RATTLE THOSE POTS AND PANS
By RAFAEL ALVAREZ, photos by ANNA SANTANA

Some might be insulted. Others would pin the comment to their lapel like a Black-eyed Susan on Preakness Day.

So genuine is Cathy Ruiz, instinctively without airs or self-consciousness, that a local would claim her for a Crabtown native.

“I’ll take that,” said Ruiz, 63, the catering manager at Au Bon Pain downtown with roots in Northern Michigan and Southern California.

Honorary citizenship was conferred by no less a Patapsco River partisan than Anna Santana, photographer of all things east of President Street, south of Patterson Park and west of Dundalk.

“Cathy’s been all around the United States,” said Santana, who spent a day taking pictures in Ruiz’s kitchen in Canton. “But as soon as I met her, I knew she had a Baltimore soul.”

The evidence of things unseen?

A large knick-knack collection of ceramic horses; a backyard tomato patch every summer; regular trips to the Broadway Market for seafood and a friendship with Jake Poodles, son of the fabled Joe Poodles, the former light heavyweight boxer known for the East Baltimore pool hall that bore his name.

“I’ve been in Baltimore 26 years now,” said Ruiz, who first lived at Regester and Pratt streets in Fells Point. “I’d be lost living anywhere else.”

If you get lost on the way to her house in the 800 block of South Streeper Street, just follow the scent of a good meal simmering on top of the stove.

“When I roast chili peppers in my cast iron skillet,” she says, “it makes the house smell so good.”

Her repertoire includes burritos to please her husband Eddie, 55, born to Mexican parents in East Los Angeles; a chicken noodle soup with a tomato broth; homemade chili; and a Spanish rice dish called sopa, even though Eddie prefers white rice.

“Some days it’s low-fat Moroccan chicken and potato stew made with baby carrots, figs and stewed tomatoes,” she said. “Other nights it’s a plate of carnitas.”

But the dish Cathy’s family clamors for, the one her father grew up with and still conjures his spirit, is beef and noodles.

“Everybody looks forward to it,” she said.

A country mile to school

French-Canadian and Scotch-Irish, bloodlines that only trickle along the Chesapeake, Cathy Hebert Ruiz was born in Ysplanti, Michigan.

Her truck-driving father owned a Christmas tree farm not far away in Kalkaska and she and her siblings walked a mile to a country schoolhouse “like Little House on the Prairie,” she said.

Cathy’s mother – Mary Monica Savage, born in Scotland – died when she was not quite three years old. She spent the next year in a Catholic orphanage known as the Sarah Fisher Home for Children.

[Now known as the St. Vincent and Sarah Fisher Center, the orphanage was rebuilt after a 1928 fire by the Fisher Body automobile family. Operated since 1844 by the Sisters of Charity, its work continues in the Brightmoor section of Detroit.]

When Cathy’s father married a woman named Helene Bocock, the family was reunited.

“When I was around 12 years of age my Dad sold the farm and we moved to California,” she said. “My grandmother was already there and told my father to come on out and get away from the cold.”

Nana’s skillet dish: boeuf et nouilles

It was then – in the early years of Disneyland in Anaheim, California – that Cathy first learned the beef and egg noodles made from scratch, a skillet dish passed down from her father’s mother, Marie Whalen Hebert – “Nana.”

Thus began a life of making others happy with food.

“Nana spoke a little French,” said Cathy, perhaps enough to say boeuf et nouilles. “She taught me the beef and noodles because it was one of my father’s favorites. She would make it on Sundays.”

After high school, Cathy married and had four children, living for a time up the coast from Orange County in Long Beach. That marriage ended and she started a new life with Eddie, also divorced.

They were wed 27 years ago in a California courthouse but were drawn back to the Catholic church while living in Canton.

Two years ago, after tracking down Baptismal records and other documents to have their first unions annulled, Eddie and Cathy entered into the Sacrament of Marriage at St. Casimir church.

The ceremony was performed by the Rev. Ross Syracuse, a Franciscan friar and pastor of the 107-year-old sanctuary with the twin-gold cupolas on O’Donnell Street.

Food and a faith rich with memories of Dad

Why, after being married for a quarter-of-a-century, was Cathy compelled to renew her vows upon the altar of the self-proclaimed One True Faith?

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “But it was something my father had been hoping we would do.”

A ritual – not unlike a pan of beef simmering with homemade egg noodles – to please the ghost of her father, Francis Edward Hebert, the steel hauling trucker born in 1918 who taught her to spend all day making spaghetti sauce.

Hebert died last year. When Cathy makes beef and noodles – “Daddy loved it,” she says – her “mind wanders back to when I was young.”

“I taught my daughters and granddaughters how to make it . . .”

And now she’s telling you.

SOUTH STREEPER STREET BEEF & NOODLES

Ingredients

* One, five pound rump roast

* Three large eggs

* One-half cup of whole milk.

* One teaspoon salt.

* Three cups flour.

* Two bay leaves.

* One tablespoon vegetable oil.

DIRECTIONS

BEEF

Season roast with salt & pepper.

Brown roast with one tablespoon of vegetable oil.

Add enough water to cover the roast and bring to boil.

Turn heat to low and simmer for two and a half hours.

Remove roast from broth. Set both aside. Discard bay leaves.

NOODLES

Whip up eggs, milk and salt together. Begin adding flour and mix well, making dough into a soft ball.

Roll dough into a 12-inch circle and flour lightly.

Let circle of flattened dough dry for about three hours.

Roll circle “like a jelly roll,” says Cathy and slice into strips.

COMBINE

Bring broth to full boil before adding noodles one handful at a time. After adding all noodles, turn heat to low and simmer for about 20 minutes.

Slice roast and place in skillet with noodles. Warm on stovetop and serve with vegetable of choice.

TODAY’S VEGETABLE OF CHOICE

Knust Stewed Tomatoes

This simple side dish was taken from “The Flea Market Cook Book of Oxford, Maryland,” published in 1971 by Doris Fortenbaugh and Louise Hazelhurst Knust.

INGREDIENTS

One large can of whole tomatoes.

One medium-sized onion, chopped fine.

Two slices rye or whole wheat bread, crumbled.

Two-thirds cup sugar.

Salt and pepper to taste.
DIRECTIONS

1. Combine all ingredients and simmer uncovered in saucepan for one hour, stirring often to prevent sticking. Like many foods, tastes better reheated the next day.