dishwasher, all standing in our sweatshirts and our shorts, while we tore open the waxy sack with those little spots of grease starting to bloom from its contents. We inhaled the spice of the rising steam, we inhaled the doughnuts like we'd never seen food before, and luckily it was mid-morning and a little slow in the restaurant, and so our customers sat unattended and drank their coffee while we stood and ate, and ate until every last crumb was gone. That year, that was the day autumn arrived. Ever since, whenever I remember the scene, the women I stood with, how hungrily we all ate, it is autumn's first day again.