They spill into the room: about two football fields wrapped in wood and stone walls lined with oil portraits of military figures, draped in state and Revolutionary flags, and crowned with stained-glass windows that depict giant battles. Scrapers and huge hoses come out, and in twenty minutes the griddles and workspace are clean, the residue of eight thousand pancakes wiped away and washed down the drain.
The little remaining batter is wheeled away. Most wear pink earplugs.ĭarren, tasked today with loading the warming carts, tells John they're full. Most of the cooks have been on the job for five, ten, even twenty years. Clangs as trays slide into warmers, and metallic buckles as warmer doors are swung shut. And each warmer has a numbered spot in the mess hall, so once the cadets arrive, the waiters will have to walk only a few feet to serve each table. Each warmer has slots for ten trays of food, enough to feed ten tables of ten cadets. To serve by seven o'clock, Wally must flip three hundred pancakes per hour.Īs they come off the flattop, the pancakes are placed on serving dishes, fifteen per, then rushed over to the forty-eight double-oven-sized warmers on the far end of the room. Wally works methodically, left to right, first pouring a batch, then starting over at the beginning to flip. The cooks then dunk and fill one-gallon pitchers, off-loading the batter into the half-gallon pitchers they use to hand-pour each pancake, carefully laying them out in grids of forty-eight. Just simple: Those sixty-gallon tubs of batter are divided into thirty-gallon bowls that are placed near the grills. Just a task: Cook eight thousand pancakes in three hours. (All recipes are approved by a staff dietician.) There are no surprises, no uninvited guests.
He knows how much butter, fat, and salt to use - Army calorie regulations. John knows exactly how many pancakes the cadets will eat. There are advantages to feeding the Army. "We try to break it down to the simplest level." "Just simple," he says, explaining how he feeds the masses. He's laconic, has a habit of looking down as if always in private thought. He wears loose-fitting khakis, button-down shirts that balloon, and scuffed black leather shoes. He's worked at West Point for twenty-four years, sets the menu, orders all the food. John Fitzsimons, the food-service officer, watches over his team of sixteen cooks. The kitchen extends beyond view in every direction, an industrial steel landscape that could be the set of a gory horror film - deep fryers the size of minivans, dunk tanks of boiling water, mixers with paddles you could canoe with. They'll come all at once, and they'll eat all at once. He finishes at 2:30, four and a half hours before more than four thousand cadets will converge in the mess hall for breakfast.
He is methodical and trustworthy - been working this job for thirty-four years. A man named Wally, gray hair tucked under his white paper cook's cap, adds thirty pounds of baking powder - it must go in closer to cooking time or the batter will ferment. It's just after midnight now in the kitchen at West Point. And don't forget the salt - two and a quarter pounds of salt. Forty-two pounds of sugar, 390 pounds of flour, six gallons of shortening. The evening before, after the dinner shift, two men filled them up: thirty-one and a half gallons of whole milk, twenty-four gallons of buttermilk, 180 pounds of eggs. There are two of them, each sixty gallons. Waist-deep, wide as a hockey goal, and filled with pancake batter. It's the type of tub you could lose a small child in.
0 kommentar(er)
