“Honey! Just look at this!”
We were in the hotel kitchen because the chef had not shown for work and we had guests to feed and it was late.
“What? What?” she asked, turning quickly to me and to whatever it was that had caused my outburst; prepared for the worst. We were both upset that no one had told us Pedro had not shown back to work from his visit to town.
“No one fired the stock pot,” I said, turning my attention to its contents. Holding the large lid off to the side so that Margie could come beside me and look. “It looks like some bubbles on the top, too. It may have gone off.”
“That damned Pedro! Where do you think he is?”
In a French Creole speaking island a Spanish given name was unusual enough, but Pedro was more than a bit odd himself.
“He was supposed to be here at noon and it’s nearly six. He’s mad all right but he’s not a boozer. Do you suppose he’s gone funny?”
“Off his nut?”
“Sure, his nut. We both know he’s strange.”
“We were warned, but he’s been so good so far. Maybe he had a catastrophe or something at home, maybe at his little shop.”
Pedro had worked for years as a soup and sauce chef on the Lady Boats, small passenger and freightliners from Canada. The line had ultimately folded and he opened a small bread shop in town which, it developed, did not satisfy his creative urges or his family’s need for support. When food was ready to be served at the hotel he invariably said, “Steward, pick up!” to the room boys, who did not understand the phrase but deduced what they were being asked to do.
“Well, whatever,” Margie said, “We had better get on with it. We’re the cooks tonight.”
“Yet again.”
“Yet again. This is the worst part of owning a hotel. Bloody chefs.”
A kitchen helper came up the back stairs to report for the dinner preparation. He and some of the staff lived just below the hotel’s main building in a little picturesque imitation of a Carib Indian thatched hut built over the hotel’s generator room.
“Celestine?” I said, forgetting to get the agitation out of my voice. “When was this stock pot boiled last?”
“I don’t know sir.”
He looked frightened.
“Last night? This morning? This afternoon? When?”
“I don’t know, Sir. That’s Mr. Pedro’s thing to do, Sir.”
I still had the stockpot lid in my hand, looking back at the five or six gallons of stock that had been carefully tended for a long time. It was an ongoing thing; the base for most of our soups and some sauces. Little bubbles now showed in the center. A chicken breast bone protruded from the liquid’s surface.
“Damn!” I exclaimed again.
Margie, resigned to our having to fix the hotel dinner, had begun placing vegetables on the kitchen’s ‘set up’ table.
“Here, Celestine, wash these and cut them for tonight.” Margie instructed the boy.
“Yes, Madam,” he said, moving into position for the task, apparently eager to get away from where I stood in front of the stove holding the top of that bomb (a large pot)of stock. I kept looking at the contents, hoping somehow that I was mistaken.
Pedro came in at that moment.
“Ah, Pedro,” I smiled broadly, willing to forgive his very late arrival, so happy was I that I would not have to do the kitchen work myself. I managed to conceal my feelings about his misfeasance on the stockpot’s tending.
“Pedro,” I said, carefully, “You have been cooking the stock pot every morning and evening, haven’t you?”
“Well, sir, it doesn’t matter,” he smiled broadly. Shrugging off blame, usually with non-sequiturs, was his way.
I looked at Margie, paused, and calmly explained. “Pedro, if you don’t heat it to a boil twice a day it will spoil. We don’t have a big enough fridge to put it in so we have to do that. I’ve told you this.”
“Oh, yes, Sir,” he said and grinned his super gold toothed grin. His teeth may well have represented his accumulated wealth. This was Pedro’s charming, wide mouthed, ingratiating smile and he relied on it to get him past a reprimand. He offered no excuse.
Margie interjected; “Why don’t you throw that pot out and start another. No use crying over spoiled stock.” I knew she meant to be humorous but she was not laughing.
“We can’t do that,” I said over my shoulder as I looked again at the open stock pot. “This took so long to stew down.”
I took a spoon and dipped it into the stock and came up with a sample, which I raised to my nose. ” It smells reasonably all right, Honey,” I said. “Maybe it’s good.”
“Throw it out,” she said firmly.
Ignoring her, I tasted it.
“It’s sorta sour,” I said. “It’s spoiling all right.”
“We are noted for our soups, too,” she said to no one in particular, then she looked at Pedro. “Do we have any bullion cubes?”
“None, Madam,” he answered, his smile having left him. She looked at me as though I had not been checking inventory carefully enough; and I had not.
“Can you make something… anything, for tonight’s soup, Pedro?” she asked.
Pedro paused and made a face as though giving the question much thought and then shrugged in the negative. “Not really, Madam,” he said in Dominican English vernacular.
The hotel was at the edge of the rain forest, on the foothills of Morne Trois Piton at the end of four and a half miles of somewhat tortuous, mostly single lane road. One could not just nip out to the store for supplies.
“Pedro, Where is your baking soda? Maybe I can fix our soup problem.”
Pedro produced a large box. It was four times the size of the ones suggested for keeping in the refrigerators for odor control.
I shook a dollop into the pot, about a heaping tablespoon full, and stirred it with the big kitchen spoon. The liquid foamed like a freshly poured beer and I stirred it until the foam disappeared. I tried another, smaller, portion of soda and again it foamed. A third addition of soda produced almost no reaction and I stirred the mixture until I was satisfied that the mix was uniform.
Pedro, Margie, and Celestine were now at my side watching this recreation of some high-school chemistry class experiment.
“Tastes pretty good,” I pronounced as I sampled the result of the partial alkaline neutralization of the acid of spoilage.
“But, is it safe?” Margie asked.
“You can bet that it will be boiled for a proper time before we use it but it should be safe enough after at least ten minutes boiling. We usually figure five.”
We let it slow boil for half an hour just to be sure. I ate a small bowl of it, additionally seasoned, with a penny bread. It wasn’t bad. We told Pedro to mix it with some fresh vegetables and left the kitchen to the chef and his helpers.
Guests numbered about sixteen that night; a family from Maine, eight from the Chicago area and a couple from Pennsylvania. Our custom was to buy a round or two of drinks downstairs in the Loupe Garou Lounge before dinner to make certain that the guests had all met each other. This was a happy group and everyone seemed delighted with the hotel. That night we were ‘heavy on the TLC’ Margie remarked later.
At 8:15 we were summoned to the dinner upstairs and because of the small number of guests we seated them all at the long Gommier table where we told tales of the islands and encouraged friendly conviviality.
The room boys came up from the kitchen with the soup course and placed the steaming bowls before each of the guests.
Margie looked down the table at me, seated at the other end. I raised my eyebrows just the slightest bit and then could not suppress a smile. She waited for me to take my first taste and I found it still a little more acidic than I had thought, but it was not bad. I looked up at her and after she checked to see that no one was looking, she made a disapproving face. I raised my shoulders in an ‘oh, well, so what,’ shrug and took another spoonful.
“My, my,” one of our lady guests said, “That’s simply marvelous soup!”
“Yes, it is indeed,” another added.
Yet another added her praise of the soup.
“What ‘kind’ is it?” the first lady insisted, looking at Margie.
“I’m not sure,” she responded, “We’ll call the Chef, and have him tell us.”
‘She is really gambling,’ I thought.
I asked one of the room boys to go down and bring Pedro up for a ‘Compliments to the chef’ moment, which we often did when a guest requested it.
Pedro came up smiling his bright gold smile, and spoke to Margie from the edge of the kitchen screen. “Yes, Madam?” he asked, smiling broadly.
The lady guest who had first asked said, “That soup is simply marvelous, Sir, we can taste the wine. It’s just wonderful. What kind is it?”
Pedro’s smile faded for the briefest moment and then the gold reappeared, brighter than before. “Potage, Madam…Potage!” he said, beaming.