ECOS LANDING

I always knew that Val’s recipe came from Mr. Riley who owned and cooked at The Town House (the recipe card from 1972 is in his wife’s handwriting and credits his kitchen), but I didn’t realize its popularity until one summer when I was waitressing at a local fish shack after my junior year in college. Eco’s Landing, sat at the base of the hill from Falmouth Hospital on Palmer Avenue where another restaurant now resides. Tourists coming into town stopped in for the fried clams and fish and chips. We also served quite a bit of broiled scrod with rice accompanied by zucchini and summer squash during the early evening hours to some of Falmouth’s older residents. There were only two desserts on the menu: soft serve vanilla or chocolate ice cream and Grape-nut custard. Joan Econimedes wrote the waitress schedule and made the custard. When she wasn’t sitting in the tall, walnut colored booth by the door, cigarette smoke encircling her silver beehive while she scribbled out our shifts on the back of a paper placemat, she was in the kitchen stirring eggs and milk with one hand wearing a yellow Playtex dishwashing glove to protect her manicure. Even though Joan was always dressed to the nines right to her black stilettos, she tied on an apron almost every day and made the custard for her adoring customers. After it was cooked and cooled, she cut it into perfect cubes and called over to the fry station in her gravely voice for her grand-nephew Andy to immediately stop mid- cooking and place it in the walk-in. In the darkness of the chilly cave, my friend Beth (who got me the job) and I would devour a whole cube at once by shoveling it in and trying to swallow it before someone else came to fetch more tartar sauce and busted us. The creamy cold of the custard was perfect on a hot summer night and gave us energy to finish our busy shift. There never seemed to be time to eat. At least this was far tastier and more filling than the usual waitres