Chef's Special
WE HAD LUNCH at the Hanover Inn on a mid-February Tuesday, the first meal served from the new kitchen, with a choice of Roast Beef Hash Brown with Poached Egg, Baked Lake Trout with Poulette Sauce, Chicken a la King, and Shirred Eggs a la Turque. The new kitchen runs to the south of the dining room out toward the Ski Hut, which it just misses, and is, according to a modest press release, "a shining example of what a modern kitchen should be." Our interest in shining examples took us on a preprandial inspection trip, and under the proud tutelage of Manager Chet Westcott we peered into every nook.
There are no crannies, but the old kitchen was full of them and had changed very little since its construction at the turn of the century except to gather an increasingly fine patina. After a good bath it will be broken up into a dishwashing department and additional space for the Coffee Shop. From its back door and two feet of superior elevation we had a fine prospect of the gleaming expanse of stainless steel gimmicks that almost float on the red quarry-tile floor of the new room.
Our first impression was of lots of elbow space and fluorescent light, surrounded by refrigerators officially distinguished as "walk-ins" and "reach-ins". The fore- ground, or part nearest the dining room, seems big enough for a small dance and is no doubt put to this use by the kitchen staff of thirty-two cooks and helpers. Off to the left (Bissell Hall side) is the salad counter or pantry department, which takes care not only of salads but also of boiled eggs, ice cream, toast, coffee, short orders, and fudge sauce. Across the middle of the room is a serving table in the center of which is a shallow tub of hot water, or Bain Marie, probably so named from the humorous misadventure of some French cook. The table also has a battery of ten Lowerators which feed up dinner plates in the manner of an inserted bus conductor's change machjaae.
the table are the ranges, under a hood of stainless steel, with grease filters and various ventilating and fireextinguishing gadgets that go off and on respectively if the fat flares up. Technically speaking, what we would call a hell of a big stove is really a Salamander, a fryolater, a broilerizer, and a roasting oven. Next in line, and backed up to the range, is the vegetable and soup department with an orchestra of great kettles and mixers and peelers and, apparently an adjunct to all large food establishments, a consomme cooler. At the extreme south end is the bake shop with ovens and mixers and flour bins, while to the west of the range is the butcher shop (and Garde Manger) with a power saw, some lovely chopping blocks, and a bin full of shaved ice to keep oysters happy. We counted eight refrigerators and fourteen sinks and probably missed a few.
DOWN CELLAR, in addition to a meat room, a vegetable room, and a dairy room, is a deep freeze room at eight below, which is more winter than we've had in
Hanover all year. All these rooms have ultra-violet germ killers, like barber shops. In the basement also is a tremendous storeroom full of big cans of spinach and pineapples, the steward's office, and separate refrigerating units for all the upstairs iceboxes. Somewhere around is a big fish and lobster box, a cheese box, and a machine for flaking the ice that your orange juice comes wrapped in.
We made our way upstairs again via a freight elevator that runs on top of one of those big greasy steel columns, pausing half way to peer out at the back porch, or receiving platform, and back through all the glittering paraphernalia to the dining room door. Just here is an ice cube machine that can make eight thousand cubes a day and would be a wonderful toy for the hockey coach. It seems that those little holes that come in hotel ice cubes are not made by ice mice (or the rats of Norway) as we had always believed, but by feeding gradually congealing water down a flock of little square wells with rods up their centers. When the ice sticks out far enough at the bottom, a slicer whams across and you have several hatfuls of ice cubes like square doughnuts.
After the flamboyance of the kitchen the dining room seemed almost sombre, and we felt a romantic pity for the Roast Beef Hash Brown that was forced to leave a scene of such grandeur for a sober whitecovered table. The Poached Egg was done to a T.
