From the Dining Hall to Jerry’s: A BCS Culinary Map of the Early 80s
By Scott Goodson, BCS'81

In the late 1970s, Bishop’s College School was a landscape of gravel, grey skies, and the peculiar, localized gravity of the dining hall. I was not an employee of the kitchen. I lacked the official standing, the hairnet, and the paycheck. Instead, I was a student of BCS and moreover of cooking—more of a self-appointed observer before anyone would watch Anthony Bourdain or Iron Chef. In between classes, I’d simply visit the kitchen to watch the maestro work.

The maestro’s name was Richard. Memory is a slippery thing, much like the surfaces of a professional kitchen; it polishes the edges of the past until the names begin to slide away. As I remember it, Richard was a kind man in his thirties or forties with a face that suggested he had witnessed things in a stockpot that would make a civilian tremble.

Richard ran the kitchen. He was “chef” decades before The Bear made that term stick. Back then, when word spread through the dormitories that his roasted chicken was on the menu—golden, crackling, and honest—the student body moved as one. We were a colony of hungry adolescents with an insatiable desire to eat our fill. Those with the most cavernous appetites would line up for seconds of the Chicken à la King, his famous dish alongside the grilled. Louis Laflamme swears it was Sheppard’s Pie with the brown gravy. That was always seconds for him.

But it was the cream that held me in its thrall. The milk arrived in containers from farmers, homogenized and dense with the accumulated fat of cows who had eaten much better than we had. When the lids were lifted, the cream sat at the top in a thick layer, nearly solid. Richard used this for his "special dessert." The base: a cake, a pastry, a shrug of flour did not matter. What mattered was the whipping. Richard handled cream the way a therapist handles silence: as something that should be allowed to reveal itself at its own pace. He would whisk it with a concentration so fierce you suspected he was performing surgery. He was transforming a liquid into a solid, which is a minor miracle if you think about it long enough.

While Richard’s dinners were the main event, Evan Ballentyne recently told me his personal favorite was the quiet, steady reliable of breakfast. A simple, tactile ritual: warm hard-boiled eggs, broken up with a fork directly onto thick slabs of butter-covered toast, finished with a sharp dash of salt and pepper. It was the kind of fuel that made the grey Lennoxville mornings survivable.

The rest of the dining hall food? Well, that was another story entirely. The burgers were great, but institutional cooking always carries the risk of descending into chaos.

Nowhere was that risk more evident than during the Epic Power Failure. It happened mid-dinner, plunging the hall into a sudden, vacuum-like blackness. In the silence that followed, a spark was lit—not of light, but of mischief.

Instigated by the members of the UKTO, as Jeff Drummond recalled to me, the darkness became a canvas for an alternative use of leftovers. What began as a stray roll evolved into a massive dining hall food fight. In the pitch black, you didn’t see the mashed potatoes  coming; you only felt the impact. The resulting school-wide punishment was legendary, a collective penance for a few minutes of glorious, starch-filled anarchy. Rumor has it all started by Drummond.

On special days, there was all-you-can-eat ice cream as I was recently reminded by Willy Badger. But the true peak of our civilization was the all-you-can-eat pizza day. This was not the artisanal craft of the Maestro; this was Saga Foods: simple, frozen, institutional squares.

On one such day, a boy named Richard Tucker (Rest in Peace) successfully consumed seventeen slices. He was subsequently "gated"—sent to detention—for being late to his afternoon class, but it was a small price to pay for immortality. He walked to detention a legend, albeit a very heavy one.

Friday nights, however, belonged to the secular world. Friday nights were for Jerry’s Pizza. In those days, in Smith House, the order was always the same: a small plain pizza with extra cheese. If you were feeling decadent, you ordered the "All Dressed." It would arrive in the common room, a space that smelled permanently of damp hockey equipment, unwashed socks, and adolescent longing.

We would huddle around the grease-stained boxes like conspirators. When the boxes were nearly empty, the screaming would begin. “Scraps!" we would howl, fighting over the orange-stained crusts and the oily remnants as if they were spoils of war. Jerry’s was the opposite of Richard’s kitchen; it was chaos, it was democracy, it was the taste of being briefly unsupervised.

I returned to Lennoxville a few years ago. Time has been unkind to many things, but Jerry’s Pizzeria is, miraculously, alive and well. It is owned now by the son of the original owner. The posters of the Greek islands are still on the walls, faded into a blue that no longer exists in nature.

I can report that the secret recipe is intact. The pizza is as greasy as ever, which is to say, it is wonderful. 

The cream is gone now. That particular milk exists only in the abstract realm of nostalgia. Richard is gone too, though I imagine his hands were the last things to go—hands that understood that cooking is just the art of paying attention.

That is what Bishop’s gave me in the seventies: a lesson in both excellence and its oily, cheesy opposite. It taught me that a man can create a masterpiece out of a milk can, and that a boy can become a hero for eating seventeen slices of frozen pizza. Both are true.

Food remains a great memory to all those who attended BCS including more recently.  My son Jacoby was together with Lucas Boyd, Yann Fasso. Jacoby said that the three of them ate the same delicious breakfast every day: English muffin with sunny side up egg, sausage cut down the middle, baked beans and hot sauce. It was delicious. 

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