Kitchen Yarns

by Ann Hood

  Knitting and this soup or a grilled cheese sandwich will help take the blues away. I promise. If you don’t knit, then read a good crime novel, preferably by Laura Lippman or Denise Mina or Tana French. Stay under a quilt. Mend.

  PERFECT INSTANT RAMEN

  By chef Roy Choi, who shared it with the New York Times in 2014 and said, “It’s our snack, it’s our peanut butter and jelly sandwich, it’s our bowl of cereal. It’s something that’s been part of my life forever.”

  Makes 1 serving

  INGREDIENTS

  1 pack ramen noodles, chicken flavor

  1 large egg

  ½ teaspoon butter

  2 slices American cheese

  NOTE: Roy Choi’s recipe calls for ¼ teaspoon toasted sesame seeds and the green part of half a scallion, thinly sliced. I have made this with sesame seeds and scallions, but mostly I don’t have them on hand when the blues hit, and the soup is delicious without them.

  Bring 2½ cups water to a boil.

  Add the ramen noodles and cook for 2 minutes.

  Stir in the flavor packet.

  Remove the pan from the heat and gently add the egg to it. Do not stir! Just kind of pull the noodles over the egg and let it sit for a minute.

  Carefully pour into a bowl and add the butter and the cheese, torn into pieces, and then the sesame seeds and the scallion, if you’re using them.

  PERFECT GRILLED CHEESE

  I think it’s important to state that I am happy with the most basic grilled cheese sandwich: I butter four slices of white bread, melt a lot of butter in a skillet, put two slices of the bread buttered side down in the pan, top those slices with a couple pieces of American cheese, then top that with the two other slices of bread, buttered side up, flip it, and as soon as it’s browned and the cheese is melted, I have two pretty perfect sandwiches. However, Ruth Reichl takes grilled cheese to another level by using mayo. Yes. Mayo. Apparently chef Gabrielle Hamilton, owner of one of my favorite New York City restaurants, Prune, also uses mayo. These women know what they’re talking about, obviously. The sandwich here is “adapted” from Reichl’s recipe from her must-have cookbook, My Kitchen Year. I say adapted because her recipe calls for garlic and any combination of shallots, leeks, scallions, and onions, and I leave those out. I never have onion on my hamburger, either. I’m not an onion-in-my-sandwich kind of person.

  Makes 1 sandwich

  INGREDIENTS

  A couple big handfuls of shredded cheddar

  Unsalted butter

  2 slices of sturdy white bread

  Mayonnaise

  Butter one side of a slice of bread and heap some shredded cheese on it, buttered side facing in. Top with another slice, also with the buttered side in.

  Spread a thin layer of mayo on the outside of both slices.

  Press more grated cheese into the mayo.

  Fry in melted butter in a skillet until browned and oozy.

  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 when 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 before I was married, 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, 1970s-era Formica–linoleum–avocado green kitchen, I made loads of tomato pies, maybe even dozens. The recipe got splattered with tomato guts and mayonnaise—yes, there’s mayonnaise, too, but only a third of a cup—the words smearing in spots. But it didn’t matter, because by the end of the week I had made so many tomato pies, I knew the recipe by heart. The first layer of biscuit crust is covered with sliced fresh tomatoes, then sprinkled with chopped basil and topped with shredded cheddar cheese. A mixture of mayonnaise and lemon juice is then poured over the filling, which is covered with the second crust and baked 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 made me look incredibly talented. No, this tomato pie was important to me because it wasn’t just anybody’s recipe, it was Laurie Colwin’s recipe.

  Is it possible that there are people out there who do not know Laurie Colwin’s writing? Yes, she of the Gourmet magazine column in the 1990s. But also of eight books of fiction—short stories and novels. When I was working as a TWA flight attendant back in the late 1970s and early ’80s and dreaming of becoming a writer, Laurie Colwin was one of my heroines. This was before the rented beach houses, and before her 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, which was now the color of old leaves.” I would smile at just how perfect 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.

  To me then—and still now—Laurie Colwin was a kind of Manhattan Jane Austen. Her novels and stories examined ordinary people and ordinary lives, the very kind of writing I wanted to do. Even though she tackled themes like marital love and familial love, themes that might be construed as sentimental, Colwin appreciated and plumbed the ambiguities of relationships, always turning a sharp eye on them. In Happy All the Time, her character Misty attends a dinner party with her fiancé: “How wonderful everything tasted, Misty thought. Everything had a sheen on it. Was that what love did, or was it merely the wine? She decided that it was love.” But just when Colwin appears to be veering perhaps too near sentimentality, she throws a sharp observation at us. Misty also says: “You believe in happy endings. I don’t. You think everything is going to work out fine. I don’t. You think everything is ducky. I don’t.” She then goes on to explain: “I come from a family that fled the Czar’s army, got their heads broken on picket lines, and has never slept peacefully anywhere.” Colwin does this again and again in her fiction. In A Big Storm Knocked It Over, her posthumous 1993 novel, Jane Louise considers other women: “Their pinkness, their blondness, their carefully streaked hair, nail polish, eyelash curlers, mascara, the heap of things . . . that Jane Louise never used made her feel that they were women in a way that she was not.” She was generous to her characters. And funny. And honest.

  Although my family did not flee the czar’s army or get our heads broken on picket lines, we were—like many in Colwin’s fiction—a waiting-for-the-other-shoe-to-drop family. An aunt dead during a wisdom tooth extraction. An uncle dead on a dance floor on Valentine’s night. But also like Colwin’s characters, who find “the experience of having a baby exactly like being madly in love,” as Billy does in Another Marvelous Thing, we love fiercely. And those weeks in those rented beach houses in the early 1990s could have, in many ways, stepped right out of Happy All the Time: “We’re all together. We’re family and we’re friends. I think that’s the best thing in the world.”

  I COME FROM a public beach kind of family—no pool clubs or private cabanas for us. Growing up, I spent most of my summers sweating in our backyard or watching game shows on TV, sitting in front of the fan and eating root beer ice pops. My mother worked at a candy factory, stuffing plastic Christmas stockings with cheap toys and candy all summer. But she got Fridays off, and she and my aunt would load us kids into one of t
heir station wagons and drive down to Scarborough Beach, where my cousin Gloria-Jean and I sat on a separate blanket and pretended not to know the rest of the family. We had plans, big plans. To leave Rhode Island and our blue-collar, immigrant-Italian roots behind. Even at the beach, we toted Dickens or Austen, big fat books that helped the hot, humid summer pass.

  I did escape. First to college, where I waitressed every summer at a tony beach club and studied how the women there held their fancy drinks—brandy Alexanders and Lillet with a twist of orange peel. I studied how they held themselves, too, the way they shrugged their sweaters from their shoulders directly into a man’s waiting hands. The way they looked, a combination of boredom and amusement. Outside the club, their children learned how to play tennis and how to dive, how to order lunch from the guy at the grill and sign their parents’ names and membership numbers on the bill.

  In 1978 I became a flight attendant for TWA, a job I held for the next eight years, serving mostly businessmen in first class. In training we learned how to carve chateaubriand, dress lamb chops in foil stockings, mix a perfect martini. I developed a taste for the leftover caviar and the champagne from duty-free shops across Europe. Eventually I settled on Bleecker Street in New York City and fulfilled a dream I’d had since I’d read Little Women in second grade: I became a writer. As is often the case, with success came a longing for home. We yearn so much to leave our small town, our childhood home, the familiar. Yet somehow once we’ve left it all behind, it beckons us back. How I longed for the taste of my mother’s meatballs; the casual way I would flop onto the couch beside my father, dropping my feet into his lap; the noisy nights around the kitchen table with all those loud, Pall Mall–smoking, black coffee–drinking relatives; the long, sandy beaches of Rhode Island with the smell of Coppertone, and clam cakes frying in oil mingling with the salty air. Of course I loved where I had landed, in a small apartment in NoHo, my books on bookstore shelves, my days spent writing, my nights at parties or readings, just as I’d imagined, or maybe hoped, when I’d dreamed of a writer’s life. But I wanted home, too, and when I offered to rent a house at the beach, my parents assumed it would be at Scarborough.

  Rhode Island has beautiful beaches with long stretches of sand and crashing waves. Isolated beaches and remote beaches and beaches that require special passes just to sit on them. Still, my parents wanted the state beach, so Scarborough is where we went. I brought lots of recipes with me that first summer, and for the dozen or so that followed. But it was the tomato pie that became a symbol of those weeks in that split-level ranch house across a busy road from the crowded beach. The more local tomatoes that appeared at the Stop & Shop, the more pies I made.

  We ate the pies on the back deck of those houses—we never rented the same exact one, yet they were all identical, located in a treeless development called Eastward Look. We ate tomato pies with grilled cheeseburgers and hot dogs and Italian sausages, my father manning the grill with a cold beer in his hand. There were often dozens of us at dinner—cousins and aunts and uncles and the women from my mother’s Friday night poker club. At some point, pasta (we called it macaroni) would be served. And meatballs and my Auntie Dora’s Italian meatloaf. The tomato pie appeared at lunch with the cold cuts and sometimes even at breakfast, heated up.

  The soggy recipe page went back to my Greenwich Village apartment with me, but it returned to Rhode Island and that year’s rented beach house every summer, growing more faded and smudged over time. That was okay; I needed only to glance it at to remind myself what temperature to bake it at (400 degrees) and how many lemons I needed for the juice to add to the mayo (just one). My father marveled at that pie. As a midwesterner, he always ate apple pie with cheddar cheese, and he liked that this pie had cheese in it. I admit, some of my relatives didn’t like the tomato pie, or at least remained suspicious of it. But the beach house was so crowded, so full of family, of aunts and uncles and cousins and old friends and new husbands, that the response to the naysayers was just More for us, then!

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Laurie Colwin was back in the 1980s, long before tomato pie, when I was working for TWA and writing what I thought were interconnected short stories (they later become my first novel). Colwin and Deborah Eisenberg were giving a reading at Three Lives bookstore, not far from my Bleecker Street apartment. In those days, The New Yorker ran two short stories a week, and sometimes the writers read together at Three Lives. I remember it as a January or February night, cold with an icy sleet falling as I made my way to the reading. I arrived late, or maybe just on time: they had not yet begun to read but a hush had already fallen over the packed store.

  For a moment, I paused in the doorway and stared at the two women sitting together at the front of the crowd: Eisenberg, skinny and dark-haired, her legs folded up like origami; Colwin, curly-haired and plump and grinning. She looked up and I swear, in that moment, I thought she was grinning at me. I thought—and this sounds crazy, I know—but I thought she was beckoning me in, not just to the little bookstore but into this world of words and writers. A woman, annoyed, in charge, began waving her arms at me to come and sit. And then the irritated woman pointed at the only place left, which happened to be right at the feet of Laurie Colwin.

  I believe that Colwin read something from what would become Goodbye Without Leaving, her novel about the only white backup singer in a touring soul group. But the memory is fuzzy. I really remember only the smells of steam heat and wet wool, the way the audience listened, rapt. I remember wanting to say something to Colwin, something about how her generous heart came through on the page, how happy I felt when I saw a new story by her. But I was too shy. I stood and watched people line up to speak to her, and to Eisenberg, to get books signed and shake hands. And then I left. As I walked back through that cold, icy night, something settled in me: I could do this. I could be a writer. No. I would be a writer. And as corny and impossible as it sounds, Laurie Colwin’s smile, the one she sent to me that night, made it so.

  THIS WAS ALL long before I discovered tomato pie. Before I started publishing stories and novels. Before I brought my family to those rented houses in Eastward Look for a few weeks each summer.

  Over time, we stopped renting those beach houses at Scarborough Beach. My father got lung cancer, got sick, then sicker, then died. My aunts and uncles died, too. And my mother’s Friday night poker club dwindled from twelve to nine to four as the women, too, died. Cousins moved away. New husbands became ex-husbands. And that recipe, the one torn from a long-ago Gourmet, got lost in the move from one apartment to another, or perhaps one city to another. Whenever we learn that someone we admired and loved died, we meet the news with disbelief. But perhaps even more so with Laurie Colwin’s sudden death in October at only forty-eight from heart failure. Although I can’t now recall where I first read about Colwin’s death, her prescience only added to my stunned disbelief, because I did remember clearly how Mrs. Parker, in Colwin’s 1973 short story “Mr. Parker,” died suddenly in October of heart failure. Wrapped up in the heartbreak of a broken romance, I learned about it months later, in winter. Had it been summer, had I still owned that faded recipe, I would have made tomato pie the day I heard.

  In the two decades since then, I have found and lost love and found it again. It has turned me to mush. I’ve published more than a dozen books. I’ve had three children, and lost one suddenly and horribly when she was only five. My heart has broken again and again, and miraculously it has healed. There have been so many things I didn’t take good enough care of, or hold on to tight enough, because we don’t really believe we will lose them, do we? Somehow we are always stunned that things go away, disappear, die. People, too. They leave us, and even though we know better, their leaving is always a surprise.

  Then one summer day a few years ago, I line farm tomatoes up on my windowsill, I glimpse the basil taking over my yard, and I have one thought: tomato pie. Is it too much to hope that the recipe had found its way to the Internet? I type in “Laurie Colwin�
�� and “tomato pie,” and just like that I have it again, my beloved recipe, still the ripe tomatoes, still the basil and double biscuit crust, and, yes, one-third of a cup of mayonnaise.

  I preheat the oven to 400 degrees. I cut into the tomatoes, letting their juice spill everywhere, and I remember that long-ago winter night when I stood in the doorway of Three Lives bookstore and Laurie Colwin smiled at me. I am smiling now, at her wherever she is, at all the people and all the things I’ve lost, because in that moment I feel like maybe we never really lose the things we love. Maybe they are still, somehow, close. I go into the yard and pluck the greenest, most tender leaves of basil and I hold them to my nose and breathe in, deep. In that instant, I am back at Scarborough Beach and the women of my mother’s card club are all there, ready to throw their pennies onto the table, and my aunts are complaining about putting tomatoes in a pie and my father is grinning because there is cheddar cheese in it and the recipe is smeared but still readable and the tomatoes are so fresh and so red that I swear, there has never been anything that red since.

  LAURIE COLWIN’S TOMATO PIE

  I have seen many iterations of this recipe: with corn, with—God help us—goat cheese, without the biscuit crust. Colwin cites a woman named Mary who owned a tea shop in Salisbury, Connecticut, as her recipe’s source, and I have, for the most part, stuck true to her version. Why mess with something perfect? However, a few years ago I was teaching in Chamonix, France, for several weeks and was asked to make tomato pie for a dinner party. The grocery store there had no cheddar cheese, no mayonnaise, and a measurement of baking powder that not even Google could translate. So I substituted: Gruyère for the cheddar and a Dijon mustard–mayo condiment for the straight mayo; I took my chances with the baking powder. The result was delicious. More sophisticated, perhaps, than the rustic original. Tangy and vaguely French, what with the Dijon and Gruyère. Although back home I returned to the original, I concede that other variations can suffice in a pinch. “It is hard to describe how delicious this [tomato pie] is,” Colwin wrote in More Home Cooking, where the recipe appeared, “especially on a hot day with a glass of magnificent iced tea in a beautiful setting, but it would doubtless be just as scrumptious on a cold day in your warm kitchen with a cup of coffee.”