Even on her days off, Smith Dining Services employee Gerry Dupre likes to bake. Most recently, she made a pecan pie. “I had so many pecans in the house, I had to find a way to get rid of them. So a pie seemed like the best idea.”
As for the savory foods, steak is her favorite. “I love a tenderloin steak,” she says with a proud, toothy smile. She is the kind of person whose eyes smile when her mouth does; they gleam brown like butter-glazed pecans.
We’re standing in the kitchen of Dawes, the gluten-free dining hall. At the moment, Dupre is scooping chocolate-banana muffin batter into a muffin tin. Once the recesses are filled, she sprinkles a handful of granulated sugar evenly over the tray as if distributing fairy dust.
She aspires to be the first person to have worked in every kitchen at Smith College. The only one she hasn’t worked in is Comstock-Wilder, the dining hall that specializes in “Asian Fusion.”
“I’m not leaving here yet, don’t worry. But I don’t like cooking Asian food. I think it’s because I’m afraid to mess it up — it’s this fear of the unknown.” She says it’s the broths that are hard to get right. Each quantity has to be perfect, each ingredient perfectly mixed. One minor mistake, and the whole meal will taste off.
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Dupre’s father worked for a wholesale meat company. “We always had the best meat growing up,” she says. “I think that’s why I like it so much.” I ask how she likes her meat: “rare.” But she won’t go near anything raw. “Maybe it’s because, as a chef, I know how unsafe it can be. But I also just don’t like it.”
Before her father got his job at the meat company, he owned a floor-sanding business. “But then everybody got carpeting, and he had to find another job.” So he got into the meat business. “Even our hot dogs were the best,” she reminisces.
When I ask about her mother, I am told that she “passed” when Dupre was 18. Enrolled in culinary school, Dupre left after two years to help her father take care of her siblings. One was going into high school, and the other was a senior. She came back to provide an extra “presence” in their lives, while her father switched to a custodial job in the East Longmeadow school system so that he would have the same hours as the kids.
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I ask Dupre how she deals with students who are not only gluten-free, but also vegan. Dawes serves some of the most dietarily compromised students at Smith. However, rather than being daunted, Dupre finds those cases “sad,” mostly because what they can eat is so “limited.” She worries that students who follow both gluten-free and vegan diets won’t be able to get the protein they need. “You see, eggs are what make up for the gluten in gluten-free food, and vegans can’t have them.”
This year, Dupre’s been experimenting with bread, which, without the gluten, needs eggs like how turkey needs gravy. “Was it you who made that cranberry bread the other day?” I ask.
It was, indeed. It was the most normal-tasting bread I have had in the four years since being diagnosed with Celiac disease. The crust was distinctly different from the inside, which was soft and doughy — the antithesis of most bread sans gluten. More often than not, on a scale of hits and misses, gluten-free bread is a miss. The advent of Dawes, however, with its dedicated, talented chefs, has repeatedly challenged that reality.
In 2015, when Dawes was founded, after a bloody battle between a handful of intestinally afflicted, immunodeficient students and indifferent administrators, it had a population of just six people. Then, Dupre explains, it went to 30, and then to 100. Now it’s at 135.
“Dawes is the closest thing to what Smith used to be.” I ask her what she means. “Well, I’ve been working here for 22 years, and for a long time, dining halls would be 70-80 people, and you would get to know everyone. But now it’s 300 people, and you just can’t afford to get to know all your staff and each student.”
In Dawes, however, the chef needs to know the diners. The chef must know that Person X will go into anaphylaxis if they come into contact with anything containing coconut and that Person Y will break out in hives if they eat a raw carrot. At Dawes, the chefs don’t know anything but resourcefulness and resilience, and are unfailingly prepared to offer alternative meals to students who need them.
“See, no one should leave here hungry. That’s my motto.”
In keeping with the nostalgia that working at Dawes brings her, Dupre talks about how she likes to make “paninis and grilled cheese sandwiches” as a kind of “throwback.” “Everyone has always liked a grilled cheese with tomato soup. I don’t know why, but that’s just the way it’s been since I got here.”
I thank her and try to convey my gratitude. Sylvia Plath once wrote, “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won’t cure, but I don’t know many of them.” I feel the same way about grilled cheeses.
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“What do you think,” I inquire, “about students who sign up to eat at Dawes but then go––“
“Oh,” she interrupts, “and eat at the other dining halls?” she laughs. She begins to recount a story about how she once served a student from Dawes chicken tenders at the Campus Center.
“People can do what they want with their bodies … it’s a shame, but putting bad things in their bodies is their prerogative.”
“So you don’t feel like they’re stealing resources from the people who actually have Celiac?”
“No, not really.” Rather than a judge, she sees herself as a “mom,” whose job it is to ensure that nobody leaves hungry — not to accuse them of being frauds.
“Personally, you know, I’ve never been hungry a day in my life,” she says. “I honestly have no idea what hunger feels like.” She vows to make sure that no student, Celiac or not, knows what it feels like either.
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Before she got “here,” Dupre worked at Denny’s. “That was my job as a teenager. I worked the night shift on weekends so I could be home with my brother and sister during the day.” Her signature was a scrambled egg dish, which was, apparently, the preferred cuisine of the inebriated at 2 a.m.
After Denny’s, Dupre worked at Springfield College. “That’s where I really started — in academia.” She had a brief stint at Mercy Hospital, but she “didn’t like how sad and all-the-same it was. The seven-day menus were too boring.”
“Because if you’re not leaving the hospital after seven days, you’re dying?” I clarify.
“Yeah, exactly.”
But overall, Dupre sees herself as someone who belongs in academia. “I like working with younger people — they keep me young. We have some strong, smart girls here.”
The other day, a student working in the kitchen told Dupre that she had gotten stranded on her way home the previous weekend.
“Apparently she was riding one of those bikes you rent, but it froze up, and she had to hitchhike home.” She pauses, eyebrows raised. “So I told her never to rent one of those bikes again — I have a bike in my basement that I’ve used six times, and I told her I’d bring it in. I told her she can’t hitch rides anymore.”
“And don’t get me wrong,” she continues after a moment, “she just mentioned this in passing, in the kitchen! I might’ve never known about it.”
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“Having worked in almost all the dining halls,” I ask, “does it upset you to see all this food get thrown away?”
Dupre explains the complicated laws dictating what institutions can do with leftover food. They are strict and virtually prevent any school from donating uneaten food to those in the community: “If it’s been sitting out for a certain amount of time, or touched by enough people, we can’t donate it,” she says. The list of restrictions goes on, creating a legal maze for anyone who simply wants to give away food instead of putting it in the compost or the trash. “But Smith does do a lot for the area, and there is a Recovery Program run by students. People often overlook that.”
The community does a lot for Smith, too. “Like that church back there,” Dupre says, pointing over her shoulder with her thumb.
“Oh, you’re talking about that church that does the midnight breakfast during finals?”
“Yes,” she says. “In fact, I should ask them if they need any help this year.”
“Really?” I ask. “That must be so stressful — it’s like serving a mob, right?”
“Well, actually, I really enjoy that. It’s a great time.” Cooking eggs and pancakes for 2,000 burnt-out students is no big deal for Dupre; it’s just what she does.
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“You know,” Dupre tells me, “it took Bradley Cooper a year and a half to learn how to sing. He had a speech coach and everything.” We are talking about the movie she saw, for the second time, the Wednesday before. She lives down the street from the movie theater and goes every Wednesday evening for the discounted viewing.
At 55 years old, Dupre has one dining hall left to work at. But, after a year and a half, she is still honing her skills at Dawes, waiting for the time to be right to move on and conquer the last one. She does not have any sort of coach, but she works ten-hour days as practice. She cuts out and keeps the labels from food packages so that if a student wants or needs to know what’s in a certain food, she can tell them.
“When do you plan on meeting your goal?” I ask.
“I may never reach it,” she says. “But, you know, it’s always good to have a goal.”
