| Food
& Other Important Things
About
time, tomatoes and watermelon
by Don Curto
Life and time are not all about me, of course, but I will use
my birth date of August 16, 1923 as a starting point for this
column. Birthdays bring on reflections. In my experience and judgment,
very little of the “old days” were times as good as
today. About the only thing I can certify was better in those
old days was my age.
Younger is not always better, but in most instances (despite our
purported wisdom), it beats age. In my early Marine Corps days,
I could do a hundred pushups before breakfast. And I sometimes
did them with a hangover.
There have been no hangovers for many years, but there are times
when my still quite young-thinking brain tells my body to do something
and the request is rejected immediately.
Time did move more slowly then. An hour was really sixty minutes,
and a minute, sixty seconds. It is rare today, even searching
in old closets or in the stacks of the U of M library, where there
once rested a favorite Shakespeare Folio, to locate an hour of
such length.
As time passes, we get cheated by bogus hours. You may think I
imagine this, but just you wait—if you are lucky enough,
you will see that I tell only the truth. Fifty years from now,
if the world still supports humans, you will find that the hour
of that time will have shrunk greatly from today’s.
As you know by now, I am not a believer in calling up the past
as a better time with better foods. However, there are some things
today that truly are such junk compared to the “olden days”
they are worth noting. The first is the modern tomato, which really
should be written with quotation marks setting it off, as in “tomato.”
(I suppose one could say a “tomato by any other name is still
a rose.” This could bring denunciation upon my writings.)
Let’s dispense with the “heirloom” tomato first.
It has mostly snob appeal. I have not yet tasted one that tastes
like a tomato. I have seen some ugly ones, however.
In past years, including 2008, I was able to find tomatoes which
were real…real in appearance, real in taste. Increasingly,
however, tomatoes are being grown successfully with travel properties
as their main characteristic.
We, the consumers, are the ones at fault because many of us demand
salads with edible tomatoes in the winter. Even in January, some
of the tomatoes on the market look very good, feel very good,
but are terrible.
Combine this drive for appearance and constant availability with
the increasing lack of discernment on the part of the customer,
and what do you get? Today’s tomato is what you get: part
crushed drywall, part red dye and a weight that runs the price
up. Increasingly, the tomato on the market especially in the winter
season is on the way to becoming an inedible product. Most of
those tomatoes that were real in the summer were local. But this
year has not been a good tomato year, anywhere.
I have developed a recipe for a tomato pasta sauce that makes
the use of the tomato feasible. This is for one person, but easily
expanded. I sometimes use it for breakfast, to try to begin my
day with flavor. The original base for this sauce was a French
recipe I reported in a recent column.
Take an eight-inch sauté pan and put about two tablespoons
of butter in the pan. Melt over medium heat and add two thick
slices of tomato, three if the tomato is small. Salt well, pepper
heavily with coarse black pepper. Cook slowly without letting
the tomato slices get either brown or black. After a few minutes,
turn the slices over, salt and pepper again.
Cook until tomatoes are soft. Add some hot pepper flakes; go easy
until you find out just how hot you want this dish to be. Now,
pour in about two ounces of whipping cream. Bring to boil, reduce
slightly. Using a table knife, cut the tomato slices into small
pieces. They will tend to disperse into the cream. You will have
cooked some pasta already and have drained it. Put what you want
to eat into the pan, mix with sauce, put on plate. Enjoy.
A note on whipping cream. I think Jilbert’s is the only locally
available cream that has no additives. Read the ingredient list.
Read the ingredient list on all the foods you purchase.
Stay away from Morning Glory brand. Here is the ingredient list
for that product, which should not be called whipping cream, but
is a substance that can be whipped, if you should wish to eat
something like this.
Here we go: cream, carrageenan, mono-digiclycerides, polysorbate
80, cellulose gum. Good quality whipping cream should have a butter
fat content of between thirty-six and forty percent. Using the
additives noted above permits the use of lower butterfat content.
It’s all about money.
The other product from my childhood that has changed drastically
is the watermelon. The old watermelon had seeds, lots of them
and was sweet, sweet, sweet. From time to time, we had contests
to see who could spit a seed farthest. Then there was the old
story that a pregnant woman got that way by swallowing a watermelon
seed. Makes a kind of sense, don’t you think? For kids, it’s
better than the other explanation. So what to do with today’s
flat-tasting watermelon? Here’s a watermelon salad I saw
in a deli in Chicago. Try it; it’s good.
Get about an eight-pound seedless watermelon. Prepare the following:
julienne about a 1/4 pound of red onions; 1/2 ounce of fresh mint,
cut into chiffonade; crumble about a half pound of good feta cheese;
prepare a 1/4 cup of fresh lime juice.
Remove the rind from the watermelon and cut into one inch cubes.
Place in a colander and allow to drain for fifteen minutes.
In a large serving bowl combine the onions, mint chiffonade and
the lime juice. Gently toss to combine. Cool to forty degrees.
Garnish with a sprig of fresh mint and the crumbled feta.
That’s about the best I can do for this month. Read the special
bulletin below.
Special Bulletin to MM
Well! They are doing it again. You know who they are. They are
the Marquette Elite who just can’t leave well enough alone.
They started the destruction of Old Marquette when they moved
the coal dock from the downtown harbor to Presque Isle. And left
a space that today is mostly green grass and some trees.
They took away our high ranking on the list of the ugliest and
dirtiest city harbors in the United States. Then they tore up
the lower rail yards to put in what look to be some really strange
houses.
Before that they tore down the rail overpass across Front Street
to the ore dock. One of these days, you mind my words they will
try to remove the ore dock itself. In the last few years, they
have been planting flowers all over town, flowers that release
their poison pollens to make us sneeze.
Some idiot has even suggested we abandon the name Queen City of
the North and call Marquette the Flower City of the North. Flowers
are just a waste of good money; they mostly all die when the snow
comes, anyway.
Now, can you believe it? They are paving the few original streets
in the northern part of the city. Those streets have been gravel
since the city was founded. Now they lose their distinction and
will look smooth and black just like all the other streets.
What great historic monument will they attack next? My best guess
is they will want to remove the old Delft Theatre canopy on Washington
Street, claiming it is ugly and on its way to becoming a hazard
as well as a garbage can for junk along the street.
You know what? Former citizens of Marquette will return and not
know that this is the city they left. Stop all this stuff they
are doing before we become a modern, beautiful city, with Freedom,
Justice and Health Care for all.
—Don Curto
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