Sixty Plates and One End Slice

The Posting by the Front Desk

I went to see Mom that afternoon and did not tell her about the text. She would have tried to drive to Main Street herself, and she could not even stand.

On the way out, I saw the paper taped to the glass by the front desk. Cook wanted.

Full time, days, five days a week. Experience required. Sixteen dollars an hour. See Dena in dietary.

I asked the woman at the front desk for an application and filled it out on a clipboard in the lobby.

Dena called me two days later. She was in her fifties, with short gray hair and reading glasses on a beaded chain, and she had run that kitchen for nine years. She did not hand me anything.

She interviewed me for forty minutes in a little office next to the dish room, with my application in front of her, marked up in red pen.

“This is not a cafe,” she said first thing. “I want you to understand that before we go any further. Half my people can’t have salt the way you’d cook it. Twelve of them are on mechanical soft. Four are pureed.”

“I understand,” I said. “Mom’s been here two weeks. I’ve watched what they bring her.”

“Then tell me what mechanical soft means,” she said.

“Ground or chopped fine,” I said, “moist, nothing tough or dry, nothing they have to work at. Meat in gravy. No raw vegetables, no hard crusts, no nuts. Cut it so it falls apart under the fork.”

She made a mark in red. “Holding temperature for hot food on the line?”

“One thirty-five or higher,” I said. “Ground beef cooked to one fifty-five. I check it with the probe, not by looking at it. You throw out anything that sits in the danger zone too long.”

She made another mark. Then she asked the question I think she really wanted answered.

“Can you put out sixty plates by noon, hot, every one of them right for the person it’s going to?”

“I did ninety on Easter Sunday by myself,” I said. “Mom was at church, and the girl who washed dishes called in sick. I can do sixty.”

Dena took her glasses off and let them hang on the chain. “I know who you are, Corinne. I’ve eaten your mother’s meatloaf for twenty years. I’m not hiring you because of that. I’m telling you so you know I know.”

“I wouldn’t want you to,” I said. “Hire me because I can cook.”

She hired me the second week of January. First there was a state background check, a skin test for tuberculosis at the clinic, and a food handler class I took online at our kitchen table one night while Steve watched basketball.

I asked Dena one favor before I started. I asked her not to tell Mom I worked there.

Not yet. I wanted to tell her myself, and I wanted it to be on the right day.

Dena looked at me over the top of her glasses. “You mean a Thursday,” she said.

“I mean a Thursday,” I said.

The Menu Cycle

A nursing home kitchen runs on a menu cycle. Ours was four weeks long, written out and signed by a consulting dietitian who came every month from Great Bend.

Dena handed it to me on my first Monday. I flipped to the first Thursday of the cycle. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green beans, a dinner roll, and peaches for dessert.

“Meatloaf’s already on there,” Dena said. “Has been for years. It’s the regular menu item that week. What I want to know is whose meatloaf you’re planning to make.”

“Mom’s,” I said. “If the dietitian signs off on it.”

“Write it out,” Dena said. “Every ingredient, every amount, for sixty. I’ll send it to her today. If she says yes, it’s yours. If she says no, you make the one in the binder and you don’t sulk about it.”

I wrote it out that night. It took me two hours, because Mom never measured anything in her life.

I had to stand in my own kitchen and make one loaf the way she made it, and weigh every handful.

The dietitian called Dena on Wednesday. She wanted the brown sugar in the glaze cut by a third and the salt cut in half, with salt packets on the side for those allowed.

Everything else she approved. Dena told me without smiling, but she was close to it.

That first week I learned the steam table, the tray cards with every resident’s diet and allergies, and the names.

There was Gene, who had farmed wheat north of town for fifty years and wore his seed cap at every meal because, he said, his head got cold.

There was Marge, who wanted her coffee black and her butter on the side.

There was a retired schoolteacher named Doris who had taught me fourth grade spelling, and who looked at me in my hairnet on my second day and said, “Corinne Albrecht, you always did have good handwriting.”

Mom did not see me that first week. The aides brought her down at noon and took her back by one, and I stayed behind the line and visited after my shift in my regular clothes.

“Your hands smell like onions,” she said on Wednesday, and sniffed at my wrist. “You been cooking at home?”

“Something like that,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead, right in her white curls, and went home and could not sleep.