Quaker Creek Store

 

A family charcuterie just north of Pine Island, at the gateway to Black Dirt country, at

767 Pulaski Highway, Goshen, NY 10924

 

At the Quaker Creek Store the grandson of a Polish settler is producing meats so fine that customers come from far and wide.  Robert "Bobby" Mateszeskwi is making sausages and smoked and cured meats the old fashioned way - using the finest ingredients and home-mixed herbs and spices - just as his Polish grandfather did before him.  Through his training at the Culinary Institute of America (C.I.A.), Bobby learned centuries-old methods of charcuterie as well as garde manger.

 

Bobby's inspiration and mentor was his grandfather, Stanley Sobkowiak, a Polish garde manger chef, who first came to the United States in 1939 to cook at the World's Fair.  Stranded here by the outbreak of World War II, he got a job as a chef at a hotel in Atlantic City.  Seven years later he brought over his daughter Barbara (Bobby's mother) and his Polish wife, Irene.  But Irene yearned to be among people of her own heritage.  So they moved to Pine Island, where Stanley bought a grocery business on Pulaski Highway.  When Bobby was 19, his grandfather died and left him the business.

 

Bobby works every day of the week, rarely taking Sunday off.  He is happily married for over 20 years to Diane and has three children.  Apart from all the varieties of food he is curing or smoking at any one time, he makes a wide assortment of sausages.  He started out making Polish sausages, but soon added a range of six Italian sausages.  As requests came in he added to his repertoire many other sausages.  His customers are people of the region who've discovered the extraordinary quality of food available at Quaker Creek, and fine food experts from afar, who've heard about him at dinner parties.  Though he is a modest man, a little embarrassed by the attention he's getting, he is not shy about his standards.  "I use the best quality ingredients, all available in this region.  I get my herbs fresh from a grower right here in Pine Island, and mix all the seasoning myself.  And I apply the very highest standards of hygiene."  "Like my grandfather, " he says, "I am a gourmet."  "It's ironic," he adds, with satisfaction, "but what I am doing is the fulfillment of my grandfather's dream."