Best Food Writing 2014

by Holly Hughes

To me then—and now—Colwin was a kind of Manhattan Jane Austen. Her novels and stories examine ordinary people and ordinary lives, the very kind of writing I wanted to do. Even though she tackles themes like marital love and familial love, themes that might be construed as sentimental, Colwin appreciates and plumbs the ambiguities of relationships with a sharp eye. In Happy All the Time, at a dinner party with her new husband, her character Misty thinks: “How wonderful everything tasted. . . . 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 dead-on observation at us. Misty says to her husband: “‘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 posthumously published 1994 novel, the character Jane Louise observes of 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 they were women in a way that she was not.” She is generous to her characters. And funny. And honest.

  The first time I saw her was in the eighties, long before I baked a tomato pie. I was writing what I thought were interconnected short stories (they later become my first novel). Colwin and Deborah Eisenberg were 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 at the audience. 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 the 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 to sit, which happened to be right at the feet of Laurie Colwin.

  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. There was an aunt dead during a wisdom-teeth 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 falling madly in love,” as Billy does in Another Marvelous Thing, we love fiercely. And those weeks in those rented beach houses in the early nineties could have, in many ways, stepped right out of Happy All the Time: “We’re all together. We’re a family and we’re friends. I think that’s the best thing in the world.”

  We have always been 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 a fan and eating root-beer popsicles. 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 their 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. I studied their children, who 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, a job I held for the next eight years, serving mostly businessmen in first class. I was trained 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 read Little Women in second grade—I became a writer.

  Even after I began publishing, I often thought of that reading at Three Lives. I believe Colwin read 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 mostly remember 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.

  As is often the case, with success came a longing for home. How I longed for the taste of my mother’s meatballs; the casual way I would flop on 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 on Bleecker Street, 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.

  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 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 call 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 returned with me to Rhode Island and the rented beach house every summer, growing more faded and smudged over time. That was okay; I needed only to glance at it to remind myself what temperature to set the oven (400 degrees) and how many lemons I needed 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 t
he naysayers was just More for us, then!

  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. And then I read somewhere that Laurie Colwin had died suddenly at only forty-eight from heart failure—much as Mrs. Parker in Colwin’s 1973 short story “Mr. Parker” dies suddenly, in October, of heart failure. Wrapped up in the heartbreak of a failed 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 over 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, despite knowing better, their leaving is always a surprise.

  One summer day, I line up farm tomatoes 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, still 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 lost, because in this moment I feel that 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 in 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

  Crust

  2 cups all-purpose flour

  4 teaspoons baking powder

  8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter

  Approximately ⅔ cup milk, less if it’s a very humid day)

  Filling

  ⅓ cup Hellmann’s mayonnaise

  2 tablespoons lemon juice

  2 pounds fresh tomatoes

  3–4 tablespoons chopped basil, chives, or scallions or a mixture of all 4

  1½ cups grated sharp Cheddar cheese

  Heat oven to 400 degrees. In a bowl mix flour and baking powder together. Cut butter into flour with a pastry blender until it resembles coarse oatmeal. Stir in milk a little at a time until dough forms a ball. Knead gently only until dough is completely blended. Roll out half the dough on a floured surface and line a 9-inch pie plate with it.

  In a small bowl, mix mayonnaise with lemon juice. Blanch the tomatoes in a large pot of boiling water for 20–30 seconds and transfer immediately to a sink full of cool water. Peel and slice very thin. Cover the bottom of the crust with two layers of tomato slices. Sprinkle ⅓ of the herbs across tomatoes. Add another layer of tomato slices, sprinkle with ⅓ of the herbs and ½ the grated Cheddar. Drizzle with ½ of the mayonnaise mixture. Layer the rest of the tomato slices on top and scatter remaining herbs over the last layer. Top with remaining Cheddar and mayonnaise mixture.

  Roll out the remaining dough, fit it over the filling, pinch the edges of the dough together to seal them. Cut several steam holes in the top crust and bake the pie for about 25 minutes, or until crust is golden and filling is just bubbling.

  Extreme Eating

  THE INVASIVORE’S DILEMMA

  By Rowan Jacobsen

  From Outside Magazine

  In books such as American Terroir, Shadows on the Gulf, and his new Apples of Uncommon Character, journalist Rowan Jacobsen has carved out a very specific beat: scrutinizing the environmental impact of what we eat. Here he proposes what could be an elegant solution—but it’s not as easy as it sounds.

  Bun Lai is rolling rocks in the dark along a craggy coastline, clawing on all fours after the little crabs that burst like roaches from underneath, stuffing them into a bucket.

  With his spotlight and his pail and his perfect snap-on hair, he looks like an action figure. We are on a clandestine mission that began at 10:30 P.M. at Miya’s, Bun’s New Haven, Connecticut, sushi restaurant, where I asked him who did the foraging for the restaurant, which has become famous for serving invasive organisms. “You’re looking at him,” he replied.

  So here we are, at low tide on a steamy summer night, scrabbling around a closed Connecticut beach park. When the crabs bolt, you must quickly slap your hands on top of them, then get your fingers underneath. They scratch unhappily at your skin, but they are only the size of 50-cent pieces. It feels like a prickly manicure. Sometimes you can get them to hang by their claws from the web of your thumb.

  The first time Bun did this was in 2005, with his buddy Yancey Orr, a waiter at Miya’s who went on to get his Ph.D. in anthropology at Yale and now teaches in Australia. They’d gone to the shore because Bun wanted to use more local ingredients. But they had no idea where to start. In Connecticut, Orr mused by e-mail, “no one really interacts with the environment at the level of caloric intake.”

  They tried oysters but worried about toxins in the filter feeders. They chewed seaweeds. Then they noticed the speckled brown crabs scuttling around the rocks. Bun, who grew up playing in Long Island Sound, didn’t remember them from childhood. He discovered that they were Asian shore crabs, an invasive species that arrived in 1988, dumped out with the ballast from some cargo ship, and had already taken over the coastline from New Hampshire to New Jersey, like a marauding army of nanobots. “At that point,” Bun says, “I was already working on evolving sushi into a cuisine centered around more planet-healthy ingredients. The invasive-species thing made perfect sense.”

  Bun and Orr had no idea what to do with the crabs. “We sautéed them, tried them soaked in red wine, boiled, raw, et cetera,” Orr recalled. “Raw was a bit rough, as they crawled around in your mouth and didn’t taste so great.” Fried whole, however, they turned bright orange and ultracrispy, like Doritos with legs. The crabs have been a staple at Miya’s ever since.

  Bun is not your typical sushi chef. This 44-year-old son of New Haven has the smooth, rippled body of a porn star and a voice like Captain America. He grew up near Yale, where his Chinese father worked as a medical researcher. When he was nine, his parents divorced, his father moved away, and his Japanese mother opened Miya’s, which was named for Bun’s sister—though since he took over he has been threatening to change the name to Bun’s After Dark and use the Underalls logo for his sign. He was the captain of his prep-school wrestling team, and he used to fight illegal mixed-martial-arts matches in a Waterbury, Connecticut, warehouse. Now he fights for food justice. On his bookshelves, you can find everything from The Cornel West Reader to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kickboxing. During one of his previous foraging operations, he was arrested for trespassing while taking a leak in the woods.

  A little lower down the dark beach, Joe Roman is pulling periwinkles off the rocks, tossing the little snails into another pail. A bespectacled, late-forties conservation
biologist at the University of Vermont and the creator of a website called Eat the Invaders (“Fighting invasive species, one bite at a time!”), Roman tells us how Littorina littorea, a European native, arrived in the Northeast in the 1860s and began eating salt marshes from Maine to New York. Our coasts are starker and less productive than they used to be, thanks to this file-tongued little mollusk, which has endangered numerous local species. In places you can find 700 periwinkles per square yard.

  The Asian shore crab may wind up being even worse. It eats anything it can fit in its mouth, including native crabs and juvenile lobsters. “This is a totally different system now than just a few decades ago,” Roman says. “Go to a place where the invaders are present and you see a battlefield.” And the crab, which can lay up to 200,000 eggs per year, is expanding its forces in all directions.

  Like their hundreds of fellow invasive species from Miami to Malibu, these two aggressors will continue to engulf the Republic. But not these particular troops. These will be dinner. If all goes according to plan, we will spend the next 24 hours apprehending the alien and the overabundant wherever they lurk. Then we will devour them.

  The America you grew up in is history. It has been clogged by zebra mussels and snuffed by snakeheads. It has been swallowed by Burmese pythons and smothered by kudzu. It has been swarmed by crazy ants.

  Forget the notion of stable ecological communities that have existed in harmony for thousands of years; what we have now is an endless war zone where invasive insurgents go from building to building, routing the locals. Simply strolling down Bun’s driveway in the leafy Connecticut burbs the morning after our late-night crab-athon, Roman could point to all the slow-motion carnage. Dense mats of garlic mustard in the woods that drip chemicals into the soil to keep anything else from growing. “Invasive.” Clots of burdock along the roadside. “Invasive.” Dark ranks of knotweed infiltrating a stream bank. “Invasive.”