Ladles of Love Accompany Steaming Cups of Homemade Goodness
01/06/2015
By David Perry
Cheryl Dion makes soup. It sustains the university’s famished students, faculty and staff. It wins awards.
And it does so much more.
Here, in the Hawk’s Nest in South Campus’s Mill City Restaurant, they call her Auntie Cheryl. Greetings here are dished out in warm hugs.
“Listen,” says Dion, “these kids are away from home, their parents are probably not too close-by. If anything helps, that’s great. At some point, a baker at Fox Hall said, “You make me feel at home. You remind me of my auntie.”
The name stuck.
The walls are plastered with photos of students who have come to be fans of Auntie’s soups. Or of Auntie, a la carte.
The next time someone tells you institutional food is necessarily lackluster or dining hall atmosphere is cold and impersonal, bring them over here. Show them the four awards proudly displayed on the wall behind the wells holding the day’s offerings. On this chilly, rain swept late-morning, the choices are Hearty Beef & Vegetable and Creamy Tomato Basil.
And as with every day, at least once, Alexa Queenan ’13, a graduate student assistant and MA candidate in the Community Social Psychology, is here and happy.
“One day,” says Queenan, 23, “I just came in here and I was hungry and I didn’t like anything I saw. And I got the soup.”
Adopted from a Russian orphanage in 1997, Queenan already had a fondness for soup. “It was the only thing I ate at the orphanage.”
Then she had Auntie’s soup.
“Oh, my goodness. Amazing. It wasn’t canned or generic. There was something about how fresh it was. On Halloween, there was a chicken soup she made ... she also makes jerk chicken soup. I am obsessed with her soup.”
She came back the next day. And kept coming back. Sometimes, twice in a day. The soup is a balm when she feels illness coming on. So is its maker.
“Cheryl always asks how I’m doing. She makes it homey here.”
From a Cooking Legacy
When she begins to make the soup around 7 a.m., Cheryl is already more than an hour into her day. In December, she notes, she makes 10 to 15 gallons of each soup, rather than the five to 10 gallons cooked up during warmer months.
“I take a lot of pride in this,” says Auntie Cheryl, 61. “Four semesters ago, the person who did the soups transferred to another campus. And they asked me, how do you feel about soup? And I told them, I can make a pot, but I’m not sure about mass quantities.”
She comes from avid cooks. Though the family lived in Haverhill, Cheryl’s parents ran The Corner Diner in Amesbury.
“I remember that every weekend, my father would make soup,” she says. “With whatever was leftover in the fridge. There was a lot of love and passion in there, too.”
She says this may explain her shepherd’s pie soup, loaded with mashed potatoes, ground chuck, corn, half and half. There’s a chipotle chicken, too, topped with stringed tortilla strips. Aramark’s executive regional chef approves all of the recipes used in the kitchen, she says.
“I make two soups a day,” she says flatly. I add the things on the recipe and I add a lot of love. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”
“She’s the best,” says Bruce Perry, Resident District Manager of University Dining. “She has such a passion to serve the university and her customers. And it’s infectious. I’d love to have everybody do things the way she does. Every time I go in there I get a hug.”
Award-winning Endeavor
Auntie Cheryl has taken her soup skills off campus, too, landing three second- and third-place people’s choice ribbons at the city’s annual Winterfest. The awards are all on the wall in the Hawk’s Nest. She earned another ribbon at last year’s chili competition.
People call on the phone, asking, “What’s the soup today? Do you have the Swiss crab bisque today?”
Auntie Cheryl earned an associate’s degree in business management from Northeastern in 1972. She worked in the computer industry, designing circuit boards, did “all sorts of different things before moving to Lowell and working at Lowell Provision. When a former co-worker saw her name on an application to University Dining, he hired her.
She has worked at the university since 1995. She started with pizza.
“Didn’t like it,” she sniffs. “Too boring.” She moved to the salad bar, which included breads and soups. Then, soups.
Last semester, she became supervisor of the Hawk’s Nest and also oversees mornings for Mill City restaurant’s residential dining hall. She never had children of her own, though at one point, she calls a trio of student regulars, “three of my little babies.”
A few semesters ago, her student fans approached Auntie with an idea: to sell hoodies with “Soup on South” on the back. They did. Then came a second model, with a Warholish soup can also advertising Auntie’s soup.
Queenan bought one of the $40 sweatshirts and wore it to Pittsburgh, host to the Andy Warhol Museum.
“People asked me if it was a Warhol can on the sweatshirt and I just said, “no, but if I explained, you wouldn’t understand.”