“Like what?” sneered Jim Easton.
“Well, I learned to play well with others and to share my toys when I was five. Didn’t you learn that, too?”
That got a good laugh from everybody there, including Easton. “That’s true. It didn’t take, but I do remember learning that.”
“Everything else important is from that time, too. Don’t you remember being told to watch both ways before you cross the street? Five years old!”
Everybody nodded, and they started tossing around stuff like, ‘Don’t run with scissors.’, ‘Don’t cheat.’, ‘Nobody likes a tattletale.’, and so forth.
I nudged Marilyn in the side and said, “Here’s a good one. Always take a nap every day.” Marilyn turned bright red at that, especially when Marty asked if I needed a nap.
“Maybe,” I agreed. “Besides, I always remember what I learned on Romper Room.”
That got a few people reminiscing about Romper Room. Marilyn got some attention when she announced, “I was on Romper Room!”
“Really? You and Miss Sally?”
“It was Miss Nancy in Utica.”
I nodded. Romper Room was a sort of franchise operation, and every town and station in those days, back before you had nationwide broadcasting like that, had their own hostess. “Well, I learned a very important lesson from Miss Sally.”
“What?” she asked, falling into my trap.
“Be a Do-Bee and eat your honey!”
Oh my God but the place roared at that, and Marilyn turned beet red and squealed as she ran out of the room. I raced after her and caught her and carried her up to my room. I was a Do-Bee!
Marilyn put up with quite a few jokes the rest of the weekend, but we left the party early and had our own party upstairs. Sunday morning, after a nice bout of early morning loving, we hit the bathroom early. The procedure was that you could lock the main bath on the second floor hall from the inside, and then clean up together. Sometimes, if the traffic was heavy, a girl would simply barge in and hop into the shower, and then peel off her robe and hang it up by sticking her arm out through the curtain. That I saw more than once in my time there.
Sunday morning I had to get up early anyway, since I was cooking. Not just cooking myself and Marilyn some Sunday breakfast. No, I was cooking Sunday Supper for the entire fraternity! I was confident of my abilities in preparing a nice intimate meal for two, or a delicious family sized meal, but this was the first time in either life that I would cook a professional meal for a large group of people on a budget. I was a little nervous.
Normally we had a cook who came in at about 11:00 and worked until 6:00, Monday through Friday. She made a simple lunch, sandwiches and soup, that sort of thing, and then made dinner. The Kitchen Steward was in charge of ordering everything needed, overseeing the budget, and running the assigned labor. All the brothers acted as waiters and dishwashers in rotation. Saturday we did the same, but Mrs. Clarity simply prepped the meal ahead of time. We simply warmed it up.
Breakfasts were usually cereal or toast or eggs, which were free, or you could do yogurt, which had a signing sheet on the fridge, where you marked down what you took and it was added to your bar bill at the end of the month. That’s how I learned to do omelets, studying under Ricky in the middle of the night when we had the munchies.
Sunday was different. We only had one meal, a big deal meal, at 1:00. You scrounged for yourself Sunday night. This was usually a big roast of some sort, veggies, potatoes, dessert, etc. We had these things at other meals, but Sunday was definitely supposed to be bigger and better. We would also have more people in attendance. Girlfriends were usually around, and we often brought pledges and potential pledges in for meals. The cook was one of the brothers, from a list of three or four brothers who had demonstrated superior kitchen skills over the years. They got paid $10 for a Sunday meal. I had been a Steward once, but I had never been a cook.
I didn’t have an unlimited budget, and I didn’t have unlimited manpower. I had me and Marilyn, after I promised to split my fee with her. She was generally hopeless in a kitchen, but I would supervise her and use her for the scutwork. I just wouldn’t tell her that. I had been assigned a beef roast, and Arnie, the current Steward, had gone over my menu. I promised him roast beef, canned green beans, potatoes, gravy, rolls, and my choice of either Jell-O and Foo (a non-dairy whipped topping that we made from a powder) or ton cake (it’s bigger than a pound cake), which was nothing more than a sheet cake with some baker’s sugar sprinkled on it.
So that was the menu, but it didn’t mean I couldn’t improvise. We started early, and I had Marilyn help with mixing the ingredients for the ton cake and pour it into a baking tray. Marilyn, for all her being a lousy cook, is a perfectly adequate baker. As soon as the cake was in one side of the double oven, I had her make some dough for biscuits. Again, this can be pretty simple, but we needed 50–60. Meanwhile, I quickly washed three dozen potatoes and set them on a tray, and put them into the other side of the oven.
Just because we were doing meat and potatoes, it didn’t mean we were doing something boring. I remember reading Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, and there is a passage about the fall of communism. It basically goes that not everybody has equal abilities. A good cook can turn apples, sugar, and flour into a tasty treat, a great chef can take the same ingredients and turn out a brilliant confection, and a lousy hack can turn them into an inedible mess. I was going for something special today. These weren’t just going to be baked potatoes; I was going to make double baked potatoes! You bake the potatoes until done, remove them from the oven, and cut them in half lengthwise. Then you carefully scoop out the potato from the skins and save the empty skins. The potatoes get mixed up with some milk and butter and chives, into a creamy mashed potato filling, get spooned back into the potatoes, and then rebaked. It takes a little longer, but it’s very nice.
While the potatoes were baking and Marilyn was working on the biscuits, I was preparing the roast beast. I was going for a horseradish crusting. You slit some pockets into the roast and then dredge the roast in flour and place it in the roasting pan. Next you prepare a paste of melted butter, horseradish, parsley, and lemon juice that you pour into the pockets and then cover the outside of the roast with. Then you roast as normal. Very tasty!
For gravy, I was taking some standard canned gravy, but modifying it by adding some beef bouillon, garlic, and horseradish. For my veggies, I was using canned green beans, which I had to use since I couldn’t budget for fresh and didn’t have the time to prepare them anyway. I was tempted to bake a green bean casserole, but instead settled for adding some chopped onions and cilantro to the pot while they were warming up.
By noon everything was cooking along nicely. The real trick to cooking is not the individual dishes, but the timing required to bring it all together at once. Some items, like the dessert, can be prepared ahead of time without worry. Others can be cooked and then kept warm for a bit longer, like the potatoes. The meat needed to be ready about fifteen minutes early, so I could carve it in time to be served on the dot at 1:00. The biscuits and the gravy needed to be ready without any delay. By half past twelve Arnie was marshalling the waiters and starting to prepare everything for serving. The kitchen smelled fabulous; Marilyn and I looked like we had been dragged through a knothole!