by Holly Hughes
Clearly, the irony of the question was lost on him.
I looked at him as if he had asked me, “Why do you eat an entire pint of Ben & Jerry’s New York Super Fudge Chunk by yourself?” or “Why do you binge watch TVLand all Saturday?”
“Because . . . I . . . can.” It came out quietly, almost whispered, but carried such weight as to shut down the conversation.
During the past 13 years, I learned how to wriggle out of my friendship with Geoffrey, but not how to make homemade ketchup. It was distaste by association.
Two weeks ago, though, The One and I pulled into the old-fashioned gas station just off the center of town in Roxbury, Connecticut, to buy organic vegetables from our local mechanic, Mark. On the counter were gorgeous globes of love practically rolling off the table and into our basket. But it was the boxes stacked beneath that caught my eye, “Sauce Tomatoes” scrawled across their sides. Always a sucker for the underdog—and alarmingly low on homemade tomato puree—I asked the price.
“A dollar fifty per pound,” said Lucia, the salesperson. A buck fifty? That’s incredible! I thought. I bought 20 pounds, then a few days later I went back for 20 more. And after making and freezing 12 quarts of puree, I still had ten pounds left.
Then I heard it in my head. “I’m making homemade ketchup, too. I think it’ll make nice gifts.” Why on earth did I let his offhanded comment stop me from doing something I’ve wanted to do for more than a decade? I asked myself. And with that, I began slicing into a beefsteak, its juices squirting across the counter, and simmering, and food-milling, all the while holding a raging one-sided conversation with Geoffrey.
You know, Geoffrey, if you got your head out of your sanctimonious ass, you’d see that making things from scratch is one of the best ways to live.
I grabbed a handful of overly soft Romas and squeezed hard, bleeding them into a bowl.
You may be a strict vegetarian, but you’re a food Nazi. Do you hear me? A FOOD NAZI!
I slammed the pot full of chopped tomatoes on the stove and brought the whole thing to a boil.
And ever since you started making millions of dollars, you’ve become a motherf . . .
And there it was. The cancerous root of it all. Standing over a pot of burbling tomatoes, I had a breakthrough that would have cost me $250 had I been sitting in my shrink’s office.
I understood that I have always felt less than Geoffrey. I’ve never dressed as if I was a member of the Connecticut Lockjaw Society. I don’t have famous actors as friends. I don’t throw fundraisers at my home to support state politicians. Instead I dress so messily I startle our UPS driver. I walked away from Meryl Streep just as she was about to talk to me at an event because I was utterly tongue-tied. And I couldn’t name a state politician if Mama Leite’s life depended on it. I had let his elitism—his militant vegetarianism, his social exclusivity, his higher tax bracket—-cow me.
After the homemade ketchup was cooled, bottled, and tucked away, I considered giving Geoffrey a jar. There would be a certain symmetry to that. But I knew that such a simple gesture would cost me a lot. A hell of a lot more than $1.50 a pound.
Homemade Ketchup
Adapted from Jeffrey Steingarten. The Man Who Ate Everything. Vintage, 1998
What I love about this homemade ketchup recipe is that is doesn’t taste too homemade. There’s nothing worse than ketchup that tastes like tarted-up tomato sauce. There’s no unusual ingredients here–no chipotle peppers or paprika made by 17-year-old Hungarian virgins–that now pass for “house-made ketchup” in so many restaurants. You achieve the perfect Heinz or Hunt’s sweet-tart balance by using a common jam-making technique: reducing the tomato liquid to a thick, glossy syrup then swirling it into the tomato pulp. —David Leite
Special Equipment: Food mill or potato ricer
Ingredients
10 pounds very ripe red tomatoes, preferably beefsteak, cored and roughly chopped
4 garlic cloves, chopped
1 large onion, chopped
¾ cup white vinegar (for a mild taste) or cider vinegar (for a fruity tang)
1 tablespoon black peppercorns
1 heaping teaspoon allspice berries
1 cinnamon stick
8 whole cloves
¼ teaspoon cayenne
¼ teaspoon ground ginger
2½ tablespoons salt
6 tablespoons granulated sugar, plus more to taste
Directions
1. Place the tomatoes in a heavy, wide, nonreactive pan of at least an 8-quart capacity. Cover, place the pan over high heat, and cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring every minute or so, until the tomato chunks spill their juice and everything comes to a boil.
2. Working in batches, pour the tomato chunks and juice into a large, medium-fine strainer placed over a 3-or 4-quart saucepan. Gently press and stir the tomatoes with the back of a wooden spoon so that all of the thin liquid but none of the tomato pulp goes into the saucepan. You should have about 2 quarts of liquid. Reserve the tomato pulp.
3. To the tomato liquid in the saucepan add the garlic, onion, vinegar, peppercorns, allspice, cinnamon, cloves, cayenne, ginger, and salt. Cook over moderately high heat until the liquid is thick and syrupy and reduced to about 2 cups. This could take anywhere from half an hour to an hour or even as long as 2 hours or, in the case of 1 tester, up to 4 hours, depending on the type of tomato used. [Editor’s Note: Some tomatoes, such as beefsteaks, are more pulpy and mealy, whereas other tomatoes, like Romas, are more juicy. This will affect the final yield of juice and total simmering time.]
4. Meanwhile, transfer the tomato pulp to a food mill fitted with the finest screen to eliminate the seeds and skin. You should have about 1 quart strained pulp. Transfer the strained pulp back to the first pan and reserve the tomato solids that you strained from the tomato pulp.
5. Strain the thick, syrupy, reduced tomato liquid into the tomato pulp, pressing on the solids to extract all the liquid. Stir in the sugar and gently simmer over medium-low or low heat, stirring frequently, until the ketchup is reduced by ⅓, 15 to 20 minutes. Taste the ketchup occasionally, adding more sugar if desired. You should have about 4 cups tomato goo at the end. If the ketchup still seems a little runny, continue to simmer the mixture over low heat, stirring occasionally, until the desired consistency is attained. If the ketchup isn’t quite the texture of commercial ketchup and some very vocal dissenters in your household prefer that, purée the ketchup in a blender or food processor. Let the ketchup cool to room temperature. Transfer the ketchup to glass jars or other containers with tight-fitting lids and refrigerate for up to several weeks.
SOLITARY MAN
By Josh Ozersky
From Saveur
Founder of the Grub Street food blog, a food columnist for Time and Esquire, and the author of Hamburger: A History, Josh Ozersky is known for his prodigious and enthusiastic appetite. It’s a sort of birthright, he explains here, reflecting wistfully on the consolation his unhappy father sought in food.
David Ozersky, my father, thought about food a lot. He wasn’t frantic and feral about it like I was, but we shared a deep common feeling on the subject, one of our few such bonds. My father, a brilliant but melancholy man, loved to eat, but I believe he took more pleasure in talking about eating. He would talk about his last meal while eating the current one, and soon his talk would turn to the subject of where we ought to eat next.
In Atlantic City, our home during my teenage years, the options were gratifying but few: spareribs from a Chinese joint at the local strip mall, vast flaccid pies from a boardwalk pizzeria, some frozen rabbit meat from the ShopRite that he would roast up in the oven with honey and salt. My father never got tired of weighing each equally banal option, deliberating back and forth while never being completely sold on his decision.
I didn’t register any of this as odd. In fact, the contours of my unformed mind molded to his strange monomania, a shape it has kept to this day. I didn’t realize at the time that my father�
��s preoccupation with food was a form of denial, something he talked about so as to avoid talking about—or thinking about—other things. But even as a child I could tell that he always seemed sad. It made me love him more, and feel guilty, and want to try to make him happy. At times, as I grew older, I was able to do that. Often it involved bringing him little surprises: mail-order Katz’s salami, a half-eaten carton of Cantonese roast duck.
One of the reasons he was sad, I knew, was that he was a hugely talented painter, and nobody cared. My father was a failure; he knew it, and my mother and I knew it. We didn’t blame him; it was understood as the kind of cosmic misfortune that requires stoicism and big sandwiches to bear up to. But it was tragic nonetheless.
My father’s paintings of chefs, one of his favorite subjects, hung in our house when I was growing up. They were much happier than his other paintings, whose themes included dead gangsters, the Holocaust, and junkies.
His paintings are charged with feeling, as per the ideals of abstract expressionism. I think he put so much of himself into them that, beyond their formal qualities, they seem to almost seethe with his thwarted, rueful spirit. He was completely unsparing in his painting, and I feel like it was the only place he ever really opened up. He never said anything to indicate it, because he never talked about himself, but I believe he thought of his whole life as the waste product of his art. Which made it so much worse that nobody cared about it. My father’s active hopes for recognition as an artist died before I was born.
David Ozersky wasn’t a painter as far as anyone was concerned. He was a stagehand at Resorts International Hotel Casino in Atlantic City, a job he held for the last 20 years of his life. He had contempt for the job, which he considered mindless, but it was a cushy one, a union gig that allowed him to work three hours of an eight-hour shift and spend the other five across the street at a lounge inside the Burgundy Motor Inn. He was, I will say, inspired enough by his time at work to create a series of charcoal sketches of showgirls on acid-proof cardboard. “I’m going to go do my Edgar Degas routine,” he would say mordantly, trudging up the stairs to the spare bedroom he used as his studio.
The one subject he kept coming back to in his paintings was food. It was a constant in our pre-Atlantic City days, back in the 1970s, when we lived in the groovy sun-dappled decadence of South Miami. That was before things turned really bad. I was five or six years old, and my father spent much of his time volunteering in the kitchen of a popular Italian restaurant called Raimondo’s. His real job was working in his father’s hardware store, which he hated but was obliged to do, because he was otherwise unemployable, for reasons I never thought to wonder about. During his time with Raimondo, he created elaborate menus and worked the line. That’s when he first started painting chefs.
We went out to many restaurants back then, but my father cooked at home a lot as well. I remember him going through a soufflé phase, when he would make the fluffy desserts every night, beating the eggs with a whisk furiously, and then pulling them at full height from the oven with a triumphant expression my mother and I otherwise almost never got to see.
The chef paintings stopped in 1978 when we moved to New Jersey and he landed the job at Resorts. Those were dismal times, with my mother—isolated, depressed—in even worse shape than my father. His closed-off sadness became even more airtight in 1982, when he came home from work one night to find my mother overdosed on Dilaudid, a potent prescription narcotic. I woke up; he told me to go back to sleep. I did. But when I got up in the morning, she was dead. We didn’t talk about it.
We talked about food. For the next few days we talked animatedly about why some potato skins weren’t crispy enough (they had too much potato still on them) and why Katz’s pastrami was so great (it had to do with hand slicing). We began to eat more too. I remember cooking steaks on our porch, wood-fired New York strips on a little hibachi, served up with buttered onion rolls. Afterward, we sat quietly in that nowhere, and then he said, sheepishly, “Maybe we should get some ribs from the Chinese place.” Why not?
His mood eventually stabilized, but there remained a certain wry, morose quality to his eating. The summer I was 16, I manned the grill at Pizza Haven on the boardwalk. One day my father wandered up after a show at Resorts, dressed in black pants and a black long-sleeved shirt, his stage tech garb, killing time before heading to the Burgundy. I made him a double cheesesteak with pizza mozzarella melted into the vinegar peppers. He ate it absentmindedly, then stood around, trying to figure out what to do next. “Maybe I should have a sausage sandwich,” he said, in a glum, half-questioning way. I wanted to cry, but I did make him a sausage sandwich, and he did like it.
His story isn’t wholly a depressing one. In the early ’90s he quit drinking and took up with someone who truly understood and loved him—someone who had known him most of his life. They began to spend a lot of time in New York. He had discovered Jean-Georges Vongerichten when the French chef was still at the Lafayette Restaurant at the Drake Hotel. And when he opened JoJo on the Upper East Side in 1991, my father became such a loyalist that the chef would try things out on him. One Christmas, Vongerichten even presented him with a foie gras terrine, a mark of special favor. My father was astonished by the chef’s conviction as an artist, and I think it reawakened something in him. (“Who else would have come up with white pepper ice cream?” he’d ask me, rhetorically, over and over again.) He became aware of his torpor; he felt guilty about it, and was moved to start a second series of chefs, many of whom looked suspiciously like Jean-Georges.
When the chef’s big luxe restaurant in the Trump Tower received a four-star review in the New York Times from Ruth Reichl in 1997, my father had it silk-screened onto shower curtains, which he then painted over in a Warholian manner, the only time I ever saw him depart from his figurative, emotional style. I think he was grateful that the chef had made him so happy in the only way he allowed himself to be happy, and helped him, in some small way, to start painting again. Nobody saw or cared about the paintings, then as before; but he opened up a little in middle age and would occasionally say revealing things in his own sardonic way, like “I beat three major addictions in my life, but I can’t stop buying cheap shoes.” He would mock his own dark cast of mind, saying his motto was “Let them get you down.” But when he said it I knew it was no longer completely true, and that made me feel good.
David Ozersky died in 1998 at 58 from a cancer that had been diagnosed four days earlier. He never saw it coming. He thought he had a backache. He was going to chiropractors. When I got back from the hospital—on Father’s Day, no less—there were still some leftover pork chops in the refrigerator from the Malaysian restaurant Penang on the Upper West Side, which, it turned out, had been his last meal. I finished them, of course; there was never any chance I wouldn’t.
TOMATO PIE
By Ann Hood
From Tin House
Novelist Ann Hood (Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine, The Knitting Circle) has always fashioned fiction from strands of her own life; she totally gets how favorite foods become synonymous with the scenes and settings of our lives. Case in point: tomato pie.
It is that time in summer when the basil starts taking over my yard and local tomatoes are finally ripe, red and misshapen and so juicy that after I cut into one I need to wipe down the counter. In other words, it’s the perfect confluence of ingredients for tomato pie. And not just any tomato pie, but Laurie Colwin’s tomato pie, a feast of tomatoes and cheese and basil baked into a double-biscuit crust.
I first discovered this recipe back in the nineties, in a long-ago Gourmet magazine. I ripped it out and took it with me for a week with my parents and assorted relatives in a rented house at Scarborough Beach in Narragansett, Rhode Island. There, in the hot, outdated, Formica-linoleum-avocado-green 1970s kitchen, I made loads of tomato pies, maybe even dozens. The recipe got splattered with tomato guts and mayonnaise—yes, mayonnaise is an ingredient, too, but only one-third of a cup—the words smearing
in spots. But it didn’t matter, because by the end of the week I knew the recipe by heart: You place a layer of biscuit crust in a pie pan, cover it with sliced fresh tomatoes, sprinkle with chopped basil, and top with shredded cheddar cheese. You then pour a mixture of mayonnaise and lemon juice over the filling, cover it all with the second crust, and bake until it’s browned and bubbly. The smells of that pie on a hot summer day make you feel dizzy, so intoxicating are they.
No one in my family knew just how important that tomato pie was to me. Not just because it used the freshest ingredients at their prime deliciousness. Not just because eating tomato pie is something akin to reaching nirvana. Not even because it made me popular and look incredibly talented. No, this tomato pie was important to me because it wasn’t just anybody’s recipe.
Can there be people out there who do not know Laurie Colwin’s writing? Yes, she wrote a Gourmet magazine column in the nineties, but she also wrote eight books of fiction, both short stories and novels. Back in the late seventies and early eighties, when I was working as a TWA flight attendant and dreaming of becoming a writer, Colwin was one of my heroines. This was before she began doing food writing, when her stories would appear like little jewels in the New Yorker. When I would read lines like these from “Mr. Parker”: “He was very thin . . . but he was calm and cheery, in the way you expect plump people to be.” Or: “As a girl she’d had bright red hair that was now the color of old leaves.” I would smile at just how apt her descriptions were, and at how perfectly she captured real people. “‘I don’t work. I’m lazy. I don’t do anything very important . . . I just live day to day enjoying myself,’” a character tells us in Colwin’s 1978 novel, Happy All the Time.