Best Food Writing 2014 (49 page)

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.

•

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

B
un 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.”

Not all introduced species become invasive. Most newcomers move into town, settle down, and become part of the fabric of the place. Apple trees, for example, originally from Kazakhstan, have been model citizens since they arrived with colonists four centuries ago. But of the 7,000 or so introduced species that have made a new life in the United States, about 1,000 are trashing the place at a rate that puts most of our other concerns to shame. Worrying about the
impact that climate change may have on a region's ecology while ignoring the work of invasive species is kind of like fretting over next year's crops while Vikings torch the harbor.

That's because, with little if any natural predators or diseases, an invasive species has few checks on its reproductive rates, and it quickly goes about outcompeting the locals, if not directly consuming them. The result: the collapse of a local species, followed by the collapse of the natives that depended on that species, followed by ecological death spiral.

Exhibit A: Asian carp, imported from China in the 1970s by fish farmers in the South who hoped that the carp, which feed on algae, would help keep their ponds clean. The carp soon escaped into the Mississippi River Basin and now fill the Midwest's rivers, where they sometimes comprise 90 percent of the biomass. These are the carp that weigh in at 50 pounds and jump ten feet out of the water when startled, whacking passing boaters upside the head like piscine two-by-fours. In 2014, the Army Corps of Engineers released its long-awaited master plan for keeping Asian carp out of the Great Lakes by severing all the arteries that connect the Mississippi River watershed to Lake Michigan. The price tag? Some $18.4 billion.