Sense and Sensibility

Soup Kitchen Chef Takes No Guff

The kielbasa floats on the surface of the boiling water and curls, like a skinny circus balloon. The caldron is big and the kitchen is hot and when the steam rises it seeps into the deep folds under Emmett Reid’s hound-dog eyes, turning them rheumy and pink. Reid sweeps a red-handled pair of tongs over the bubbling water, clamps one about the middle, plucks the sausage out of the pot and lays it gently in a deep aluminum pan, where it joins a dozen others.

Reid used 19, maybe 20 packages of kielbasa today; he lost count. When you’re cooking for 300, which Reid does almost daily at the Greater Waterbury Interfaith Ministries Soup Kitchen, you can do that. Plus, Reid is 82, and while he hasn’t lost much upstairs, he’s learned when to keep quiet.

His cooking, for instance. It’s succulent and aromatic and will stick with you for a day on the streets, or under a tent, or until the big brick shelter opens on Benedict Street in Waterbury’s South End. Reid learned it at his grandmother’s elbow [--] his grandmother who raised him after his mother moved on. He grew up in Tuskegee, Ala., and can’t remember a day of being hungry. His family raised hogs and tended a farm. You’d be surprised how ingenious you could be with food that popped out of the earth and a grandma who knew how to cook it right.

 ”Whassat?” Reid says, motioning toward a peeled potato floating in warm, creamy water. Marty Litschauer, who is 90 and has learned not to argue with Reid, lifts his eyebrows. Reid plunges a gloved hand into the pan of potatoes and yanks out a medium-sized one, marked with a black dot, about the size of a fly. Reid sneers.

“Rich, don’t do that,” Reid says to Rich Marquis, today’s potato peeler. Reid chucks the potato in the trash. “You know I don’t go for that.”

Reid can spot a defect six feet away. “If I can’t eat it, I don’t give it to nobody else,” he says, grabbing a 12-inch kitchen knife and heading toward the coils of kielbasa. It’s just after 10 on this overcast, humid Wednesday, and most of the staff in the Soup Kitchen are sweating. That includes Reid, who has worked as a cook for the kitchen for the last three years through Maturity Works, and Marquis and Litschauer, who work for Greater Waterbury Interfaith Ministries. They are supported in this by the silent, plodding labor of Diane Drankeley, a volunteer at the kitchen for nearly 20 years. Most of the men, like Reid, are paid for 15 hours of work, and put in nearly another 10 of their own time. A good 10 other workers, cobbled together from Waterbury Youth Services, Alternative to Incarceration clients and volunteers, staff this soup kitchen, a highly choreographed undertaking supervised by Barbara Dublin.

The hungry who come here [--] who have been, since the beginning, mostly single white men [--] are out of work, or in treatment, or on the streets or in some other way impoverished. Dublin, executive director here, has seen an increase of 75 to 125 new people a month [--] an appalling number of them children. The roads that led the hungry here are elaborate and simple, convoluted and tragic. Many are lonely and taciturn and stare into their two scoops of tuna salad intently, shielding themselves from eye contact, or conviviality, or pity. Others are genial and garrulous, swapping cookies donated by Sweet Maria’s or asking for loaves of bread donated by Freihofer’s Bakery. For many, like Ed White, it is their only meal of the day.

“These people are very righteous people,” White says of the volunteers. “They don’t put you down because you’re homeless. I’m not apologizing about being homeless; I put myself in this predicament…..Without this church, I’d be lost. I’d be nothing but skin and bones.”

In the kitchen, there is little contact, because there is so much work. Reid, a tall, lanky black man with a gray, die-size goatee and belted wool pants that sag at the back end, has been here since 7:30. For years he cooked at a U.S. Army base in Fort Benning, Ga. He ran a bar for awhile. He cut hair. He married [--] five times. About his cooking, he will only look wryly out of the corner of his eye, bring his index finger to his lips and shake his head. “I don’t tell no secrets,” he says. “You too nosey.”

“He follows his own clock,” says Dublin of Reid. “So he’s here two hours early. He’s here on his days off. He wants everything to be perfect.”

Nobody in the kitchen of St. John’s Episcopal Church talks about faith. They don’t talk about corporal or spiritual acts of mercy or obligation to the poor. They talk about potatoes and four-pound cans of tuna and how long the beans need to be heated up. Nobody calls Reid “chef.” Everybody knows he’s just the “cook.” And nobody, not even Dublin, needs to tell him what kind of cook he is.

“I don’t care if nobody like it. I cook it. They don’t like it; they don’t have to eat it.” He whistles slightly as the steam licks his forehead. “Everybody find out that I’m cooking, they be here all the time. When I cook chicken?” He raises his eyebrows and shakes his head. “When I cook chicken, they run over me.”

c, Republican American,2009.