By Ann Hood
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 There, in the hot, outdated, Formica-linoleum-avocado-green 1970s kitchen, I made loads of tomato pies, maybe even dozens.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.
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 the 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.
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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.