Love Story with Squash
Potato Soup on the Stove
Awake or asleep, Rebecca dreamed beautiful dreams. She dreamed of a small organic market garden, maybe four acres of butternut squash and Blue Hubbards; this garden would provide the produce for the casual and eclectic restaurant where people would learn again to love the flavors of food. She even dreamed of her small restaurant as a stone, dropped into the lake of American obesity. Future generations would look back and point to four acres of squash, and say, that’s where it started, right there. That’s when they started to get healthy.
She was a sturdy girl with wide shoulders and strong hands, a long ponytail the color of oak, and on her days off she liked to drive around in her pickup truck and look at land for sale. She was looking for four unimproved acres of rural Oregon, and she must have walked a hundred, studying the slope and the trees and the fertile earth, dressed in a warm barn coat with a corduroy collar and hand knit socks inside her Wellies. Her mother had an alpaca in her back yard, and she sheared and spun his fleece every year and knit the yarn into socks. The alpaca gave about seventy pairs of socks a year. Rebecca knew that her mother wished it was seven hundred.
Rebecca came from a long line of women who had dreamed big when they were young--grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins. These voices urged caution, higher education, a back-up plan, perhaps a husband. Her cousin Adele, the cousin who knew her best, suggested soup.
The problem, Rebecca thought, with Americans and squash was they didn’t know how to cook it. Also, their palates had been ruined by all-beef patties and too much salt. They didn’t know how to cook, they didn’t know how to eat, and they didn’t know how to wait. Soup was a very reasonable first step. After talking the problem over with Adele, Rebecca decided to ask her boss at Denny’s, where she worked as a waitress, if she could make her soup and serve it to the customers.
“I want to make soup with my organic squash and serve it here at the restaurant,” she said.
Mr. Vick looked like he was thinking hard about what to say to her. He wore a black polyester tie and white, short-sleeved uniform shirt. “The thing is, Rebecca, that this is a franchise. Denny’s has a set menu. According to our contract, we can’t add squash soup.”
“The thing is, I love the flavors of squash,” she said, “especially butternut and acorn and pumpkin. Blue Hubbards, too, and there are some very interesting new varietals coming out of Israel. But maybe not everyone shares my taste. My cousin Adele says I should get some people to taste the soup before I invest in the land.”
“The land?”
“Four acres. I want to have a small organic market garden, specializing in root vegetables and winter squash. Then, I would use that produce to open a restaurant. Specializing in squash. Like, cooked into something.” She waved her hand. “I haven’t gotten that far. But soup for sure.”
They studied each other for a moment. Mr. Vick rubbed across his forehead. “If you used the commercial kitchen here to make the soup,” Mr. Vick said, “you could sell it at the farmer’s market. Or you could make the soup here and offer it to the rest of the staff, as an initial experiment.”
They eventually agreed that Rebecca would work the long shift on Saturday, 0600 to 1700, and she could make her soup and keep it on the back burner for the staff to eat during the day. That would give her two shifts worth of tasters.
Rebecca was as happy as she could ever remember being when she arrived the first Saturday at 0500 to start her soup. She had saved two weeks’ worth of vegetables from her CSA share for the stock, and she roasted butternut squash, a couple of Acorns, parsnips, turnips, and some Yukon Gold potatoes for the soup. Denny’s was quiet, a dark night turning into a cool and foggy morning, and the restaurant smelled like coffee and bacon and roasting root vegetables. Mr. Vick came in early, too, and watched what she was doing in the kitchen.
“So this is the soup?” He looked into the big stockpot. The celery tops were floating on the surface of the simmering water.
“No, that’s the stock. The soup is going to be made with the stock, and then all these veggies.” She cracked open the door of the oven, and he looked inside. “I’ve got some turnips and parsnips, as well as the squash. I thought about adding a beet, but that would mess up the color.”
“Are those potatoes?”
She nodded. “Potatoes are the most popular of the root vegetables, but not the only ones. The roasting really brings out the richness of their flavor, something between nutty and sweet.”
“Hmm, nutty and sweet.” He rubbed his chin, and she noticed, not for the first time, the dark hair that grew on the back of his hands. He had strong hands, like a farmer’s. “I was wondering if you had thought of a name for your soup.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I’ve just been thinking of it as squash soup.”
“The thing I’ve noticed, managing this Denny’s, is that names seem to matter to people. The familiar names and the silly names seem very popular. I can’t begin to explain why. But not many people understand squash the way you do. They might be more inclined to try the soup if it sounded a bit more familiar.”
Mr. Vick had won a scholarship to play football for Oregon the year Rebecca was in the third grade. He was home by Thanksgiving of his freshman year and never went back, to football or to college. He’d come back to Denny’s, where he’d worked as a short order cook in high school, and had worked his way up to manager. None of the waitresses knew what had happened to end his dreams, though they speculated a good deal.
“You mean call it potato soup?” She poured a cup of coffee for him, then one for herself. “Potato soup is a good example of what I’m fighting against. You take a healthy, simple food and you pour in the cream and butter and salt until it’s a bowl of heart attack soup. Old fashioned potato soup is really good, though. My grandmother used to make it with baked potatoes and onions and milk. She said baking the potatoes was critical.”
“My grandmother made potato soup, too. I wonder if you could call it something unique, like roasted potato soup?”
“The soup is going to be goldy-orange,” Rebecca said. “The color might throw people off.”
“Then what about Golden Potato soup?”
“That sounds perfect,” Rebecca said. “Thank you.”
“Oh, of course,” Mr. Vick said, his neck shading red, and he went back to the front to roll silverware in napkins.
She made ten gallons of the Golden Potato soup. It was probably too much, but she was hoping that people would like it so much that they would eat seconds, and ask her if they could take some home. By lunchtime, the soup was rich and thick, filling the kitchen with the warm smells of sage and browned butter and roasting squash. It was a lovely golden color, and it tasted like a cupful of autumn leaves, like Indian summer sunshine. Denny’s was busy by noon, but none of the customers asked about the smell. They ordered burgers, as usual, with fries on the side.
Mr. Vick had a large bowl of soup for lunch, and then ate seconds. The cook tasted a cupful, winked at her and told her she was hot shit in the kitchen. He was looking at her ass when he said it, though, so she thought his opinion was suspect. The busboy wouldn’t try any soup. The other two waitresses deferred: one was lactose intolerant and the other was doing Atkins. By late afternoon, when the lunch crowd cleared out, she was left with about nine gallons of soup.
She was tired, as much from the excitement of the day as anything. Moderate to low enthusiasm was adequate for a first try. She had taste buds. She had a nose. That pot of soup was the best soup she had ever eaten. Her first commercial pot of soup! It was as good as she had hoped it would be. She ate a bowl herself, swallowed with her eyes closed and dreamed about standing in a garden with a shovel, turning over rich, black earth in early spring.
By four she had customers in for the early-bird specials. An elderly woman, her walker parked next to the booth, told Rebecca that Denny’s smelled good. “It reminds me of something, I don’t know. Something I’ve forgotten? A lovely, old-fashioned smell,” she said.
Rebecca looked around the restaurant. Mr. Vick seemed to be watching her, but when she met his gaze, he looked quickly away. “Would you like to try some soup? It’s on the house,” she said. “It’s called Golden Potato soup. A new recipe.”
“What’s in it?”
“Potatoes, turnips, parsnips, butternut squash, and acorn squash. Vegetable stock, milk and butter and sage and cinnamon!”
The old lady clapped her hands. “That’s what I smelled! The sage and the cinnamon. Yes, my dear. I would like to try some soup. Are you sure it’s on the house?”
Rebecca nodded. “Absolutely.”
She raced back to the kitchen, stirred the pot. It had thickened over the course of the day, but she didn’t want to try and thin it out, not when she had a live taster on the hook. She filled a cup and carried it to the table.
The woman bent over the cup, her eyes closed, smelled deeply, then she tasted a small spoonful. She leaned back, fingers stroking the purple silk scarf around her neck. She swallowed another spoonful and uttered a small sound of distress in her throat.
“What’s wrong? You don’t like it?”
Rebecca was horrified to find the woman looking at her with tears in her eyes, tears sliding down her worn cheeks. “When I was growing up, we had a small farm in Oklahoma. My father left, looking for work. This was the depression, you know. My mother and my grandmother, they grew all the food we had to eat. This soup reminded me of what those years tasted like. I had forgotten. I don’t think I’ve tasted turnips in soup in fifty years. It reminded me of being hungry.” She pushed the soup across the table, like she couldn’t get it far enough away.
What could she possibly say to this? Rebecca handed the woman an extra napkin for the tears, patted her tiny shoulder.
“Darling, don’t mind me. I can cry over sunshine, when the day’s been cloudy. It was lovely soup, I promise you. I’m just not feeling very strong today.” Then she reached for her walker with shaking hands.
“Don’t go without eating!” Rebecca was ready to cry herself. “What would you like? Let me get you something. You can take it with you.”
The old lady wiped across her cheek with the back of her hand, made a little tsk of impatience at herself. “Nothing, thank you, my dear. Enough is as good as a feast, as my grandmother always said.”
Rebecca walked her to the door. Then she went back to the kitchen, pulled the huge stock pot off the stove. She put the lid on and set it on the counter. The cook grinned at her and pulled his smokes out of the pocket of his apron, offered her one. She shook her head. Mr. Vick looked into the kitchen, studied the stockpot, but he didn’t say anything.
Rebecca finished her shift. It had been a very long day. Mr. Vick looked tired as well. He kept looking at her like he wanted to say something. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to hear it. She was beginning to suspect that he had eaten seconds of her soup just to be nice! She didn’t need false encouragement. He didn’t understand the power of her dreams. She needed honest feedback. Those damn turnips! If he had just told her four hours earlier the soup tasted like the Great Depression, she wouldn’t have forced it on a frail elder.
She heard the screams before she smelled the smoke, then the alarms were going off, red lights flashing, and the customers were racing for the exit doors. Mr. Vick ran into the kitchen, then spun in a circle, looking for the fire extinguisher. She grabbed one from below the waitress station and followed him through the doors. He held out his hands and she threw the extinguisher to him. The grease pan below the grill was on fire, grease and flame spreading across the floor. The cook was beating at the smolder on the bottom of his apron with a cup towel.
Mr. Vick pulled the pin and squeezed the nozzle, pointing the fire extinguisher down at the floor. A dollop of foam, and then the extinguisher was fizzing, blowing air. The second extinguisher was on the other side of the grill, unreachable. The cook was shouting, pointing at the back door. The fire was climbing up the grill, scorching the walls, filling the kitchen with oily black smoke. Mr. Vick grabbed some towels, threw them at the fire and tried to stomp on them. They soaked up the grease and caught immediately.
“It’s an oil fire,” he said, eyes zinging like pinballs in his head. “We can’t use water. Water just spreads it…”
Rebecca grabbed the stockpot. It was heavy, the soup cooling thickly, and she dumped the pot out on the fire, nine gallons of beautiful squash soup across the kitchen floor. She watched it smother the flames, suck the oxygen out of the fire. Mr. Vick leaned back against the counter, set the empty fire extinguisher down with shaking hands. “Wow. I’ve never seen soup do that.”
The cook was laughing like a loon from across the kitchen. “Golden fucking potato!”
The oily black smoke was replaced just for a moment with the rich autumn smell of roasting squash, sage and cinnamon. Rebecca stared down at the mess on the floor. That was good soup.
Rebecca turned around and walked out of the restaurant. She passed through the crowd of customers in the parking lot and got into her truck. She reclined the seat and closed her eyes. Adele was wrong. She didn’t need tasters. She needed four fertile acres planted in heirloom Blue Hubbards.
She was calm by the time Mr. Vick opened the door and handed her in a couple of Kleenex. “I’m coming back in,” she said. “I just needed a minute. Mr. Vick, I gave some soup to a customer. She got upset and started to cry.”
“I know. I saw it.”
“I’m really sorry. I’m not sure what happened, to tell you the truth. But I shouldn’t have done it.”
Mr. Vick straightened, looked back toward the restaurant. The fire truck was turning into the parking lot. The crowd of customers out front applauded when the fire fighters jumped down from the truck and picked up their axes. “I’ve got to go. Will you come in tomorrow? Help with clean-up?”
Rebecca noticed that, by the ceiling light of her Ford Ranger pickup, Mr. Vick’s evening whiskers were growing in very thick and dark. “I’ll be here.”
“Have you found your land? The four acres?”
She looked at him in surprise. “I’m very close.”
He smiled down at her. “Good.”
Awake or asleep, Rebecca dreamed beautiful dreams. She dreamed of a small organic market garden, maybe four acres of butternut squash and Blue Hubbards; this garden would provide the produce for the casual and eclectic restaurant where people would learn again to love the flavors of food. She even dreamed of her small restaurant as a stone, dropped into the lake of American obesity. Future generations would look back and point to four acres of squash, and say, that’s where it started, right there. That’s when they started to get healthy.
She was a sturdy girl with wide shoulders and strong hands, a long ponytail the color of oak, and on her days off she liked to drive around in her pickup truck and look at land for sale. She was looking for four unimproved acres of rural Oregon, and she must have walked a hundred, studying the slope and the trees and the fertile earth, dressed in a warm barn coat with a corduroy collar and hand knit socks inside her Wellies. Her mother had an alpaca in her back yard, and she sheared and spun his fleece every year and knit the yarn into socks. The alpaca gave about seventy pairs of socks a year. Rebecca knew that her mother wished it was seven hundred.
Rebecca came from a long line of women who had dreamed big when they were young--grandmother, mother, aunts, cousins. These voices urged caution, higher education, a back-up plan, perhaps a husband. Her cousin Adele, the cousin who knew her best, suggested soup.
The problem, Rebecca thought, with Americans and squash was they didn’t know how to cook it. Also, their palates had been ruined by all-beef patties and too much salt. They didn’t know how to cook, they didn’t know how to eat, and they didn’t know how to wait. Soup was a very reasonable first step. After talking the problem over with Adele, Rebecca decided to ask her boss at Denny’s, where she worked as a waitress, if she could make her soup and serve it to the customers.
“I want to make soup with my organic squash and serve it here at the restaurant,” she said.
Mr. Vick looked like he was thinking hard about what to say to her. He wore a black polyester tie and white, short-sleeved uniform shirt. “The thing is, Rebecca, that this is a franchise. Denny’s has a set menu. According to our contract, we can’t add squash soup.”
“The thing is, I love the flavors of squash,” she said, “especially butternut and acorn and pumpkin. Blue Hubbards, too, and there are some very interesting new varietals coming out of Israel. But maybe not everyone shares my taste. My cousin Adele says I should get some people to taste the soup before I invest in the land.”
“The land?”
“Four acres. I want to have a small organic market garden, specializing in root vegetables and winter squash. Then, I would use that produce to open a restaurant. Specializing in squash. Like, cooked into something.” She waved her hand. “I haven’t gotten that far. But soup for sure.”
They studied each other for a moment. Mr. Vick rubbed across his forehead. “If you used the commercial kitchen here to make the soup,” Mr. Vick said, “you could sell it at the farmer’s market. Or you could make the soup here and offer it to the rest of the staff, as an initial experiment.”
They eventually agreed that Rebecca would work the long shift on Saturday, 0600 to 1700, and she could make her soup and keep it on the back burner for the staff to eat during the day. That would give her two shifts worth of tasters.
Rebecca was as happy as she could ever remember being when she arrived the first Saturday at 0500 to start her soup. She had saved two weeks’ worth of vegetables from her CSA share for the stock, and she roasted butternut squash, a couple of Acorns, parsnips, turnips, and some Yukon Gold potatoes for the soup. Denny’s was quiet, a dark night turning into a cool and foggy morning, and the restaurant smelled like coffee and bacon and roasting root vegetables. Mr. Vick came in early, too, and watched what she was doing in the kitchen.
“So this is the soup?” He looked into the big stockpot. The celery tops were floating on the surface of the simmering water.
“No, that’s the stock. The soup is going to be made with the stock, and then all these veggies.” She cracked open the door of the oven, and he looked inside. “I’ve got some turnips and parsnips, as well as the squash. I thought about adding a beet, but that would mess up the color.”
“Are those potatoes?”
She nodded. “Potatoes are the most popular of the root vegetables, but not the only ones. The roasting really brings out the richness of their flavor, something between nutty and sweet.”
“Hmm, nutty and sweet.” He rubbed his chin, and she noticed, not for the first time, the dark hair that grew on the back of his hands. He had strong hands, like a farmer’s. “I was wondering if you had thought of a name for your soup.”
Rebecca shook her head. “I’ve just been thinking of it as squash soup.”
“The thing I’ve noticed, managing this Denny’s, is that names seem to matter to people. The familiar names and the silly names seem very popular. I can’t begin to explain why. But not many people understand squash the way you do. They might be more inclined to try the soup if it sounded a bit more familiar.”
Mr. Vick had won a scholarship to play football for Oregon the year Rebecca was in the third grade. He was home by Thanksgiving of his freshman year and never went back, to football or to college. He’d come back to Denny’s, where he’d worked as a short order cook in high school, and had worked his way up to manager. None of the waitresses knew what had happened to end his dreams, though they speculated a good deal.
“You mean call it potato soup?” She poured a cup of coffee for him, then one for herself. “Potato soup is a good example of what I’m fighting against. You take a healthy, simple food and you pour in the cream and butter and salt until it’s a bowl of heart attack soup. Old fashioned potato soup is really good, though. My grandmother used to make it with baked potatoes and onions and milk. She said baking the potatoes was critical.”
“My grandmother made potato soup, too. I wonder if you could call it something unique, like roasted potato soup?”
“The soup is going to be goldy-orange,” Rebecca said. “The color might throw people off.”
“Then what about Golden Potato soup?”
“That sounds perfect,” Rebecca said. “Thank you.”
“Oh, of course,” Mr. Vick said, his neck shading red, and he went back to the front to roll silverware in napkins.
She made ten gallons of the Golden Potato soup. It was probably too much, but she was hoping that people would like it so much that they would eat seconds, and ask her if they could take some home. By lunchtime, the soup was rich and thick, filling the kitchen with the warm smells of sage and browned butter and roasting squash. It was a lovely golden color, and it tasted like a cupful of autumn leaves, like Indian summer sunshine. Denny’s was busy by noon, but none of the customers asked about the smell. They ordered burgers, as usual, with fries on the side.
Mr. Vick had a large bowl of soup for lunch, and then ate seconds. The cook tasted a cupful, winked at her and told her she was hot shit in the kitchen. He was looking at her ass when he said it, though, so she thought his opinion was suspect. The busboy wouldn’t try any soup. The other two waitresses deferred: one was lactose intolerant and the other was doing Atkins. By late afternoon, when the lunch crowd cleared out, she was left with about nine gallons of soup.
She was tired, as much from the excitement of the day as anything. Moderate to low enthusiasm was adequate for a first try. She had taste buds. She had a nose. That pot of soup was the best soup she had ever eaten. Her first commercial pot of soup! It was as good as she had hoped it would be. She ate a bowl herself, swallowed with her eyes closed and dreamed about standing in a garden with a shovel, turning over rich, black earth in early spring.
By four she had customers in for the early-bird specials. An elderly woman, her walker parked next to the booth, told Rebecca that Denny’s smelled good. “It reminds me of something, I don’t know. Something I’ve forgotten? A lovely, old-fashioned smell,” she said.
Rebecca looked around the restaurant. Mr. Vick seemed to be watching her, but when she met his gaze, he looked quickly away. “Would you like to try some soup? It’s on the house,” she said. “It’s called Golden Potato soup. A new recipe.”
“What’s in it?”
“Potatoes, turnips, parsnips, butternut squash, and acorn squash. Vegetable stock, milk and butter and sage and cinnamon!”
The old lady clapped her hands. “That’s what I smelled! The sage and the cinnamon. Yes, my dear. I would like to try some soup. Are you sure it’s on the house?”
Rebecca nodded. “Absolutely.”
She raced back to the kitchen, stirred the pot. It had thickened over the course of the day, but she didn’t want to try and thin it out, not when she had a live taster on the hook. She filled a cup and carried it to the table.
The woman bent over the cup, her eyes closed, smelled deeply, then she tasted a small spoonful. She leaned back, fingers stroking the purple silk scarf around her neck. She swallowed another spoonful and uttered a small sound of distress in her throat.
“What’s wrong? You don’t like it?”
Rebecca was horrified to find the woman looking at her with tears in her eyes, tears sliding down her worn cheeks. “When I was growing up, we had a small farm in Oklahoma. My father left, looking for work. This was the depression, you know. My mother and my grandmother, they grew all the food we had to eat. This soup reminded me of what those years tasted like. I had forgotten. I don’t think I’ve tasted turnips in soup in fifty years. It reminded me of being hungry.” She pushed the soup across the table, like she couldn’t get it far enough away.
What could she possibly say to this? Rebecca handed the woman an extra napkin for the tears, patted her tiny shoulder.
“Darling, don’t mind me. I can cry over sunshine, when the day’s been cloudy. It was lovely soup, I promise you. I’m just not feeling very strong today.” Then she reached for her walker with shaking hands.
“Don’t go without eating!” Rebecca was ready to cry herself. “What would you like? Let me get you something. You can take it with you.”
The old lady wiped across her cheek with the back of her hand, made a little tsk of impatience at herself. “Nothing, thank you, my dear. Enough is as good as a feast, as my grandmother always said.”
Rebecca walked her to the door. Then she went back to the kitchen, pulled the huge stock pot off the stove. She put the lid on and set it on the counter. The cook grinned at her and pulled his smokes out of the pocket of his apron, offered her one. She shook her head. Mr. Vick looked into the kitchen, studied the stockpot, but he didn’t say anything.
Rebecca finished her shift. It had been a very long day. Mr. Vick looked tired as well. He kept looking at her like he wanted to say something. Whatever it was, she didn’t want to hear it. She was beginning to suspect that he had eaten seconds of her soup just to be nice! She didn’t need false encouragement. He didn’t understand the power of her dreams. She needed honest feedback. Those damn turnips! If he had just told her four hours earlier the soup tasted like the Great Depression, she wouldn’t have forced it on a frail elder.
She heard the screams before she smelled the smoke, then the alarms were going off, red lights flashing, and the customers were racing for the exit doors. Mr. Vick ran into the kitchen, then spun in a circle, looking for the fire extinguisher. She grabbed one from below the waitress station and followed him through the doors. He held out his hands and she threw the extinguisher to him. The grease pan below the grill was on fire, grease and flame spreading across the floor. The cook was beating at the smolder on the bottom of his apron with a cup towel.
Mr. Vick pulled the pin and squeezed the nozzle, pointing the fire extinguisher down at the floor. A dollop of foam, and then the extinguisher was fizzing, blowing air. The second extinguisher was on the other side of the grill, unreachable. The cook was shouting, pointing at the back door. The fire was climbing up the grill, scorching the walls, filling the kitchen with oily black smoke. Mr. Vick grabbed some towels, threw them at the fire and tried to stomp on them. They soaked up the grease and caught immediately.
“It’s an oil fire,” he said, eyes zinging like pinballs in his head. “We can’t use water. Water just spreads it…”
Rebecca grabbed the stockpot. It was heavy, the soup cooling thickly, and she dumped the pot out on the fire, nine gallons of beautiful squash soup across the kitchen floor. She watched it smother the flames, suck the oxygen out of the fire. Mr. Vick leaned back against the counter, set the empty fire extinguisher down with shaking hands. “Wow. I’ve never seen soup do that.”
The cook was laughing like a loon from across the kitchen. “Golden fucking potato!”
The oily black smoke was replaced just for a moment with the rich autumn smell of roasting squash, sage and cinnamon. Rebecca stared down at the mess on the floor. That was good soup.
Rebecca turned around and walked out of the restaurant. She passed through the crowd of customers in the parking lot and got into her truck. She reclined the seat and closed her eyes. Adele was wrong. She didn’t need tasters. She needed four fertile acres planted in heirloom Blue Hubbards.
She was calm by the time Mr. Vick opened the door and handed her in a couple of Kleenex. “I’m coming back in,” she said. “I just needed a minute. Mr. Vick, I gave some soup to a customer. She got upset and started to cry.”
“I know. I saw it.”
“I’m really sorry. I’m not sure what happened, to tell you the truth. But I shouldn’t have done it.”
Mr. Vick straightened, looked back toward the restaurant. The fire truck was turning into the parking lot. The crowd of customers out front applauded when the fire fighters jumped down from the truck and picked up their axes. “I’ve got to go. Will you come in tomorrow? Help with clean-up?”
Rebecca noticed that, by the ceiling light of her Ford Ranger pickup, Mr. Vick’s evening whiskers were growing in very thick and dark. “I’ll be here.”
“Have you found your land? The four acres?”
She looked at him in surprise. “I’m very close.”
He smiled down at her. “Good.”