College Kitchens Taught Me A Lot

Yes, those are my glasses. I can't answer
 any questions about that thing around
my neck. We had to wear it while working.

 “How do you want your eggs?”

Standing at the grill in the student dining hall, I held up two eggs. Asking a deep question at six-fifteen in the morning is unfair to anyone, especially the poor girl standing opposite my grill.

“Ummm…fried?”

“Sunnyside up? over easy? medium? hard?”

“Can you mix them up? I don’t like the white stuff. My mom always mixed them.”

“You mean scrambled?”

“Yeah, yeah. Fried and scrambled.”

Standing next to me at his own grill, Paul was engaged in an escalating argument about the difference between eggs over-easy and eggs over-medium. When your proffered eggs have been rejected twice already, taking kindly to criticisms from a bow-tie-wearing freshman before six-thirty in the morning is surprisingly difficult. I thought about reaching over and taking away Paul’s spatula before violence ensued.

Not until my Bible college years did I even think about working in a kitchen. But when you need date money, you need work. Thirty years ago college kitchens and dining halls were different than they are today. We cooked a lot and from scratch most of the time. Huge bags of onions needed peeling, as did the potatoes. Everything was diced or chopped, mixed with spices and sauces, and panned up into four-inch hotel pans. Twenty-five-pound bags of chicken pieces needed washing and seasoning salt. It's where I learned how to cook. The only problem was I learned how to cook for large groups, and by large I mean two thousand.

“Bill? Mom wants chili, can you do that?”

“Sure Dad! um…I need eighty pounds of ground meat and eighteen big cans of tomato sauce.”

Once I dropped the large group thinking I learned a lot of skills still useful today. How to handle a knife and chop quickly, and the difference between chopped and diced. I learned how to toss diced onions in a frying pan without needing to use a utensil and how to clean said onions off the white tile backsplash. Still, you learn some lessons the hard way.

“Boy! Look at these grilled cheese sandwiches. Who made these?”

“I did Ms. Maddie.” The real cooks in the kitchen were a quartet of African-American ladies that alternated between shaking their heads at our incompetence and threatening us with large serving spoons for our stupidity. We, the student cooks, were still wet behind the ears.

“What’s wrong with these sandwiches boy?” With one hand on her hip and the other pointing at a rack of trays, Ms. Maddie fought to keep her lips pursed instead of smiling.

“Umm…too much cheese?”

“Now that you mention it yes, two slices per sandwich. But what else you knucklehead?” They were all fine Christian women, and would never ever think about using coarse language with us. “Look at the sandwiches!”

“I..I don’t know…” Assigning my crew to the oven cleaning part of the weekend, I had taken it upon myself to prep for lunch, grilled cheese sandwiches. Everyone knew how to make grilled cheese sandwiches.

“Where is the butter?”

“Here.” I opened a sandwich and showed Ms. Maddie the neatly buttered inside faces of the bread. “I buttered both slices.”

“Did you now…tell me about that.” Her eyes sparkled as she slowly lost the fight against laughter,

“Buttered side out genius.” Mike, my student supervisor, whispered the answer in my ear as he passed me pushing a cart piled full of boxes of instant mashed potatoes. “Rookie mistake man.”

“Da…..Shoot.” You never swore around the cooks. Ever.

“You need to fix it son.” Ms. Maddie walked away shaking her head. Her voice trailed off into the distance. “Can you believe that boy? Doesn’t even know how to make a sandwich. Ain’t no one gonna marry him.”

 “Yes ma’am,” I said to her back and I fixed all two thousand soon-to-be grilled cheese sandwiches one at a time and then grilled them. Later I did realize that I could have fixed them as they went on the griddle. Mike neglected to mention that option.

 There were other lessons I learned. Don’t wave a breakfast sausage in the air while asking a waitress if she wants one. Don’t volunteer to clean the inside of the freezer, and despite how exciting it sounds refilling the Coke machines in the girl’s dorm only leads to insane amounts of verbal abuse.

 But I would not trade my time in the kitchen for anything. The early mornings making breakfast and the late nights doing pots and pans, the friendships developed, and the hourly wage of $4.50 helped me through school. As a bonus, on my first day I meet my future wife.

 “Really? You’re going to keep the trays filled? Are you new?”

 Her slumped posture and slowly shaking head were trying to tell me something. Joy’s lack of enthusiasm at my presence was a little deflating, but I pressed on.

 “Hi. I’m Bill.”

 “Yeah, We don’t care. We needed chicken five minutes ago.” She turned to her fellow waitress, “Why do I always get stuck with the new guys?”

 My legs wobbled as I wandered back into the kitchen.

 “She’s mean to everyone,” Mike said. “Don’t give her a second thought.”

 “I won’t,” I lied to the room. We all know how that ended up.

-------

Originally posted at: https://medium.com/muddyum/college-kitchens-taught-me-a-lot-5a50541e0fa

Check out the publication that graciously accepted it: https://medium.com/muddyum