Best Food Writing 2014 (47 page)

“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.

D
avid 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.