Call Me Chef
by Tom Sheehan
part 1
For the second time this day and for the second day in a row, Salvatore looked out the window of the A&P Railroad dining car kitchen. The train was in the middle of grass running for endless miles, and he saw a herd of cattle and drovers dashing about on horseback. Those gallant riders that had drawn him all the way from Italy, half a turn around the world.
Salvatore “Sardi” Benevento, “the best cook on the whole damned railroad,” according to the big boss, felt a knot working in his gut. Out there in that mix is where he wanted to be, had wanted it from the day he left Italy with the dream locked up in his heart.
He recalled the exact moment when he sold the horse, the wagon and the small farm on the same day his grandfather died. Once he arrived in Naples, after the funeral and after his beloved grandfather had been placed down into the rocky ground, he purchased a ticket to America. A few months later, after an interminable wait, and a mad and dangerous crossing of the ocean among some thieves from his own village, he managed to maintain his inner direction, to keep his dream alive.
Ashore but one week, exploring Boston’s North End on foot, he felt like a child away from home. But he glowed in the energy bouncing around him. Like a small piece of Italy, that part of Boston came at him in its full swing. In the air were the known aromas of hours-long food preparation, the sense of music from every corner and from every bistro, from open windows and closed doors, and finally the magnificent chatter of its people, dialect atop dialect, a grand mixture of Tuscany tongue and Calabrese and Milanese and Roman as old as the sages. He inhaled all of it, as if hunger worked all the parts of him.
Then, fate itself on the move, in one breath, not marked right then but benchmarked later in the way life piles up with incidents, he heard a voice saying in a dialect near his own from the front of an open restaurant, “Ho, Luigi, perché una tale pesante, sguardo interrogativo sulla tua faccia? Si guarda sbalordito.” He had no trouble hearing it as, “Ho, Luigi, why do you have such a heavy, quizzical look on your face? You look dumbfounded.”
The speaker was a heavy, well-set man of middle age, mustache-bearing, dark of skin, in a fashionable black suit with simple orange stripes behaving in the fabric like style was its master. The felt hat on his head seemed as new as Benevento knew the suit was, and somewhat costly even in the land of riches. The speaker’s hands flew in the air as he talked, approaching an obvious acquaintance at an outside table.
The one he spoke to, Luigi as named, replied, “Ho bisogno di trovare un grande cuoco italiano, un cuoco supremo, un maestro del gusto, per la ferrovia.” (“I need to find a great Italian cook, a chef supreme, and a master of taste, for the railroad.”)
Young Benevento, having been taught everything his grandfather knew about meats and vegetables in the kitchen, the best seasons of vegetables, the uses of condiments, the difference in minute mixtures, “the splash and dash” he might have called it, how soft the fruits could become in the mouth, in the throat, stepped in as quickly as he had sold the horse and wagon and the farm. He burst into Italian, went immediately to English to carry his argument, to show his versatility. “I am he whom you are looking for. This is the moment I have been waiting for. The Good Lord sent me down this street on this day to show how destiny works at His hands.” He pointed overhead beseechingly and blessed himself.
“I am the best cook ever to come out of the mountains in Tuscany. I sold my horse and wagon and farm to get here to America, to bring great Italian cooking to the new land of America. I am Salvatore Benevento at your service. Ask the proprietor to loan me his kitchen for an hour. I shall make your mouths water, make you think of home so that you will cry for your mother’s kitchen. Blessed be the image that comes upon you now from your childhood.” He made the sign of the cross over them as if he was the village padre.
The two older Italian men, marveling at such precocity in the young man, tumbled before his onslaught. He told them how his grandfather had cooked for years for the two of them and for every celebration in their small village. He spelled out some of his own favorite recipes that moved both men to salivation, and to a few more times of their calling out to the proprietor, “another round of vino for us and the young man, Giovanni, if you please.” (“Un altro giro di vino per noi e il giovane, Giovanni, se non vi dispiace.”)
The proprietor, after all the talk and Benevento being hired on the spot for the chef’s position on a train leaving the next day for the far western lands of America, finally asked him what he would have cooked if he had been given the run of the restaurant kitchen. The proprietor’s eyes were wide with anticipation.
“Ah, I immediately thought of mushroom trifolati,” Benevento said, “for a late afternoon delicacy for these men of taste, most tasty sautéed mushrooms.”
The proprietor looked downcast as he said, “That would have been impossible, young man, as we do not have any mushrooms in the kitchen today.” He dropped his shoulders as he looked at the others, his hands flung out flat at the imagined loss.
But they all brightened as the young chef looked overhead at a string of tall elm trees, and said, “That is no problem. The Garden in the Sky above us is filled with Amanita colyptraderma that the Good Lord has provided us. Look at the parade of those choice mushrooms along the upper branch in that large tree across the street. Do they not look delicious even from here?”
Salvatore Benevento, the very next day, was chef No. 1 in the dining car of an A&P Railroad Lines passenger train heading west out of Boston, Tuscany fare on the move.
Nobody yet in the new land realized his real dream was to be a cowboy.
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Copyright © 2021 by Tom Sheehan
