by Ann Hood
We arrived in China with a bag packed with things from a checklist the orphanage had sent out: baby clothes and toys and stuffed animals, antibiotics and scabies medication, and two weeks’ worth of baby bottles and nipples. On the bus less than thirty minutes after we were handed Annabelle, our guide took the microphone to address the ten stunned families with new daughters on their laps. She held up a baby bottle and said, “First thing, snip off tip of nipple. This formula very, very thick.” Cans of thick, sandlike formula were distributed; nipples were snipped; the ratio of formula to water was given. The result was a swampy mortar that required hard sucking, even with that wider opening in the nipple. “Don’t change the formula until you get home,” the doctor traveling with us warned. “But by all means, feed these babies. They’re hungry.”
Feed we did.
Annabelle ate wok-fried shrimp, soup dumplings, cold noodles; eggs, pancakes, waffles, omelets; lychees, pineapple, pears, watermelon, cantaloupe, strawberries; octopus, congee, fried rice. In other words, she ate everything we gave her, happily slurping and chewing and sucking. Until we got home and suddenly almost everything was sniffed, touched, and rejected. A little avocado, a dollop of hummus, an egg if the yolk wasn’t runny, plain pasta with butter, fruit and sometimes carrots or mashed potatoes. “Can a kid live on this diet?” I asked our pediatrician. My other kids had eaten anything and everything. “It all evens out,” he said. “One day all watermelon, the next all pasta.”
Eventually her refrain at dinner became “No sauce!” “Too crunchy!” “There’s pepper on this! I see black dots!” “Too spicy!” “Too mushy!” “Too gross!”
Slowly I learned what she liked, and tried to rotate her four favorite (by this I mean only) meals. Other mothers looked at me with pity as I ordered Annabelle plain pasta with just butter, and cheese on the side. They bragged about how their kids loved duck confit, capers, caviar. Internally I screamed, I had kids like that once too! Instead, I cut off the crusts on her grilled cheese sandwiches, removed the fries that were too crispy, made sure the eggs didn’t touch the bacon.
Then one night, I came home from a long, long day; I had taught in New York City the night before, held office hours for students in the morning, met an editor for lunch, then raced for a train back home in time to make dinner for Annabelle and me. When I opened the pantry door, I saw that its shelves were woefully bare. Too rushed to go grocery shopping, I’d banked on our usual supply of boxes of pasta and a can or two of Campbell’s chicken and stars soup. The freezer held only ice cream, jars of pesto and vodka sauce—useless without pasta—and . . . well . . . ice. No, wait. Behind the ice cream sat a bag of frozen peas.
Even Annabelle liked peas, usually with chicken or pork chops, both of which we did not have. But back in the pantry I’d seen a bag of arborio rice and neat boxes of chicken broth. Rice. Chicken broth. Peas. That combination meant one thing to me: Risi e Bisi, or rice and peas Italian-style.
I did not grow up eating risotto. That is a northern Italian dish, cooked in a broth to a creamy consistency, made with a short-grained rice like arborio. But over my years of teaching myself to cook, it had become one of the dishes I’d grown to love to make and to eat. I made mushroom risotto, soaking dried porcinis and adding them to a mix of other mushrooms, with the soaking liquid added to the broth. I made tomato risotto and sausage and rapini risotto and even bacon risotto. People are afraid to try making risotto because it takes time and care—the very reasons I love to cook it.
I had shallots that night, though onion would do, too. I had Parmesan cheese—essential to a good risotto—and butter, also essential. Like knitting or reading, slowly adding simmering broth, a third cup at a time, to the rice and stirring is calming, even meditative. The heat must not be too high, the broth must not be added too quickly, the cook must be patient. Stirring risotto is highly recommended when you’ve just gotten off Amtrak after less than twenty-four hours in Manhattan. It’s highly recommended when you are so tired you can’t even dial for pizza delivery. It’s highly recommended when you have a daughter who does not want food that is too spicy, too crispy, too mushy, too peppery, too saucy. The rice is firm to the tooth. The broth is creamy. The flavorings are subtle.
When the rice was perfect, I added the Parmesan and a tablespoon of butter, stirred, and put some in my favorite bright blue bowl. Annabelle eyed it suspiciously. But by now I was calm and hungry, having found the Zen of making risotto.
“You’re going to like it,” I told her.
“What are the green things?”
“Peas.”
She sniffed. She poked. She tasted.
“Hmmm,” she said.
I waited.
“More,” my picky eater said.
Annabelle’s Risi e Bisi
Italian Rice and Peas
This is actually a recipe for risotto, and once you learn the basic steps of making a good risotto, you can go crazy with it: Soak dried porcini for 15 minutes, chop them up along with other assorted mushrooms, and then do everything as listed here, except instead of adding peas, add the mushrooms. Or cook Italian sausage and add it, with some cremini mushrooms, instead of the peas. Or make this recipe but also add cooked chopped bacon along with the peas. The secret is to not rush the cooking. Just keep ladling ⅓ cup of warm chicken broth to the rice, each time stirring until it’s all absorbed before you add more. I think the final tablespoon of butter at the very end does something magical to the risotto, but sometimes so eager have I been to eat my Risi e Bisi that I’ve forgotten it, and no one has even noticed.
Serves 3 or 4
INGREDIENTS
1 quart chicken broth
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 shallot, chopped
1 cup arborio rice
1 cup frozen peas
Salt and pepper
½ cup grated Parmesan, plus more for serving
1 tablespoon unsalted butter
Warm the chicken broth in a saucepan, keeping it just below a simmer.
Heat the olive oil in a deep skillet. (I like to make risotto in my orange Le Creuset Dutch oven.)
Sauté the chopped shallot for about a minute.
Add the arborio rice and stir it around, toasting it, for a minute or two.
Begin to ladle the chicken broth, ⅓ cup at a time, into the rice, stirring with each addition until the broth is absorbed.
Keep adding and stirring until the rice is al dente and creamy, about 20 to 25 minutes.
Stir in the peas.
Take the pan off the heat and add the salt, pepper, and Parmesan cheese.
Add the butter and give the rice a good stir.
Serve with more grated cheese on the side.
Five Ways of Looking at the Tomato
I
“The nation is in chaos. Can nothing stop this tomato onslaught?” asks a character in the 1978 movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. In the movie, mutant tomatoes are killing people and pets, and several scientists band together to stop them. A silly idea, and a bad movie (“Not even worthy of sarcasm,” one reviewer wrote), but the tomato has suffered from a bad reputation throughout history. In fact, in the 1700s, the tomato was called the “poison apple,” and Europeans actually feared it because aristocrats got sick and died after eating tomatoes. Or so people thought. Actually, the aristocrats ate off pewter plates, and the high acidity of the tomato leached lead from the plates; the rich were dying not from the tomato but from lead poisoning.
The tomato’s origins go back to the Aztecs, who ate them way back in A.D. 700. We have the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés to thank for bringing tomato seeds to Europe in the early 1500s, not to eat but for decorative purposes. Perhaps because my grandparents’ home city of Naples, Italy, changed the tomato’s reputation in 1880 by inventing pizza and, therefore, popularizing the dreaded deadly nightshade, I have always had a love affair with the tomato. “Star of earth,” Pablo Neruda calls it in “Ode to Tomatoes,” and, indeed, when I remember t
he tomatoes of my youth, warm from the sun in my grandmother’s yard, that description is apt. Nonna, my great-grandmother, would pick one, wipe the dirt off on her faded apron, and give it to me to eat just like that, the pulp and juice dribbling down my chin when I bit into it.
The tomato takes front and center in southern Italian households like mine because our elixir is tomato sauce. That was my after-school snack on the days Mama Rose made her huge pot of gravy (as we referred to spaghetti sauce), poured onto crusty bread and slurped down. And it appeared not just on bread or spaghetti but in parmigianas—eggplant, chicken, veal—lasagna, gnocchi, polenta, cacciatore, pizzaiola, and even on fried eggs. Jars of gravy lined the freezer shelves, and when I grew up and moved away, emergency supplies of it were brought to Boston and New York and even packed into my luggage and checked through to St. Louis.
II
Of course tomatoes appeared in the BLTs of my youth, and on the sandwiches we ate for Saturday lunch, when Mama Rose would spread a cornucopia of salumi across the kitchen table, accompanied by cheeses—two kinds of provolone and, oddly, American—and hard rolls and lettuce and sliced tomatoes. They appeared in the salads that accompanied dinner, always iceberg lettuce with sliced cucumbers and wedges of tomatoes (pale and mushy in winter, sold in a three-pack wrapped in cellophane) drenched with oil and red wine vinegar.
But it was when I was an adult that my relationship with the tomato really took off. And that began with my friend Matt. Matt lives in Los Angeles, and when I visited there he made me the most simple dinner, one that I have copied and tweaked ever since. He diced ripe tomatoes and riper Brie, tossed them with hot pasta, and topped it all with sliced fresh basil. When it is hot and humid here on the East Coast, I often make some version of Matt’s dish. Only the pasta needs to be cooked—no oven or standing over a hot stove—and it can feed a crowd easily. Now that the Brie craze of the 1980s has passed, I usually substitute fresh mozzarella. But the result is the same gooey, cheesy, tomatoey deliciousness.
III
Around the same time—the 1980s—I had my first caprese salad, that simple combination of fresh tomatoes and sliced mozzarella drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with basil. Yes, I know that this salad is ubiquitous now, on every menu at every restaurant everywhere. But the first time I tasted one, I swooned at its astounding simplicity. Looking back, I think that this is the moment when I understood that using the simplest, best ingredients produces the best food—better than the overcomplicated dishes I labored over in my early cooking days: a heavily breaded chicken Kiev, stuffed with butter and rolled in a mixture of dry herbs, or chicken-fried steak with white gravy. Here were basically two ingredients—tomato and mozzarella—changing the way I thought.
Apparently, when my maternal grandfather sat down to supper, he would look at the food spread before him and ask rhetorically, “Do you know how much this would cost in a restaurant?” The point being that eating at home cost far less than eating out—and the food was better. That caprese salad in that Manhattan restaurant brought my grandfather’s question to mind. When I read the description on the menu and saw the price, I knew I would never order such a thing. A few tomatoes and a ball of mozzarella from the grocery store cost far less. Lucky for me, someone else at the table did order it, and I realized that, in fact, sometimes even though a meal costs more at a restaurant, that perfect olive oil, that perfect mozzarella, those ripe tomatoes are worth every penny. Of course, now I splurge on the best ingredients, and I make caprese salads whenever I can get tomatoes that don’t look like the ones from Mama Rose’s winter dinner salads.
IV
One of the twists I make on a caprese salad is to use sliced cherry tomatoes and serve them with mozzarella on a bed of arugula. As much as I love the tomato, I also love the cherry tomato. “Handful of skinned sunsets,” Sandra Beasley calls them in her poem “Cherry Tomatoes.” As with all first loves, I remember the precise moment I fell for these. I was at the Virginia Festival of the Book, in Charlottesville, and my friend Jill threw a party for some of us writers. There was lots of wine and lots of friends and such good cheer in that room that I suppose the party would have been a success even if Jill hadn’t served cold sliced tenderloin with roasted cherry tomatoes topped with feta, all of it ready to be piled onto toasted sourdough or scooped up with our greedy fingers. But to me, that evening was made even more memorable because of that food Jill made, and I have roasted cherry tomatoes ever since for parties. Okay, not just for parties. Right now, as I am writing this, I have a half sheet pan of cherry tomatoes roasting in a 180 degree oven for my own lunch. I will let them cool and toss them with arugula and leftover sweet corn scraped from the cob. “Blood of a perfect household,” Beasley writes.
V
My final word on tomatoes, at least for now, is that just last summer my son, Sam, was in a play at the Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland, and his friend James, who wrote and also acted in that play (shameless plug: you can follow their theater company, What Will the Neighbors Say?, on Facebook), is from Glasgow, and James’s parents threw a closing party for them. Annabelle and my cousin and I took the lovely train from Edinburgh to Glasgow, and made our way to the Clementses’ house, where wine was being poured and food was laid out gloriously on a table on a sunlit patio.
It should come as no surprise that I made a beeline for a platter of cherry tomatoes, arranged beside a small bowl of sea salt. I assumed, correctly, that the idea was to roll the tomato in the salt and pop it into my mouth. Which I did, expecting that eruption Beasley describes so perfectly in her poem. But the eruption I got was even more delicious, not just because of the salt. “What is in this tomato?” I asked James’s mother, Kirsty. “Vodka!” she said. Yes! That was what made this eruption so spectacular: the tomatoes were like miniature, chewable Bloody Marys! Kirsty explained the process, which was simply pouring a bottle of vodka over cherry tomatoes and letting them sit overnight. The vodka, she told me, infused with tomato, made a spectacular Bloody Mary.
The tomato has come a long way from its bad reputation as a poison apple. The USDA tells us that over fifteen million tons of tomatoes are produced here every year, 94 percent of them in California. Mostly we consume tomatoes in sauce, like I did growing up and still do when I go to my mother’s for dinner. It’s the fourth most popular vegetable, after the potato, the onion, and lettuce.
They are waiting for me now, roasted, plump, juicy. Lunch.
GOGO’S SAUCE
It is perfectly acceptable, if not preferable, to call this gravy instead of sauce. Make it by the gallon and freeze it so you always have some on hand. This recipe will make enough gravy for 3 or 4 pasta dinners, or a combination of pasta and Parmesans.
INGREDIENTS
The oil you saved from making “Gogo’s Meatballs” (page 30) and “Gloria and Hood’s Sausage and Peppers” (page 82)
1 small onion, sliced thin
3 to 4 cloves garlic, peeled and diced
Salt and pepper
Crushed red pepper flakes
¼ cup Italian parsley, chopped
2 cups red wine
4 cans of tomato paste (Gogo uses only Hunt’s)
One 28-ounce can chopped tomatoes (again, she uses Hunt’s, but substituting San Marzano tomatoes wouldn’t hurt)
One 28-ounce can tomato puree (ditto)
1 tablespoon sugar
Heat the oil and sauté the onion until soft and translucent.
Sauté the garlic.
Add salt, pepper, red pepper flakes, and parsley.
Add the wine and be sure to deglaze the pan.
Add the tomato paste, stirring as you do so.
Add the chopped tomatoes and the puree.
Add the sugar.
Fill the empty 28-ounce cans with water, and add some to the sauce if it’s too thick.
Simmer for 3½ to 4 hours.
As the sauce simmers, turn it from time to time!
MATT’S PASTA WITH TOMATOES AND BRIE
/> I make this only in summer when tomatoes are fresh and ripe, though if you are not as particular a tomato person as I am, it’s delicious year-round. Below is a tweaked version of Matt’s recipe, but I often substitute mozzarella for the Brie. Any melty cheese should work.
Serves 4
INGREDIENTS
A couple pints of cherry tomatoes or 4 or 5 plum tomatoes, halved
Olive oil
Salt and pepper
1 pound short pasta such as rigatoni
A small wedge of Brie, the size it comes in at your grocery store in that little round box
A handful of fresh basil, chopped
Halve the tomatoes and place in a pretty pasta bowl with a good drizzle of olive oil; season with salt and pepper. Let them sit at room temperature.
Boil salted water and cook the pasta until it’s al dente. Be sure to reserve about ¼ cup of the cooking liquid.
While the pasta is cooking, dice the cheese and distribute it on top of the tomatoes.
Pour the hot drained pasta into the bowl with the tomatoes and cheese and toss, being sure to get that cheese melty. Add the reserved cooking water to help with this if necessary.
Top with the basil and again season with salt and pepper.
