Loaves, Fishes, and Potato Salad

"Only one! You take only one. Everyone has to eat." George yells at a tall lanky older guy who is leaning over a carton filled with boxes of cereal, clutching two in his hand. He scowls back at George, drops one, and moves on. A short stocky woman takes his place and puzzles through the Cheerios and Rice Krispies. A woman holding a small boy's hand reaches into a box of small packaged cakes and hands him one. At the end of the line, two women discuss whether the lettuce is too wilted.

 It's Friday at the Hudson Salvation Army Center, where, along with the daily lunch, the weekly food pantry helps feed its neighbors. The pantry is open from 8 to 10 AM, although some people start lining up outside at five, leaning against the front wall where there is no shelter, even in icy nasty weather. The only requirement is that you sign in and give your address and the number of people in your family. The tables that will later be set for lunch are now laid end to end, lined with a train of boxes and cartons containing the donations of the week: cans of soup, stews, and vegetables, boxes of cereal and bags of edible chemistry, fresh produce, frozen meats, and baked goods.

The donors for both the daily lunches and the weekly food pantry include local supermarkets, businesses, non-profits, and farms. The food varies depending on the season or what a donor wants to get rid of that week, either from overstock or customer disinterest. In addition to the pedestrian carrots, onions, potatoes, and apples, the pantry also occasionally provides more exotic treats, like frozen tripe and chicken livers, raspberries, mangoes, avocadoes, chilies, and artichokes. Hawthorne Valley, a local organic farm, once contributed cartons of fresh goat cheese and yogurt because there was an error in the labels. (Confession: I took some home.) There are also, of course, the awful products that don't sell. For a whole month we were graced with bags and bags of Lay's cappuccino potato chips, one of several loathsome winners of its contest, "Do Us a Flavor", in which Americans who prefer dinner munched out of a bag can suggest a subhuman idea for a new potato chip flavor. I can hardly wait for P&J and lobster roll.

 Jill, the Hudson Salvation Army manager, is often at the door letting in, one by one, those still waiting outside, occasionally greeting a regular with a sardonic tease. Jill isn't a Salvation Army member; she's Super Woman. A few years ago, the Army was about to close down the place, but decided instead to hire her to run the kitchen and pantry as a service center for the poor, with no evangelical mission. Jill is attractive, blonde, and a townie. She knows everybody and cajoles, bullies, and shames enough local businessmen, kids, and friends from kindergarten to ring bells at Christmas and convinces enough local farms and stores to contribute food, so that at the end of the year the center makes money. With a cheerful toughness she subdues diners who are about to go off the skids on too many morning beers or weird drug mixtures and kindly but scarily reprimands volunteers who don't wear their hairnets or sneak too much free food into their bags without asking her first. Best boss ever! She has recently begun to tease me incessantly about the number of pots and utensils I use. I finally feel part of the team!

When the pantry line has dwindled down so that it only needs one or two volunteers to deal with it, Sue, the primary cook and the only driver among us, and Charlie, the primary volunteer and also the best human being in the world, take off in the center's white cargo van heading for Walmart and Hannaford, the center's two biggest donors, for the bi-weekly pick-up. When they return, the van often packed to the roof, anyone working or volunteering that day helps unload the boxes. Charlie, who is 70ish and about five-four, cheerfully hauls out fifty-pound boxes of frozen beef. Everyone else has injuries, but they all carry. Sue has had two spinal surgeries. George is stiff with back pain, and Jermaine is in line for two shoulder surgeries from repetitive stress injuries suffered on the assembly line at Kaz, a local industry that pulled out a couple years ago and headed for Mexico and cheaper labor. (Some of the many employees it left behind are still pantry and lunch regulars.) The boxes are stacked, weighed and recorded in the lunch room, and Charlie tries to get them stored away as fast as possible so that we can clean the tables in time for the daily meal, which starts at 11:30.

 Every Friday and Wednesday, also a pick-up day, hundreds of pounds of donated food gets levered, piled, and shoved into one cooler, a couple of freezers, and a smallish pantry, with not enough time or volunteers to organize them so that the best ingredients are readily available. Every meal becomes a challenging decision based on whatever we can reach that day that could make up the daily rations for 20 to 40 diners, the number of whom depend on whether it's early in the month (food stamps have come in) or at the end (food stamps have been used up.) By the end of the week, most of the perishable food has been used or given away and the storage areas are ready for the next tsunami of donations.

 Since Sue is busy doing the pantry and driving the van I like working Fridays best because I sometimes get to cook the main course. Usually she has prepared most of the food the day before, or she and Jill have already gotten the meat into the ancient oven long before I come in at eight o'clock, but sometimes she'll have left me trays of thawing fish, big tubes of ground beef, or chicken strip to inspire me. A couple weeks ago I cobbled a beef stew together using extra steak and vegetables from lunch the day before. This week I took filets of tilapia and salmon, drenched them in egg and buttermilk dressing, dipped them in bread crumbs. and baked them. My recent triumph was a classic potato salad that included 25 hard boiled eggs, three pounds of bacon and some pickles, celery, and onion, all soaked in a combination of mayonnaise and yogurt dressing, livened up with two tubes of dill and a handful of dried thyme.

Even if Sue is cooking, the rest of us fill in with making salads, cutting vegetables, and offering advice. It's always a team effort, and everyone talks all the time. Sue just bought a mobile home and she shares photos of the newly painted walls and kitchen. Rhea reports her latest kid triumphs and berates the lousy Hudson school system. Jermaine, wedged in the corner on the only stool, craftily waits until one of the women innocently calls out, "That's too thick," or "Use the long one," an opportunity for him to comment, "That's what she said." (The kitchen humor is typically at this level regardless of the source.) George, a fellow ex-New Yorker, remembers his lost years in retail selling high-end fabric, describing with wistful nostalgia the extraordinary Scalamandre silk tiger velvet he once sold to clothe the couches of the very, very rich. He takes knitting breaks when there's nothing to dice, slice or cut. (In fact, George is knitting me a fabulous small teal purse, and we've been trying to figure out if he can scale it and make money on Etsy.)

When lunch starts, Jermaine and Charlie do most of the serving. As the diners come in, Charlie calls in the count from the doorway. "Five!" So if I'm at the stove, I'll pull down five plastic plates and try to guess how much to portion out from the trays of roasted meats and cauldrons of rice or potatoes and vegetables so that the food lasts through the hour. It almost always does, and so we have left-overs to pack up for ourselves if we want and always for Charlie, who walks from his apartment downtown to the center every day – even throughout this awful winter -- and is in the kitchen by four or five in the morning to set up and is the last to leave. He has no family that I know of and started volunteering after he retired, when the decades old toy store he had worked at shut down. Unlike the rest of us, Charlie says little, but I've never seen him angry or mean, and when he smiles, which is often, it is beatific.

With its one daily meal for its 30-odd guests, the Hudson Salvation Army Center is a kid's idea of a restaurant, a cartoon drawn with broad strokes and in two-dimensions. Each of the six tables are sparsely dressed with small fists of forks and knives wrapped in paper napkins, plastic cups tipped upside down beside them, two pitchers of water and juice anchoring each end, and a tiny pot of viciously bright plastic flowers set in the middle. The kitchen is a flea market of weary whisks, spoons, and spatulas, dull knives and can openers. A huge meat slicer that no one uses takes up most of one counter. A battered trio of sinks barely fit the sled-wide oven trays, wide-mouthed monster pots, and plastic salad bowls the size of koi ponds, so when we wash them, water spews everywhere. The venerable black professional stove has six burners that can boil five gallons of water in 10 minutes but are so close together that just three pots fit at one time. We have to triple any baking or roasting time, because its senile oven takes about an hour to stoke itself up to a max of 350.

But it's always fun and I've never worked with a better bunch of people. I don't actually serve lunch to the diners so I only know the regulars by sight and gossip: the deaf guy who does sign language with a companion while they eat, Chris who has to chew very slowly or else she chokes, Cookie who always pops his head in to thank us (notably complimenting my potato salad), the ketchup guy, the stoned and irritating woman who complains about the food so often that I'm really happy when she likes it, the guy who doesn't eat beef, the guy who doesn't eat pork, Carlos who was put into a mental home when he was twelve and let out twenty years later, the homeless guy who lives in the park, the cute sculptor who comes in at the end. Last Friday, when we served my tilapia and salmon, a couple of regulars complained that they didn't eat fish. One of the volunteers that day said, "How can they gripe about the food when it's free?" But I was pleased. It meant they felt entitled to good food, and why shouldn't they, just like any diner anywhere in any establishment, even at our restaurant at the back end of the Universe. We're here to serve.