What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life_ - Bruce Frankel [72]
Customers may make a big deal about Loretta’s pies, but she does not consider them special. “They’re just pies. It’s just that people don’t bake like that anymore. They buy something pre-made out of a freezer. They don’t roll their own crust as I do. My grandmother used to make pies like this and donuts this big,” she added, shaping her hands into a circle the size of a large grapefruit. “She could be sick abed and she’d get up and say, ‘I’m depressed, I’m going to make donuts.’ That’s kind of how I am.” And so, Loretta, who almost always wears jeans and never much makeup, goes about her day humming to herself as she bakes for four or five hours on baking days. She makes pies, donuts, cinnamon rolls, and biscuits. She works and shapes the dough with effortless motion, with hands that know the way. “Hands that are always soft and smooth. But I suppose that has something to do with mixing pie all these years,” says her look-alike granddaughter Tracy Kirker.
Meals with portions large enough to satisfy a hungry farmer’s appetite are also part of the Silver Leaf’s lure. Loretta understands the amount of food a farmer expects on his plate. “They don’t want ten French fries on their plates,” said Vicki Smith, a former short-order cook at the diner. Loretta does not worry about the portions cutting into her profit margins. She adjusts the portions to meet her patrons’ appetites. “It all evens out,” Loretta said.
She does not claim to be much of a chef. “I just know how to do home farm cooking. I don’t know anything about spices. And I’d have a hard time telling you my recipes. People are always asking me for my donut recipe. But I never bothered to write it down and I don’t really worry about making it the same every time. No one ever seems to complain,” she said, laughing at the memory of how her father used to warn her that she would never amount to much of a professional chef because she never used the same recipe twice. “And I am guilty of what my father said. Just the other day, someone asked me for my recipe for strawberry shortcake biscuits. I started telling them, ‘Well, you take a sprig of sugar . . .” She stopped herself and laughed at the hopelessness of trying to provide the secrets of her magic.
“I don’t know any fancy dishes. Besides, I couldn’t charge the prices you’d need to get for something like prime ribs. We’ll do them on Mother’s Day, but that’s it. If someone wants food like that, they go to a restaurant where they can have a glass of wine,” Loretta said. Once, she recalled, one of the diner’s earlier owners tried to turn it into a more elegant place. “She even put up lace curtains in the windows. It didn’t last long. This is just a neighborhood diner, that’s all. Good food and good fellowship is what it is. What more are we here for than to be good to one another? If you talk to people in this neck of the woods, that’s the philosophy they have.” Abiding by that philosophy herself, her cooking is truly done for others.
In the diner’s small entryway, there’s a saying: “Walk a little slower. Linger a little longer. Surround yourself with things and people you love.” To the cosmopolitan, it might seem corny. But Loretta’s customers seem to heed the saying. For them, Loretta is more than the diner’s proprietor. “The food is fine, but that’s not the reason I go there,” says hook-and-line commercial fisherman John Miller, a retired navy cook who regularly stops at the diner on Friday mornings en route to sell fish caught in Lake Ontario, fifty miles southwest of the diner, to restaurants in Massena on the border. He joins a group of, at times, boisterous regulars, including car salesman Jim Hodgson and auctioneer Willis Shaddock, who commandeer the restaurant’s round table. Loretta