Thetford
“She’s got a big turkey roaster,” her daughter Jessica Eaton recalled in August. “It’s a stainless steel job. It sets right across two burners. You put about yea much water and wine and seasoning in there and you just lay it down in there. Skin side down. You put it on a piece of heavy-duty tin foil that’s longer than the fish, so it sticks out so you can get a hold of it.”
Eaton now knows the steps by heart. She’s since learned, in a food safety class, that a thermometer should be used to make sure the fish is up to the right temperature, but her mother just eyeballed it, prodding with a fork to see how flaky the salmon was.
“Because you have the foil, you can take it out and put it on a platter,” Eaton said. “Put another platter on top of it. When you take that foil off, it takes the skin right with it. Then you can flip it back over onto the clean platter and refrigerate it.”
Not until the following day, said Eaton, would she decorate the fish with a bit of mayonnaise and thin-cut cucumber slices arranged to look like scales.
“That’s how Mom did it,” said Eaton.
Eaton and Robinson’s three other children respect their mother, who overcame a dirt-poor childhood to raise a family and, with no formal training, cook for some of the Upper Valley’s upper crust.
When cooking for clients, she would take on any recipe, often pulling off what her son Earl Robinson calls “the fancy stuff.” Her own taste buds, however, had been cultivated by a lifetime of subsistence farming in which thrift and hard work ruled the day.
Robinson’s children say their mother didn’t love cooking. She loved feeding people, whether they were Hollywood actors summering on Lake Morey, or the sweaty kids clearing brush up the hill. They were all people in her life.
“She loved them,” said Eaton.
Robinson never attended a culinary arts class, and didn’t learn at the knee of a cooking mother or grandmother. In those early years, Janice taught herself to cook. She had to.
She was born in 1939 in North Berwick, Maine; in the mid-1940s, her stepfather brought the family to Lummoxville Road in Haverhill. According to her sister Brenda Whichter, who is now 73, their stepfather worked on a farm for long hours and low wages, while their mother was largely absent from the home.
The kids — 10 of them, including Janice and her twin brother, Manice — were left largely on their own, and there was rarely enough food. For a while, Whichter said, their stepfather fed them the only way he could — he brought home full milk cans from work every day, instructing the children to stand at the sink and drink until their bellies were full.
Whichter said the state eventually ordered their stepfather to stay away from the family home. When he left, there was no more milk.
“I used to eat green apples in the springtime,” said Whichter. “People would say, ‘You’ll get a bellyache.’ I would say, ‘This is all I have to eat.’ My brother Manice went out in the field and got corn from the cows’ corn that the neighbor put out. He’d eat anything he could get his hands on. And I would, too.”
Janice, the eldest daughter but not yet a teenager, shouldered many of the responsibilities that would have ordinarily fallen to her parents. She did the family’s laundry and cleaning.
“She took care of all nine of us,” Whichter said.
Most importantly, she was often doing the cooking, forced to wring the most value out of the cheapest, most caloric foods possible. They ate hot cereal in the morning before setting out to Haverhill Academy.
“They’d all walk home, and she would make biscuits for lunch. Then they would all walk back to school. Every day,” said Eaton. “Biscuits are cheap, filling. You know.”
Dinner, when they could get it, was some combination of biscuits, potatoes and beans. Meat was extremely infrequent.
At 14 or 15, Janice dropped out of high school and left home to take a waitressing job at what was then the Alpine Inn in Woodstock, N.H.
Food, so scarce at home, was everywhere at the Alpine. The chefs, who were all men, wouldn’t allow her to cook anything, but a sympathetic dining room manager took Janice under her wing and brought her into the kitchen whenever she could, teaching her, not fine cooking skills, but practicalities, such as “how to do mass quantities of sandwiches for bus trips and things like that,” said Eaton.
In the 1950s, Janice moved on to another entry-level job at the Vinoy Hotel in St. Petersburg, Fla. She had just gotten used to the Alpine Inn, but the resort was another quantum leap in luxury, serving luminaries such as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Stewart, Babe Ruth, Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio, according to a history of the Vinoy on its website.
In 1959, Janice, then 20, married Kenneth Robinson, a contractor who did carpentry and cement work, and came home to the Upper Valley. The couple settled on 115 acres on Turnpike North, right off Five Corners Road in Thetford, where they raised four children.
The family didn’t have much cash, but they had enough to get by. And Robinson saw the land as an abundance in a resource that was more vital than money — food.
They kept about 20 cows, four pigs, tapped as many as 800 trees for 100 gallons of maple syrup a year, and had a vegetable garden that stretched from the house all the way up the hill to the hay fields.
For the first time, Robinson was able to oversee a well-stocked kitchen, and dole out food as she saw fit. She sent the kids to school with pan-fried raised donuts in their hands, and always packed her husband a lunch, typically thin-sliced meat with mustard and butter on homemade bread.
She protected her garden fiercely. She kept a twist of wire and a stick up by the stone wall. When the dog found a vegetable-raiding woodchuck hiding in the wall, she would loop the wire around its front teeth and drag it out into the open, so that she and the dog could kill it.
She found few problems that couldn’t be solved with some combination of hard work and food.
Every year, when property taxes came due, they would slaughter two cows to pay the bill. And in the mid-’60s, when Nancy, their oldest daughter, was treated for a bleeding ulcer at Cottage Hospital in Woodsville. they couldn’t afford to pay for the surgery.
“We didn’t have money,” said Eaton, “but we had a half of beef.”
“The surgeon was willing to take that,” said Earl Robinson.
Kenneth Robinson volunteered to help oversee the local cemetery, and sometimes Janice gave a ham to stone engravers to persuade them to do maintenance work.
Earl’s favorite meal came after his father led the family in a cow slaughter.
“They used to have all these little trimmings of meat and everything else. We never threw anything away. It all went in a jar. So it got canned up, put on the shelf downstairs. She’d bring out a can of that cubed up, chunked up meat, finish cubing it up, put it in a dish, mix it with some flour and starch — I think — and whatever. Make a meat gravy out of it and potatoes. Fresh potatoes right out of the garden. … You didn’t need anything, a knife, anything, you just cut through the meat with a fork right with the potatoes and eat it.”
Served with a side of wild-grown fiddleheads, it was perfect, he said.
Eaton’s favorite was chicken.
“You take some marjoram, thyme and rosemary,” she said. “A little flour. Take your frying pan and cut it up into pieces. Shake it in that flour and mixture, and there’s some salt and pepper in there too, and put it in a fry pan and fry it up. Usually that was Sunday dinner. That was a special thing.”
Mike Parks, the son of a neighbor, said he remembers Robinson’s raised donuts (fried in a ring in the pan), her sugar on snow (maple syrup) and even the time when, while using a winch and saw to clear brush on his father’s land, she drove up unexpectedly, unpacked a grill, and made them as many hamburgers as they would eat.
“And performance drink, one beer each,” Parks said. “Then it was, ‘See you later.’ ”
Robinson’s favorite culinary guide was the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, originally published in New England in 1896. It sat in a stack of accumulated recipes in manila folders and cookbooks, marked with scribbles where Robinson had tinkered to suit her own tastes.
The kids began to find their own paths in life. After Earl moved to Seattle, she would mail him homemade jams, jellies and maple cream.
When her other son, Eric Robinson, moved to New Zealand for a while, she visited him once. When he saw her, he grabbed her suitcase, but it wouldn’t budge. It was lined with heavy quarts of maple syrup from home; she gave him the syrup to hand out to friends as gifts.
In the mid-’70s, as soon as the kids got old enough, Robinson took a job at the Log Cabin Restaurant, a building that has since become a Nordic skate shop on Route 5 in Norwich. That’s where she met Helen Gahagan Douglas and her husband, Melvyn Douglas.
The Douglases were from a world that Robinson had only glimpsed during her time at the Vinoy. They were both Hollywood actors, but Gahagan Douglas was also famous for popularizing the term “Tricky Dick” during a 1950 race for the U.S. Senate against then-Congressman Richard Nixon. Nixon responded by portraying Gahagan Douglas, whose primary opponent called her “pink right down to her underwear,” as sympathetic to the communist Soviet Union.
“These people were fairly well-to-do,” said Earl Robinson.
“They lived on Lake Morey,” said Eaton. “They needed someone to help them. They were having people over.”
Robinson and the Douglases soon became fast friends, and she began catering for them and other Lake Morey residents.
“Cooking was what kept the bills paid,” Eaton said. “That was a way she could contribute.”
Her most regular catering income came from twice-monthly meetings of the Orford Boat Club, a social group whose name has persisted even as its members, one by one, have given up their boats.
“It is the Orford Boat Club and it has no boats,” agreed Ann Davis, 84, a member. Davis got to know Robinson because her mother, Julia Fifield, an acquaintance of former President George H.W. Bush and former First Lady Barbara Bush, hired Robinson for her own parties over the course of 30 years. Fifield died in 2012 at the age of 107.
The food Robinson cooked at these events was different from what she served at home. Dessert might be a Harvey Wallbanger cake, which Davis described as a bundt cake with orange juice and Grand Marnier liqueur, often served with “chocolate sauce, and all kinds of puddings and ice cream sauce and brownies, and anything you could want.”
The poached salmon made an appearance every Fourth of July, served with peas and homemade rolls. She did chili and salads for the Superbowl, hors d’ oeuvres for the Kentucky Derby — asparagus rolls with a Roquefort spread, or Davis’ favorite, the cheese puffs, a special cheese mixture spread on bread rounds and baked in the oven.
“She produced these miracles of food,” said Davis. “Out of a modest kitchen.”
Robinson thanked her clients by hosting her own party at the end of sugaring season, when there was plenty of maple syrup to dip her homemade donuts in and pour over little bowls of snow.
“She did her cooking and catering as a job, but it was more than a job,” said Davis. “It was personal caring.”
As a young woman, Robinson cheerfully threw herself into winter activities with the kids. She was always first on the long travis sled, or willing to strap on a pair of ice skates or skis, even though she often wound up wiping out spectacularly.
But as she aged, the rough-and-tumble lifestyle took a toll. At about 65, while carrying a bucket of sap down the hill, she grabbed onto a sapling for support and it came out of the ground, causing her to fall and badly bruise her back. She was laid up for a month, and had the kids raise her favorite chair up on two-by-fours so that she could still get in and out of it.
“She didn’t spill the sap,” Eaton said. “She was very proud of that.”
At parties, Robinson often had to navigate unfamiliar stairs and thresholds while balancing large platters of food that obscured her field of view. She began missing steps more often.
Part of the problem was that Robinson’s instinct seemed to be to place herself between a falling item and the floor.
“It’s like a quarterback trying to catch the ball, catching the ball and then sacrificing himself,” said Eaton. “That’s the way it was.”
At 74, after dropping a tray of glasses, Robinson had to go to the emergency room, where doctors used tweezers to remove all the shards of glass from her skin.
Finally, age began to slow Robinson down. Her knees hurt so much that she had to give up carrying sap, and she allowed most of the vegetable garden to go back to pasture. She still attended the catered parties, but her daughters did most of the heavy lifting.
Her legacy is in her children, for whom every meal was not only food, but a lesson in hard work and caring, economy and thrift.
Earl is a test inspector for Boeing in Seattle; Nancy Byron and Eric Robinson, of Plainfield, both work in computers, and Eaton has stayed in Thetford, driving a school bus.
Reminders of Robinson’s special talents linger. Rhubarb still sprouts in the remnants of her vegetable patch. Her basement pantry and her freezer still hold her syrup and canned foods.
Davis wasn’t entirely comfortable admitting it, but she’s been slow to let go of the leftover cheese puffs from Robinson’s final turn catering her home.
“I still have some in the freezer,” she said.
And Eaton has Robinson’s last batch of beef scraps in her own freezer, which she plans to share with Earl. She’s also taken the worn cookbooks home. She’s going to carry on catering for the Orford Boat Club’s aging members.
Eaton’s not sure whether she wants to take on other clients, though. She says it’s not about the money. And ultimately, she’s learned that it’s not about the food, either.
“It’s about the people,” she said.
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling can be reached at mhonghet@vnews.com or 603-727-3211.