by David M. de Caussin
Monday- Beef and Barely
Tuesday - Chicken and Rice
Wednesday - Navy Bean
Thursday - Vegetable Beef
Friday - Chicken Noodle
In the old days, if you happened to stop by Fadal at 9:30 am, you'd see a long line of people standing, waiting for their turn at a large pot of soup. In their hands would be a small single handed sauce pan and in the other would be a fist full of crackers, some fists were a bit bigger than others but that was ok because we had a never ending supply of crackers to go with the soup.
This was the first shift, morning break, that usually included every type of employee; from the janitor to the owners. After getting the soup, some might go back to their desk or machine, but usually the majority congregated around the soup pot, dipping the ladle for more soup and talking about everything under the sun.
There could easily be 100 people getting soup in the morning and eventually we had to expand to two soup pots. Interestingly, is that every one of our suppliers and salesmen knew about 9:30 soup and seemed to schedule their visits accordingly. It was also a great time to stop and "take a break" with many of the visiting engineers and take some time to actually get to know them.
The type of soup was determine by the day of the week.
We had this schedule for years and it wasn't until the late 90's did the "chef" start experimenting with different soups; surprisingly one of the most popular was Menudo.
Cary, our soup chef at the time said "When we were super busy, I tried a Menudo dish with all of the trimmings, lettuce, onions and when the crew got wind (or smell) of the soup cooking, I can remember that all of the crew were poised for the buzzer to ring and it was a stampede to the kitchen. What a hit that was!"
At one time, people started bringing in home made Hot Sauce to spice up their soup, it caught on a bit with some and they started seeing who could make the hottest sauce. I remember standing around watching some really sweat because it was so hot!
Eventually we did add gourmet soups to the mix such as Lobster Bis, Chicken and Dumplings, French onion, Mexican Tortilla. Sadly the soup was stopped being served around 2005; so ended a great tradition.
We served soup for almost 40 years. To think it all started with Larry de Caussin (one of the owners and the "L" in Fadal) back in the late 60's. Larry was bringing soup from home in a thermos and during the 9:30 break, he'd sit there eating his daily soup. It looked so good they decided to start making it for everyone. Little did any know we'd be making some 50,000 gallons of soup in the course of time...