Cooking With Faye

"I was sent into the fields when I was six or seven.  Not to pick cotton of course.  I was too little.  My job was to carry water back and forth to my family.  It was hot.  Hundred degrees in Georgia is really hot.  Humidity is so high."  

 

As she talked, Faye was chopping up the onions with our chronically dull knives into perfectly even dices.  I was next to her swiping at potato skins with a Swiss peeler I had bought myself. 

 

Before the pandemic, Faye and I cooked together on Tuesdays and Fridays at the Salvation Army soup kitchen.  We're both over seventy years old and creaky with arthritis.  She grew up in the South and I in upstate New York.  We each escaped the places of our childhood when we were young women. And we have a great time cooking together.  Other than that, our lives couldn’t have been more different.

 

"There were seven kids," she went on.  "I was the youngest.  My mother and stepfather and all my brother and sisters picked cotton from six in the morning to six at night.  It was really hard.  My mother came home at midday to cook lunch and I helped her with that."

 

"Were you sharecroppers?"

 

"No. The plantation owner gave us a house to live in and $50 a month.  We had a vegetable garden too that provided all our food." 

 

"So, that's what you got for nine people who all worked twelve hours a day in the cotton fields?"

 

"When the season was over my brothers got jobs working in other farms and got paid $2.00 a day each. So that helped."

 

"What about school?"

 

"The girls got to go to school, but my brothers had to be around for baling the cotton and doing heavy work, so they didn't go as often..." She paused. "My brothers don't read very well."

 

"What was the owner like?"  I asked.  "Did you ever see him?"

 

He used to come to the fields every once in a while.  He was nice enough."

 

"Was he rich?"

 

"I think so.  He also owned the hardware store in town."

 

So, in the mid-fifties when I spent my summers swimming in the cold lakes near our house, Faye was lugging water in the broiling heat as part of a vicious system of exploitation that had hardly evolved since the days of slavery.  It just adapted, so that the expenses of its workers could be maintained at the same meager amount as owning slaves– maybe even less. 

 

Faye went on to describe how, when she was about eleven, her mother got fed up and went North for a couple years.  She got a job in a factory in New Jersey and saved enough money to come back and buy a plot of land at $50 an acre so that her family could leave the cotton fields.  It had a run down house on it, which they tore apart, using the lumber to build a new one. Her parents and siblings took other jobs and Faye grew up in that house until she got married.  After having three children, she and her husband moved north to Hudson to find work.  

 

"I got jobs in the factories here.  People used to complain about how hard it was, but after the fields, working here was a piece of cake."  

 

Faye was now in the process of coating chicken drumsticks in seasoned flour, preparing for their deep fry. Crispy on the outside and juicy inside, they are shockingly great. When she first made them at the Kitchen, I asked how she knew they were done.  "They float to the top," she said, "And then I listen to them.  When they stop sizzling, then I know they're cooked through." 

 

Faye is shy and modest about her cooking "It's just Southern." She says. "We did a lot of frying in the South.  Not very healthy."  

 

Faye has also taught me to make collard greens delicious (water, ham hocks or bacon, and a little sugar, then cooked for a long time) and encouraged me to try chicken paws and pigs' feet. (The chicken paws make great stock but I haven't gotten up the nerve to cook and eat either them or the pigs' feet).  

 

I stared at my spotty spuds now soaking in the huge cauldron that I'll use to boil them in.  "My potatoes still have parts of their skin.  And your vegetables look perfect."

 

"Oh yours will be good.  Add a lot of butter.  I mean a lot of butter when you mash them up.  They'll taste great."

 

Faye has a culinary tradition that relies on creating satisfying and delicious food from difficult ingredients.  And it goes back hundreds of years.  I have no culinary tradition, or at least none that should have continued beyond a single generation.  My mother was a fifties housewife with five kids and her idea of cooking was to get it over with.  Each night, she slapped a tower of Wonder bread on the table to fill us up.  Vegetables generally alternated between iceberg lettuce wedges sprinkled with sugar and something green and frozen and then over-boiled. Typically we had a dry roast chicken on Sunday and things made out of fatty ground beef on other nights.  Occasionally she tortured us with Spam or dried salty beef softened in milk and served over potatoes with canned peas. Velveeta was cheese. 

 

I liked to cook even as a kid and I took over the kitchen when I was about fourteen.  My first dinner was upstate goulash—ground beef in tomato sauce.  After I left home in the sixties, the culinary revolution recruited me through Julia Child and Graham Kerr (aka the Galloping Gourmet), whose enthusiasm and wit seduced me into a lifetime addiction to classic and ethnic cookbooks, filled with recipes that I never followed very closely, but muddied up with other ingredients I found in the refrigerator. Sometimes the food turned out ok, sometimes it was awful.  But without a backbone of family meals from a common tradition, I can only imagine what will make the people I cook for happy.  Faye knows, and can reliably reproduce her wonderful meals, time after time. 

 

At noon, the people come in to the Army's dining room for the lunch that Faye made today with precision and consistency, so that their long, difficult day could be fractured happily for an hour eating food prepared by a woman who cares deeply about it. 

  

As we were cleaning up after the service, Faye said. "Maybe I'll do pork chops next week.  I'll season and deep fry them like the chicken legs. Then I'll pour gravy over them and let them simmer in the oven until they're tender. "   She smiled, "They aren't very healthy but they're really good."

 

The dining room closed down during the pandemic and Faye and I went into quarantine.  It hasn't opened yet although younger people are cooking and packing lunches into boxes. Faye and I talk on the phone and I miss her and our work together.  Even if the center fully opens up again, I'm not sure I'll have the physical strength to go back.  Best job I ever had.