Tom’s Letter by Tom Douglas
Hope you all have been making soup since my last newsletter.
Today I was working on the lobster sweet potato gratin for the “Heart and Soul” Valentines dinner coming up this weekend at the Palace Ballroom. Our theme is southern cooking, but as I worked through this dish with the help of my longtime co-author Shelley Lance, I found myself returning to the days of being a cook’s helper at the Hotel DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware in1976.
Uncle Duppies, as we fondly called it back then, is a classic gem of a hotel, quite literally the hub of Wilmington. When the DuPont company couldn’t find an appropriate place to house their executives they built their own. For many years and still to this day, they set the gold standard for hospitality in the region.
As a cook’s helper my first job was to shuck fish sized Cherrystone clams and Bluepoint oysters, peel mounds of giant scampi and cook and crack cases of Maine lobster. The rookie gashes that still scar my hands are a daily reminder of how not to open oysters. It was fun for me to follow the trails of the “prep” I had done in the massive basement kitchens up into the lofty, hightly regarded dining halls of the hotel.
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