M
“I don’t measure a thing,” Dumont said, a statement of both authority and principle. A foil pan containing diced and picked chicken sat on a stainless steel worktable between a huge stock pot of gravy and a pan of biscuit dough. Dumont cut the dough into circles with deft quarter turns of her biscuit cutter and laid them on top of the pan of chicken and gravy. Mollitor helped by ladling gravy onto the chicken, by refilling the supply of biscuit dough and by putting the finished pans into the oven, all at Dumont’s instruction.
“Everything has to be done like clockwork,” she said.
Before long, the masses would arrive at Randolph’s Our Lady of the Angels Catholic Church, expecting Dumont’s cooking. When the Knights of Columbus advertise their Randolph suppers, they put her name right in the ad.
And chances are, many of the patrons on Saturday night had eaten her cooking before. In over four decades of cooking for large groups, Dumont has presided over the kitchen at countless suppers.
In addition to cooking weekly for the Bethel Rotary for the past 40 years and for the Randolph Rotary “since before 1980,” she cooked for the Randolph Fish and Game Club for 17 years, back when Richard Snelling was governor and would announce upon arrival, “I’ve got to go kiss the cook.”
She has done suppers at Sacred Heart Church in Lebanon, at the Royalton Academy building, at LaSallette Shrine in Enfield (“I almost went to work down there, cooking, but it was too far to go.”) and for the Family Motor Coach Association gatherings at the Tunbridge fairgrounds.
And she has cooked many benefit suppers, fundraisers for people who have fallen ill or suffered a hardship, as many as 25 such meals a year.
A Royalton native who still lives in the home she grew up in, Dumont has built up an understanding of what it takes to set a big meal in motion. For Saturday’s chicken pie supper, the Knights followed her lead.
Her pink blouse soon became dusted with flour. “I forgot my apron,” she said. Jim Kirkpatrick fished her dark green apron out of a plastic bag and held it up. In addition to the K of C seal, it bore the words “Maybelle” and “Chief Cook.”
“She’s an honorary Knight of Columbus,” said Kirkpatrick, the Grand Knight of the Randolph-based Charles H. Phillips Council 14351 of the Knights of Columbus.
Mollitor, a former longtime Randolph police chief and former state director of the Knights of Columbus, whistled softly as he and Dumont worked in the kitchen. Kirkpatrick cut up some of the two dozen pies he’d made, four each of apple, blueberry, cherry, chocolate cream, coconut custard and pumpkin. Without much prompting, Dumont kept up a steady stream of talk about her life in the kitchen.
“I’m not using a cane. Did you notice that?” she asked Mollitor. Dumont had suffered a broken hip and a broken bone in her neck from a skydiving accident last year. She had drawn up a bucket list, but after the experienced skydiver to whom she was tethered landed on her, she’s reconsidering.
“I did it. They can’t take that away from me,” Dumont said. “I did fine until I landed.”
She had a hip replacement in November, then a knee replacement, not related to the skydiving incident, in April. She directed some suppers from her wheelchair, with helpers lifting pots down to her level so she could stir them. She jokes about wanting to ride a zip-line over Niagara Falls.
Saturday afternoon’s labors marked her second day of work on the supper. On Friday afternoon, she had decorated the hall in autumnal colors, including oil lamps in brass and silver with beaded shades.
She and the Knights also boiled 11 chickens and reserved the liquid to make gravy, the essence of chicken pie. In addition to the pot of gravy on the work table, there was a pot just as full on the stove. Dumont’s chicken pie is very simple, just chicken, gravy and biscuits, so the gravy has to be good. She flavors it with onion and crushed celery seed.
Dumont was born Maybelle Gagne, one of five siblings. “Born right where I live,” she said. “I never got weaned.” Her father had grown up speaking French.
She talked and worked comfortably in the church’s warm, companionable kitchen as a steady rain fell outside. She has mastered a form of conversation that leaves the exceptional facts of her life at the end of sentences, after a short pause, like gentle bombshells.
“My parents are both gone. They had a vegetable garden” — pause — “26 acres.”
It was less a garden than a truck farm. After a day of picking — and there was a lot to pick, what with the 2,500 tomato plants they put in — they would drive the produce up to Montpelier. They opened a farmstand at their place on Royalton Hill after the gardens became the frequent haunt of Baron and Baroness de Rothschild, who lived in East Barnard after World War II.
“Every week they came and asked if they could pick their own,” Dumont said while sitting down to take a short break in the kitchen.
Dumont went to work at the Atlantic Diner, on Route 14 in Royalton, now the location of Village Pizza. She worked first as a dishwasher, but then helped with some of the cooking. She went on catering jobs with the owner, Percy Abare, and took over some of that work when he died.
Getting back to her feet, she asked Mollitor to open the oven so she could look at the chicken pies, which were starting to brown up. “Oh, beautiful. They aren’t done yet, but they look beautiful.”
As she finished the last few pans, Dumont leaned on her left elbow as she cut and placed the biscuits with her right hand. After making more than 200 biscuits, directing the assembled pies into the oven and the cooking of the potatoes and the peas and carrots, Dumont shuffled into the parish hall to sit down.
Dumont’s husband, Richard, was a minister at churches in Chelsea, Royalton and Bethel. He passed away in 2012. Their four children are still close by, and one son, Michael, an LNA at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, often helps cook at a supper.
“I tell you, we get better and better at this,” she told Kirkpatrick, a New Jersey native who moved to Vermont full-time 15 years ago and works in the billing office at Gifford Medical Center.
The Knights of Columbus have been putting on the Randolph suppers for the past seven years or so, Kirkpatrick said. “It’s just been a huge lift to the council.”
“We love to put her name when we advertise a supper, because people know exactly what to expect,” he added.
And what’s that? “Comfort food and country food,” Dumont said. The Knights are “partial” to her, she said, an acknowledgement that they advertise her name partly to honor her. She takes no pay for church or benefit suppers.
Mass is underway down the hall. The Knights came to Dumont with questions and she hobbled back to the kitchen. “I’m crippled. I’ve sat too long,” she said.
Kirkpatrick poked a knife into a couple of potatoes and let them slide back into the bubbling pot.
“Another 5 minutes,” Dumont said.
“Thank you, dear.”
Then, crunch time and half a dozen Knights in their dark green aprons were mashing the 60 pounds of potatoes, setting out tubs of Dumont’s homemade cole slaw, putting cranberry sauce in a serving bowl and setting up a station to assemble take-out meals. Dumont got up again to make sure all the trays were aligned the way she wanted them on the buffet table. The supper wasn’t to start until 5, but the first patron walked in before 4:30.
“As soon as they’re done with church they’ll let ’em come through,” Dumont said. “Might just as well.”
Dumont has more suppers lined up for the fall, and the Bethel Rotary still expects her every Monday, though they number only 12 to 15, she said.
A few times while she was cooking and talking, the phrase “a way of life” came up. As in “Rotary is just a way of life for me.” She’s a parishioner at St. Anthony’s Church in Bethel, and has ties to Sacred Heart. Cooking is another form of devotion.
“I’m not a quitter, for sure,” she said, before turning the conversation away from herself. “But I thoroughly enjoy the Randolph Knights. They’re a good bunch. It’s just a lot of fun to work with them.”
She’s already planning a pair of suppers for the Knights in the spring: corned beef and cabbage in March and chicken pie in May. Look for her name.
Alex Hanson can be reached at ahanson@vnews.com or 603-727-3207.
