Aftertaste - Meredith Mileti [137]
Before Chloe was born, Jake and I used to volunteer in a soup kitchen near St. Mark’s Place in the East Village on our days off. Mostly, the food we prepared was simple stuff, making a couple hundred peanut butter sandwiches at a clip, or dumping a dozen cans or bags of stuff into a twenty-gallon soup pot, using whatever was on hand in the kitchen to feed as many people as possible. It wasn’t the kind of thing that required any sort of culinary ingenuity or skill, but one look at the satisfied expressions on the faces of New York’s cold, hungry, and homeless come supper time on a winter’s night, and you would’ve thought we were Eric Ripert and Alain Ducasse dishing up homard thermidor.
The place is still there, and even though it’s after nine, there’s a line coming out the door. Despite the fact that it’s June and the days have been warmish, the impending chill of a late spring evening threatens, and the place is full of people looking for a decent meal and a full stomach to help fend off the cold and the damp. It’s been over a year since I’ve been here, but I enter through the alley door, don a stained and tattered apron, and join the volunteer cooks. “Yo, lady, long time no see,” says a man wearing paper slippers, whose name is Boulie, as he raises his fist to mine.
“Hey, Bo, how are you?” I say softly, touching my knuckles to his. “What do we need?”
“I got some sammiches going on over here, and we got a big casserole over there, needs some finishing. Jump on in,” Boulie tells me, wiping his hands on his apron and flashing me a smile. That’s how it is here. No one ever assumes anything or expects you to show up, but there’s always room for one more, and they’re always glad to see you.
Tonight the kitchen crew consists of Boulie, a couple of white kids sporting dreadlocks and wearing NYU tee shirts, and an older woman named Mary, whose hair is dyed an unnatural shade of aubergine. Mary is probably pushing eighty, although she’s taken some pains to conceal it. She smiles warmly at me when I show her how to chop the pile of old onions she’s busy working on. The trick is, I tell her, to keep the root intact, anchor the tip of the knife on the chopping block, and move only the back end of the blade. Her mouth widens into a big, round “O” revealing no teeth, just a mouth full of tender, pink gums the color of pencil erasers.
We work more or less silently, the two young kids and Boulie moving to the steady beat of reggae music piped in through a small, cheap boom box stained and spattered with tomato sauce. I set to work chopping several heads of wilted celery. The casserole Boulie mentioned is several pounds of graying, chopped meat, browning in an ancient cast iron skillet and halfheartedly tended by one of the two boys. I sauté the mound of celery, throw in some of Mary’s onions, and, a couple of carrots later, it’s approaching palatable. Because little here is ever fresh, the challenge is to make something out of the donated castoffs. When I was at Grappa we, like many other successful restaurateurs, had done our part, donating bread and rolls and leftovers, things we couldn’t recycle or sell, to the various soup kitchens around the city.
I wonder if Jake’s kept up this practice, and if Boulie knows whether or not he has. More likely, consistent with the philosophy of never having any expectations, nobody here knows, or cares, where any of this stuff even comes from. It is a challenge to serve a meal here, but no more so, I suppose, than it is to eat it.
After a couple of hours, my legs begin to ache, unaccustomed as I’ve become to standing so long on my feet. The knife slips and I slice my finger, a ragged cut made worse by the dull blade. “Shit!” I cry, looking around for the nearest kitchen towel to staunch the flow of blood, but seeing nothing, shove my finger in my mouth. Boulie comes over and, laying a hand on my arm, leads me to the first aid station.
“Come on, lady, take a load off,” he says, easing me into a plastic lawn chair. He dons a pair of latex gloves and crouches in front of me.
The taste of