Working at the Midway Diner
It was really cold outside, somewhere in the low twenties, and I was shivering and trying to snuggle closer to the huge cast iron cook stove. I was about frozen after riding the little Yamaha dirt bike into town wearing my cheap, white polyester waitress uniform. My fingers would not even unbend.
“Good morning, Alta. Is the oven cranked up? I’m freezing. How many pies do you think we’ll need?”
Alta worked the gloves off my hand and tried rubbing some heat into them with her own. It hurt. She fetched a pan of warm water from the back of the stove top and had me lay my hands in that instead. I was starting to thaw out when she handed me a hot cup of coffee, which finally did the trick.
We really did not have time to waste and needed to get cranking before all the oil riggers and pipeliners showed up hungry at the door. We were the morning crew at the Midway Diner, midway between Parkersburg and Clarksburg, West Virginia, on old Route 50.
The Pipeliner Guys
There was a whole bunch of guys, down from working on the new Alaskan pipeline, who had come into town these past few days, who started work real early in the morning, so we had to be ready. I had a little trouble gauging just how much food they were likely to eat on a given day.
Alta had a feel for this, though, as she’d been periodically feeding this group, or one similar to it, like the hunters, for the better part of going on forty years. She was a roundy, plumpish, good looking farm woman who had lost her husband quite a few years back to a tractor accident. Her kids were all grown and moved off somewhere else and she mothered me as much as I would let her. She still wore the old cotton calico, shirt waist dresses of the fifties and knee high, colored nylons with sneakers for everyday. Her homemade aprons had deep pockets and rick rack edging. I don’t think she ever got cold.
“Well, it’s bitter cold and damp out there”, she said. “I figure they’ll be eating and packing extra food today just to keep warmed up. You’d better figure on ten – twelve cream pies. Make sure there’s at least two peanut butter, one each of coconut cream and lemon meringue and five or six fruit. Better get the coffee started right away too as they’ll be needing to fill all their thermal jugs.”
After hanging up my jacket on the rack by the back door and washing up my hands, I headed out into the diner and bent down behind the long, red Formica counter to get the coffee makings out. That cup that Alta had given me was starting to kick in and before long I might be able to actually function something like a human. It was still only four thirty in the morning – not my best time. You might as well not even try and talk to me before I’ve had my coffee. You might get a grunt but the brain wouldn’t be in gear yet.
I was going to have to make- from scratch mind you- eighteen pies in the next what – two hours? If I was lucky, and the other help actually showed up on time, I might actually get them done. Better make the coffee good and strong.
At six thirty A.M I would unlock the front door to the horde of ravenous beasts- Pipeliner men who smelled of oil and looked grubby enough to have been using crude oil to wash up in. They were always lined up and ready before opening time. We expected them to be working around here for six or eight weeks and they (almost all of them) left really good tips. Considering the usual five dollars a day I would get from the locals, the two dollars a plate I got from the pipeline guys would really help me out.
Pipeliners perked up the whole local economy by staying in our little run down motel, boarding in with some folks, eating at the local restaurants, and telling wild stories about well drilling and working on the Alaska pipeline. They were real friendly to me in the restaurant and sometimes, when the place just got too hectic to handle by myself, a couple of them would slip behind the counter to pitch in by making coffee and getting silverware set up.
They were on some kind of seasonal circuit and showed up every year in the late fall. I guess it got too cold up in Alaska to work outside about then. I enjoyed their company each year but I was also pretty glad to have them leave in the Spring so that I did not have to get up so darn early anymore. Places like the Diner got started later and moved a lot slower after they left.
Mincemeat and Scrapple
“You’d better get a move on girl, them pies aren’t going to make themselves and I am going to need help back here with this tater peeling before long”, Alta hollered in from the kitchen, “Oh, and do you know anybody who’s planning on butchering hogs sometime soon? I am about out of mincemeat and really need to put up another big batch a’fore long.”
I finished getting six more pots of coffee going and headed back to the warm kitchen with two fresh cups.
“I’ll ask Chip about it when he comes in next time, should be soon. He’s got a whole mess of hogs about ready to go up there. Now the weather has turned seriously cold he is bound to start on killing some.”
Chip was a farmer two hills over from us that always gave me first dibs on the hog heads because he knew I would find some good use for them. His wife, Linda, wasn’t into dealing with that part after she had spent an entire two days cutting and wrapping all the rest of the hogs- they usually did three at a time and it was a big job. A messy, smelly, gross job, that when I helped them with, left me unable to eat pork for about three weeks.
I usually made Scrapple (or Pon Hos) with my share of the heads- three heads will work up into about sixty pounds of Scrapple in the freezer -enough to last the two of us the whole year and have plenty to trade with friends. Some folks won’t eat it because they have heard it’s made of brains and eyes and such, but really, it is just good pork broth made with whatever meat there is, all ground up, with cornmeal, buckwheat flour and oatmeal, a little sage, salt and pepper.
You cook up a big pot of it just like cornmeal mush, until it gets gloppy-thick. Then you spoon it into bread pans or waxpaper lined shoe boxes and let it cool till it sets up. Then you turn the molds upside down and wrap the little loaves up with freezer paper. It only keeps about a week in the fridge so we have to freeze the rest. Since we don’t have electric at our house, we barter meat and Scrapple for freezer space at the neighbors. To cook it, you cut quarter inch slices, sprinkle some flour on both sides, and fry them brown and crispy in an oiled iron skillet. Served with fried eggs, it makes for a good filling meal- breakfast or dinner either one, and it’s cheap to make.
Alta wanted the hogsheads to make her mincemeat pie filling. I have no idea how she makes it-it is a secret recipe and she won’t tell anyone. Her mincemeat pies are by far the best around though. She always gets rave reviews at the church suppers and all her pies are the first to go. I have always made mine vegetarian style, out of green tomatoes and raisins. They are nothing like hers.
Hogsheads
Chip came by the diner for lunch later that day and told me he’d be butchering as soon as he brought in the last of his field corn which depended on it not raining for the next three days. He wanted to know if I could I help by driving the wagon?
“Sure, I’ll get done here about two o’clock. Just give me a holler.”
So we set it up to work on harvesting the last of the corn on Friday. Hog butchering would probably start the next day. I told Alta I’d have some hogs heads for her soon, but didn’t tell her exactly when I would have them. We worked steadily along the rest of the morning – we always worked well together.
The next Monday Chip stopped by my house on his way to the feed store with three big, lumpy black plastic bags for me. Inside were the three heads for Alta, all clean and scalded from the weekend butchering. I packed them into the old gas fridge we kept outside under the eaves.
You couldn’t stand to have the gas fridge inside because it put out nasty fumes, We didn’t know how to get the burners adjusted right to prevent it. We usually kept the extra eggs and the goats milk out there too, and there wasn’t a lot of extra space, so I decided to deliver the heads to Alta’s first thing in the morning.
Three Pig Heads
I had the next day off but it was going to be really hectic. We were trying to build a house way up the hill at our place and we had a lot of work to do. It wasn’t Alta’s day off, though , so I figured I had better get to her house before she left for work so she’d have time to find a cool place to put them.
When I got there at four the next morning, she was not downstairs yet, so I slipped into her kitchen and very quietly placed the heads, with their eyes and ears and snouts still intact, onto her kitchen counter. It was reminiscent of those monkeys doing “Hear no evil, See no evil, and Speak no evil” and they were all grinning grotesquely as dead pigs do.
Maybe setting the heads up on the counter like that was a bit much, but it seemed funny at the time. I wanted to hear her reaction to this gruesome trio, so I sat down outside on the dark porch step, out of sight, and waited for her to come down. I did not have to wait long. I heard her slippers scuffing down the wooden stairs, the light switch click on and then,
“Aaaahhh! Aaaahhh! Wendy! Where are you? You dirty rat! I am going to get you back for this!
I snuck away as fast as I could- she was a little too mad for me to want to risk her seeing me now. I would give her time to cool down. I knew she would, she always had a good sense of humor. It was just a little too early in the day to see it right now. I was glad I had not caused her to have a heart attack or something.
Photo of some other cooks I found with the same thought!
Photo:http://www.freewebs.com/sulphurspringsseniorcenter/Hear_No_Evil,_Speak_No_Evil,_See_No_Evil.jpg (Check out this site for a funny video of seniors having fun as well.)
The next morning at work, Alta thanked me for bringing her the heads and told me she brought out the camera and got a picture of them all lined up on the counter like that. She was thinking she might have to send a copy to her kids along with her secret recipe for Mincemeat Pie.
She also said I would never see it coming when she finally figured out how to get me back and she was making it her mission in life. I reckon I deserve it. Sure is good pie though, and I still don’t have her recipe.
Wendy lee Maddox- https://www.edgewisewoods.com
March 29, 2014