Samantha's

            My first waitressing job was at a restaurant called Samantha’s on Decatur St. in the French Quarter of New Orleans.  I got hired because I knew one of the bartenders, but I knew little about waiting tables, and had to learn almost everything the hard way. I didn’t know about balancing a tray, so when I approached my very first table with two large glasses of iced tea, I sent one of them flying across the room when I handed over the other.  A mistake I didn’t make again.

            Samantha’s was in a beautiful old brick building with an antique bar and real gas lanterns  mounted in the walls that  you had to light with a key and torch, just like in “Meet Me in St. Louis.” It was popular with both tourists and locals, so the lunch crowd was lively and the money pretty good.  The kitchen was ruled by a big, brilliant Creole chef named Cecelia whose mission in life was to fatten me up, a project that I wholeheartedly endorsed.  Everything she cooked was delicious, and I ate her bread pudding as often as I could. A single bite of that would probably send me into a sugar overload today. There was also an excellent salad bar; and after nearly starving for several months, I needed those green vegetables.  Restaurant work saved my life.

            Samantha’s was the first place where I experienced how quickly a restaurant job can take over your life. When I wasn’t working there, I was hanging out there; the other waitresses became my friends and I started dating a bartender with a lot of tattoos named Tony.  Tony stole steaks and shrimp and bottles of alcohol- it was also my first exposure to how much theft goes on in the hospitality business.  

            I only worked there for six weeks, but at that point it was the longest I had kept a job. I quit as soon as I had made enough money to get out of town, escaping the Gulf Coast just as the Spring was turning to steamy Summer, in early May, heading north to have Spring all over again.

After-school cooking class

           

            When my daughter was in second grade and I was making a living as a substitute teacher, I was recruited by the PTA to teach an after-school cooking class at her school. I assumed I would be working with the older kids, grades 3-5, but when the flyer came out it listed the age range for the class as  grades k-2. I had no idea what kind of cooking one does with kindergarteners so I called a friend who taught kindergarten for ideas. She had a lot of good suggestions, and I planned to use them all.

            One unforeseen problem in teaching a cooking class at Landing School was that there was no kitchen for us to use, so the PTA president got permission for us to use the teacher’s lounge, which had a stove, on the condition that we cleaned up thoroughly after ourselves. My daughter and her best friend were among the 10 or so kids who signed up for the class.

            First, we made English-muffin pizzas- a success. Pudding painting got a bit messy, but the pudding stayed on the table. The Halloween popcorn balls didn’t stick together, but the carmelized popcorn was delicious.  And then, we made rugalach. The recipe that I have is very labor-intensive, and I figured it would keep those little fingers busy. The dough is rolled out on powdered sugar, and then sprinkled with more powdered sugar before it goes in the oven. It didn’t occur to me that five and six year olds would be unable to stop licking the powder sugar from their fingers, and they would also wipe those sticky fingers all over the chairs. A lot of powdered sugar also made it’s way onto the floor, which was carpeted. When they finally headed home with their little baggies of yummy cookies, I was left with a colossal mess.  The entire teacher’s lounge was thick with a layer of spit and sugar, and soap and water didn't begin to clean it up. I did the best I could, left a note for the custodian and went home.

            It was early the next day that I got a call from the PTA president. Everyone was furious at me. The teachers and the custodian were angry about the condition of the lounge, and she was understandably angry that I made the PTA look bad. The room had to be professionally cleaned by an outside firm, and I have to tell you, they did a great job. Not surprisingly, I was not invited back to teach any more after-school classes, but the lounge looked so great when the pros were finished, a couple of the teachers later thanked me.

Apple-picking

            After camping in the Canadian Rockies, my friend Shawn and I hitched out of the mountains in a rainstorm. Our ride ended at the same time that the rain stopped, which was in Kelowna, BC, nestled in a valley lined with orchards. It seemed the perfect place to enact our plan to make some much-needed cash as migrant laborers. We found our way to the farm labor office to apply for jobs as pickers and blithely made up fake Canadian Social Security numbers as we filled out our applications.  We’d decided to pretend that we were from Toronto, since Shawn had spent some time there and we could fake it.

            I felt like a true hobo as we rode the bus out of town to a crossroads and then walked the rest of the way to the farm, passing squawking geese, ragged children, tumbledown shacks and crate after crate of perfect McIntosh apples. The couple who ran the place, the Masons, showed us to the army tent in their backyard that was to be our home for the next week or two, however long it took to bring in the harvest.  I could tell that we weren’t their usual migrant laborers- they were very solicitous, almost apologetic, that we had to sleep in a smelly old army tent.

            Early the next morning, we all went out picking. The way it is done is that you climb up a three-legged ladder wearing a canvas bag attached to your chest that has a metal frame at the top to keep it open. The bags untie at the bottom, so that after you’ve filled it up, you can easily pour the apples into the bin that you are filling, which is enormous. It didn’t seem possible that those tiny apples could ever fill that much space. Payment is by the bin, so there’s an incentive to pick quickly.

            It was on my very first tree, in my first half-hour of work, that I reached for an apple that I should’ve left alone. It was just out of reach, and no one had told me never to stand on the top rung of a three-legged ladder. I leaned out for the apple, and then I was flying though the air, landing with a splat on my apple-bag. I tried to make a joke, say “Oh no, I made applesauce”, but the words wouldn’t come.

            The next thing I remember we were all in the car on the way to the hospital-I’d broken my right wrist- and I had no idea where we were or who anyone was except Shawn.

            “Where are we?” I asked

            “Kelowna”, Shawn answered nervously. This did not ring any bells.

            “Where’s that?”

            “In the Okanagan Valley?” She tried. I looked out the window at the unfamiliar landscape.

            “Where’s that?”

            Shawn kind of sighed and said, “Pauline, we’re in British Columbia”

            “British Columbia?! We’re in Canada? When did we cross the border?”

            “Oh!” said someone in the front seat, “You’re Americans!”  Poor Shawn; she was so worried that we’d be in trouble for lying, and now her travelling companion was an amnesiac.

            Thanks to Canadian socialized medicine, they set my arm at the hospital, put me in a soft cast for a week, and even though I had worked less than an hour, I was eligible for worker’s compensation, $50 per week.  I spent one slightly sedated night in the hospital, and while I was there the Masons’ invited Shawn to stay in the house in their daughter’s old room, and when they picked me at the hospital the next day, I moved in there too.

            I felt pretty guilty that next week, as Shawn filled bins and I wandered around the orchard and the town waiting to get my hard cast put on.  I arranged to have my Worker’s Comp checks sent to our destinations in California, so at least I’d be contributing down the road. The Masons practically adopted us; we ate dinner with them every night and all were teary-eyed when we rolled on out of there, me with my fresh white cast.

            Then there was then a postal strike in Canada; I didn’t get my Comp. checks for months.

The Texas Memorial Museum

            Probably my favorite job ever was at the Texas Memorial Museum, on the University of Texas campus, a job that featured a grand old building, historical and geological artifacts, and a broad range of job duties, from the most menial to the highly academic.

            I was a student at UT at the time; it was a work-study job. I’d lasted exactly one night doing food service at the student union.  It was fast-food service; I was used to actually cooking, didn’t have a clue about fast food and after squirting pink milkshake all over the floor, I went back to the financial aid office and begged them to find me a different position.

            They sent me over to the TMM. Even though I’d lived in the neighborhood for a couple of years I had never noticed it.  It’s up a grand staircase, past a magnificent statue of galloping mustangs, surrounded by big old trees. Inside, it’s got a classic high-ceiling museum lobby which used to contain a big mosasaur fossil, and of course, a gift shop.

            As a work-study student, I got to help out in every aspect of that museum. Since there was actual research and publishing going on, I got to do some copy-editing and helped with the index of a scientific treatise.  But, I also had to do stuff like stick those little round reinforcements on dozens of volumes of loose-leaf archives. Once a month, each of the students had to wash all the glass in the building, four stories of exhibits, using a chamois cloth and a bucket of ammonia water. We also got to dust the fossils using a special air-puffing brush. I loved telling people that I had a job dusting dinosaurs.

            The most exciting thing that happened there on a regular basis was the arrival of busloads of children from all over the state. There was no Texas History Museum then- some of the artifacts now on display there were at the TMM, making it a required stop on most school trips to the Capital. Usually, they’d want to hit the gift shop immediately, and it was “all hands on deck” -scholars would emerge from their offices to hand out trinkets and make change. It was a pretty great gift shop; I still have mineral samples that I bought there for 50 cents. After the gift shop, the kids would usually head straight up to the third floor to see the shrunken head. The glass was always extra dirty up there.

            The TMM is still going strong, you can go see the mosasaur, which is in the basement now, and they’ve added a model of a 40-ft pteradon. It seems smaller somehow since all the historic exhibits have moved up the street. As its mission has changed over the years, focusing only on the natural history of Texas, it seems that they have put away all the random oddities from around the world. I wonder where that shrunken head is now?

The Golden Slipper

            After my job at the Fairgrounds ended, I was hungry- it was probably the only time in my life I was actually malnourished, living almost entirely on beans, rice, candy and booze. My two housemates were both using their feminine wiles to stay fed, getting men to take them out for dinner, but they couldn’t always bring along a friend, and I just wasn’t comfortable playing that game. Renee’s favorite trick was to pretend to be French and giggle and smile a lot as men from other places bought her drinks and food.

            I don’t know where Renee found Snake, but surely a name like that should have been some kind of a warning.  Snake had just gotten out of “The Pen” and was re-opening his dive on Rampart St, known as the “Golden Slipper”, complete with a yellow neon high-heeled shoe spinning around on the roof. He needed a barmaid and cook; I could sort of cook and was his girlfriend’s friend, so he hired me. He showed me how the fryer worked, and I mostly hoped that no one ordered any food.

            My duties weren’t limited to the bar- one night we “catered” a private party, which meant mixing drinks and opening bottles and lighting cigarettes in someone’s basement in the suburbs while the men gambled. Renee and I even got to blow on the men’s cards for good luck.

            Snake was a crook and a tyrant and I lasted about two weeks before we got in a huge argument and I stormed out in a huff. But I learned an important lesson from that job: to avoid starvation, work where the food is. One of our regulars tended bar himself at a busy restaurant on the opposite end of the Quarter, and he let me use him as a reference, so something good came of it.  Like Scarlett said, I would never be hungry again.

           

           

Sweetish Hill

            The first place that I lived in Austin was a vegetarian co-op house a couple of blocks from campus, and it was there that I really learned to cook large quantities of food.  When given a choice of chores to do, I always chose more cooking. We all read  Diet for a Small Planet, a book that advocated getting off of the top of the food chain and presented detailed charts and recipes that combined grains and legumes in order to create complete proteins, and many a culinary crime was committed in pursuit of achieving this balance.  My palate will be forever haunted by memories of whole-wheat noodle casseroles, among other atrocities.

            I took this background and used it to get hired at a new French restaurant that had recently opened called P. S. Sweetish Hill.  The owners had first opened up a bakery and sandwich shop over on the East Side, and this new location was to be their full-service restaurant, and the first time, to my knowledge, that haute cuisine came to Austin. Patricia, my boss, had trained in France and, in turn, trained me. Sweetish Hill was my Cordon Bleu, and I learned whatever fundamentals I didn’t already know in that job, cranking out pate, hollandaise, coquille St. Jacques, etc.  We even had to make mayonnaise by hand, with a whisk; Patricia insisted that the texture was so much better that way.  A friend of mine actually got fired for sneaking it into a food processor.

            I worked the night shift, and it was very slow going at first- I was glad that I wasn’t waiting tables, depending on tips. I worked with a woman named Helen who was also new to the trade, and we became good friends. She’d just returned from a long trip through Central America and had wonderful stories to tell.  She was also a strict vegetarian, so I  “had” to taste the scallops and the steak tartare, pretending to be disgusted.

            When they started serving brunch, business finally picked up, and on the weekend nights we’d poach dozens of eggs in advance.  But I didn’t think it would be enough to keep them open, didn’t believe that Austin was ready for haute cuisine.  Fortunately, I was wrong.  When I got back from my own trip to Central America,  many months later, I had to wait in line to get a table for brunch.  All I had to do to continue my culinary career was say that I’d worked at Sweetish Hill, and I was hired immediately.  I kept at it for another decade or so, with breaks for school and travel.

            Sweetish Hill is still open, but they moved to a smaller location and it’s more of a bakery and sandwich shop- as it started out.

The Landing Bakery

            I didn’t realize it when I lived up the hill from it, but the Landing Bakery is a National Treasure; one of the few food venues that I worked in which is still in business and relatively unchanged.  It was started in the late 50’s by a wonderful man named Henry who’d learned how to bake in the Old Country, and his rye bread, rolls, babka and coffee cakes were so perfect that when I first lived in Austin, I’d fill up a suitcase of goodies before heading home –you just couldn’t get bread like that in Austin. For those of you who are reading this wondering what about the layer cakes, the linzer tarts, the giant chocolate chip cookies? I kind of lost my taste for the sweeter stuff when I worked there- having to stack dozens of cookies will do that to you.

            Working at the Landing Bakery was, and probably still is, a rite of passage for girls growing up in the neighborhood known as The Landing.   I didn’t get around to it when I was in high school, but I did end up there after a trip to Europe when I was 22. I didn’t return to the States until I’d spent every last cent that I had, which meant that I was too broke to get back down to Austin right away and needed to find a job in my home town in a hurry.  The bakery was hiring and was in walking distance of my house, so I was glad to get the job.

            I worked the morning shift, which started really early; I’d walk over there in the dark. All of the baking was done by Henry, his son Kevin (who now runs the place), and a guy named Bob who did most of the cake decorating and the teasing of the counter girls. The Kerns had a couple of big dogs, and my favorite was named Fritz, a huge white Shepherd who’d walk me home most afternoons at the end of my shift. You had to keep an eye on Fritz in the bakery because he loved butter; I sometimes wondered if that’s why he was butter-colored.

            When you work in a neighborhood bakery, you really get to know your neighbors, and our regulars taught me how to say hello, goodbye and thank you in Polish, Greek, Czech, Russian and Serbo-Croatian. I learned all about stollen and other Christmas treats; I even helped with the gingerbread houses.

            After I’d saved up enough money, I quit and headed south, just as winter was beginning, as planned. To this day, however, given the opportunity, I will fill my car with Kevin’s  bread, rolls, coffee cake and babka. It’s how you honor a National Treasure.