Last year, Hannah Goldfield’s piece about New Haven Pizza in the New Yorker got me thinking about the other Connecticut pizza, which is sometimes called Greek Style, or New England Style. While the more famous apizza style that hails from New Haven is strictly Italian, and Neapolitan to boot, Greek pizza is a bastard.  Legend has it that this style of pizza was born in New London, a fifteen minute drive from my hometown of Norwich. The inventor was a Greek immigrant named Costas Kombouzis, whose dough prep shortcut resulted in a new species of pizza that would proliferate over New England for the next 6 decades.  

Instead of stretching dough to order as in the Neapolitan style, Kombouzis stretched his right into oiled shallow pans, and let it proof overnight, saving him a step later on. Today, Greek-style, sometimes known as New England-style pizza, is characterized by this differentiation: a crust that chews somewhere between focaccia and thin-crust. There’s a noticeable amount of oil, which results in a crisp but unctuous crust if cooked right, and leaden and greasy if wrong. Greek style gets a heavy hand of oregano-forward long-cooked tomato sauce, and an even heavier hand of a mixture of aged mozzarella and cheddar cheeses. The legendary Mystic Pizza? Greek style.1

The most popular comment about the New England-slash-Greek-style on a pizza subreddit sums it up: “When it’s good, it’s good. When it’s bad, it’s bad.” It would be hard to gather the data, and I’m not in a position to launch my own investigation, but I have a suspicion that Greek-style pizzas today are bad more than good, and only getting worse, since the obsession with other styles of pizza (Neapolitan, Detroit, Grandma, etc…) are currently dominating the zeitgeist.   

Unlike Neapolitan style, there seems to be no rules, or morality, when it comes to toppings at a Greek-style pizza place.  You’ve got your anchovy, bacon, broccoli, eggplant, green peppers, roasted peppers, ham, hamburger, jalapeño, meatball, mushroom, olive, onion, pepperoni, sausage, and spinach. There’s taco pizza, Philly cheesesteak pizza, and sundry takes on chicken pizza. Personally, I find even one iteration of chicken pizza deeply offensive (In my America, banning chicken on pizza would be the 28th amendment), but in suburban New England, anything goes. 

By the 1980’s, 40% of pizzerias in Connecticut were Greek owned, but I think that was closer to 100% in the 5 mile vicinity that was my childhood’s pizza universe.  All of these places had and still have extensive menus: pizza menu, grinder menu, pasta menu, and a house specials menu that included moussaka and pasticcio, and chicken, veal, or eggplant parmigiana. 

Dino’s, Rina’s, Great Oak, Olympic, and Tambora’s all ranked high, but “our place” was Pizza Kitchen, for no other reason than it was closest to our house.  In fact, I could walk there, which I sometimes did on a saturday. Was it good pizza? No. In fact, it was probably the worst of the best places in town.  Always too saucy, and could have used a few more minutes in the oven is how those pies will always be remembered. But if mom said we could have pizza for dinner, it was coming from Pizza Kitchen, and that would be that. 

And once we were old enough to answer the phone in my family, we were old enough to call up Pizza Kitchen and order it ourselves. In fact, we were made to. In an otherwise safe and comfortable childhood, calling up Pizza Kitchen was a slice of torture barely endured, and it never got easier. One of my brother’s favorite tricks was to dial the number and act as if he was taking charge and ordering the pizza, then shove the receiver in my ear once the call was picked up. There was something so aggressive and threatening about how those two words, “Pizza” and “Kitchen” were brought together by the guy, always the same guy, who answered the phone like he might jump through it and ring your neck. 

“PIZZA KITCHEN” 

“Uh, can I order some pizza” 

“GAHEAD” 

“Um, a cheese and a meatball” 

“YAH WAN TOES SMAULAHLAAGE” 

“Um, what?” 

“SMAULAHLAAGE” 

“Um” 

“SMAHL. OW. LAHGE” 

“Oh, small” 

“NAME” 

“Rosenberg” 

“TWENNY MINNITS. G’BYE” 

My friend Ashley lived up the street and hers was also a Pizza Kitchen family. To this day she and I still laugh about how traumatic those Pizza Kitchen phone calls were. 

After weeks of thinking and reading about Greek Pizza, I decided to make my own, with the help of J.Kenji Lopez’s meticulously developed recipe for Serious Eats. The result looked like what a Pizza Hut personal pan pizza looked like to a stoned college student version of me, which is to say puffy, molten, and greasy all in the best ways. The crust was suitably crispy on the outside, and light but structured on the inside, like a good focaccia.  The sauce was rich and ample beneath a weighted blanket of cheese. Of all the pizzas I’ve made at home, this may have been one of the most successful. 

The kicker to all of this is…I didn’t have a single bite. I’ve was (and am) on a ketogenic diet at the time of this writing, but so invested I’ve been in re-creating the pizza of my youth that I made it for my friend Robbie, a skateboarder and truck driver and dead ringer for Jeff Spicolli from Fast Times At Ridgemont High. I made a “keto” version for myself with a crust recipe I am too embarrassed to share, but know that it the main ingredient is chicken breast. Humiliating.

Robbie gave it a 9 out of 10.  Robbie also loves Hawaiian food, which is among my least favorite cuisines in the world, so I’m not sure if there is a handicap on that score in either direction.  The important thing was that it looked good, smelled good, and no one had to talk to the Pizza Kitchen Guy.  

Author’s Note: I started this for my Bobbie’s Boat Sauce Newsletter, but couldn’t find the balance between “relevant” and “marketing friendly.” So, Bobbie’s Newsletter Readers’ loss is my Substack’s gain. Enjoy??

Humans are complicated. Evolving over millions of years, surviving myriad viruses and plagues, we've built civilizations, forged written languages, and created technologies that may eventually replace us.  We've developed complex ideas and emotions, and then reduced them into emojis.  We've harnessed fire and invented air conditioning, both of which extend our lives and destroy our planet.  We've crossed oceans on canoes, and on Star Trek themed cruises.  We have invented cures for cancer, and cures for bland food.  We continue to deepen our understanding of the world and humanity, just as we continue to "other" races and religions that are not ours since our first sentient moment on this planet. That is so us! 

I'm a Jew, which has never been problematic for me, other than that I don't believe in organized religion or "God," but that's not even contradictory to being culturally Jewish.  Nowadays, things are a little more complex. I don't know what my ancestors from 200 years ago (most of whom came from the Ukraine and Lithuania), or 2000 years ago (??) would think about the current state of the world and modern state of Israel, and I probably don't want to know either.  I am grateful to them for sacrificing and surviving so that I can be here today, writing this Bobbie's Boat Sauce Newsletter while I sit under a heated blanket in my home office, but I would probably not want to get stuck talking to them at a party. 

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By the way, this newsletter is about Hanukkah. Known as the festival of lights, it's a holiday that commemorates a successful Jewish rebellion in the second century BCE.  But, it also may have started as a civil war among 2 factions of Jews. In any case, religion and power are forever intertwined, as long as organized religion exists there will always be a "them" and "us" dualism that necessitates a winner and loser, and grated potatoes and onion pancakes fried in oil are delicious, especially with Bobbie's Boat Sauce. 

As far as culinary heritage goes, you could do worse than being an Ashkenazi Jew.  I'd probably rather be Sicilian for the pasta and seafood, but I'm happy enough with matzo balls, half-sours, and latkes. Growing up, there were three kinds of latkes: weeknight latkes, Hanukkah latkes, and temple latkes.  Weeknight latkes were triangular frozen hash brown patties from Ore Ida that aren't available in stores anymore.  My mom served these after she went back to work, not every night, but not for special occasions, either.  Hanukkah latkes were exactly what they sound like; potatoes shredded through the Cuisinart, they were thin, crisp, with defined texture.  Temple latkes were served at Sunday School or any kind of function at the temple over Hanukkah, mixed with industrial-sized equipment. They were thicker, a finer texture, a little eggy, and greasy.  This would be the kind of latke you'd get in a college dining hall.  

Some people prefer the texture of a temple latke, but not I.  I like to grate my potatoes in the Cuisinart (but it's not essential), wring the hell out of them in a damp dishcloth, discard the liquid, but incorporate the starch that sinks to the bottom of the bowl back into the batter.  I only recently started using the proper amount of oil in the pan, which is a lot, but it does create a superior latke.  And ever since I started making it, I eat my latkes with sour cream and Bobbie's Boat Sauce. 

I’ve included my own recipe for latkes in this post. Most recipes yield latkes for 4 people or more, but this recipe is meant to feed two. For a bigger crowd, I tried Melissa Clark’s recipe, and I have no complaints whatsoever. Originally, I had the idea to make a batch of short ribs in the style of my brisket to go with my latkes, but couldn’t find short ribs. In a rash decision, I picked up a pound of pastrami from Otto’s Sausage Kitchen, some whitefish salad at Providore, and served a quasi-Jewish Deli platter to go with the latkes. My live-culture sauerkraut had turned, so the last of some half-sour pickle chips from Grillo’s came out. Also, Bobbie’s Boat Sauce. This was an unusual spread, but I think it may just have to become tradition, because a latke with sour cream, Pastrami, Boat Sauce and a half-sour chip is mind shattering, in the very best way.

One nice thing about making a big batch for a small crowd is leftovers. Believe it or not, leftover latkes are great, especially if you have an air fryer to reheat them. This morning I heated up 2 leftover latkes, scrambled eggs with pastrami and onion, and topped with Boat Sauce and American Cheese. Way too decadent for a weekday, but not when it’s a weekday during Hanukkah!

Latkes

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Janice wasn’t emailing with updates. She had a favor to ask. Invited to participate in a holiday cookie exchange, she was hoping I might be able to help.  “I was thinking of the cookies I even really like and honestly, the ones that come to mine are the ginger cookies you made for us once…I believe you said it was your mother’s recipe?”  After 12 years of battling a devastating disease, a cross country move, a transplant, and many close calls, she still remembered my mom’s ginger cookies.  

These weren’t the only cookies my mother made.  She made soft and fudgy chocolate cookies, meringue kisses, rugelach, madeleines, and more.  But they are the ones she is known for, by people who never knew her. Soft, but slightly crisp around the edges, their magic is in the perfect balance of ingredients: sugar to butter to spice to flour.  Not too bready, not too greasy, not too spicy, not too sweet.  They are the little black dress of cookies; never inappropriate and never out of style.

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And they are not her own recipe, so to speak. They’re from The Settlement Cookbook, a Joy of Cooking-esque canon that skews slightly Jewish. They became  “Betsy’s cookies” because she would make them for virtually any occasion and she always had a ziploc bag of them in the freezer. I’ve carried that torch further, making them for new parents, new homes, and new boyfriends. I’ve made them so many times that they could be known as “Robin’s Cookies” in my circle, but everyone calls them “your mother’s ginger cookies” anyway. 

Over the years, I have added my own updates, changing 1 cup of granulated sugar to ½ and ½ white and brown sugar.  I’ve added a touch of salt to the dough, and these days I finish with a few flakes of fleur de sel right before they go into the oven.  

As “dessert” goes further down my list of necessities, the 3 o’clock treat moves up. This is the perfect cookie to have for such moments. I enjoy these most with coffee, even if it’s the last, cold swig from my morning pot.  And as a request for this recipe comes about once a year, I’ve written it down for you here.  Enjoy.

Robin's Mom's Ginger Cookies

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For folks with vegetable gardens, August is the time of year when things start to get out of hand, though I don’t speak from firsthand experience. I have a yard with a lot of trees thus without great sunlight, but more than lacking good light and soil, I lack the courage to try, at least in this moment of my life. It’s a lot of investment, financial and spiritual, and while I’m usually pretty comfortable being bad at things, being bad at gardening feels too vulnerable for me right now. I can boast multiple decades of CSA membership, so I have the satisfaction of participating in a local food system, and the exasperation of keeping up with cucumbers.

For folks who subscribe to food magazines or newsletters, the time of year when recipes for what-to-do with a garden’s bounty of summer vegetables are as proliferate and overwhelming as the bumper crops themselves. I’m eager to make the I’m eager to make tomato sauce soup published in Food Processing when I pick up tomatoes this week, but I also have to admit that this is the time of year when I just want to make the great summer dishes of my childhood, over and over again. Next to steamers with butter, nothing is more quintessentially summer than a simple pasta dish of zucchini and spaghetti, that my mom used to make since the early 1980’s with her bumper crop.

Although she was a skilled cook, she was not a particularly improvisational one, so I don’t know where found this recipe.  It’s a pasta dish where raw zucchini is “cooked” by hot pasta, just out of the boiling pot.  I’ve had no luck finding a recipe that matches is, because if you google “zucchini pasta raw” or a deviation from that, you get endless recipes for “zoodles,” or zucchini noodles. With all due respect, fuck zoodles.  

It’s been decades since I’ve had this dish prepared by my mother herself.  In that time, I’ve probably taken some liberties that have improved it, like the lemon zest.  Because the hot noodles are tossed with room temperature zucchini, I believe this dish is meant to be eaten at room temperature.  But I’ve eaten it cold for breakfast, and I would eat it cold for lunch with some cold grilled flank steak, too. Adding some halved cherry tomatoes to the zucchini wouldn’t be sacrilege, though it will yield a lot of extra liquid, which I personally think is fine; think of it as al fresco potlikker, and cherish it.

And just because you can buy zucchini and basil year round doesn't mean this dish should be eaten past September. Have some respect the bumper crop.

Strictly Summer Zucchini Spaghetti

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Recipe: Strictly Summer Zucchini Spaghetti

Serves 4 

Ingredients

• 1 ½  pounds of zucchini (about 2 large)

• 2 fat cloves garlic, minced 

• ⅓-½  Cup olive oil 

• Red pepper flakes 

• 1 lemon, zested (and reserved for juice)

• ½ box spaghetti (8 oz) 

• 1 cup grated parmesan cheese

• 1 cup basil, torn or chopped 

Method

1. Heat up water for boiling pasta and salt liberally.

2. Prepare Zucchini.  Grate the longest, thinnest ribbons of zucchini you can get out of either a mandoline or a box grater.  Set into the bottom of a big bowl that will eventually hold hot pasta.  Add a healthy pinch of salt. 

3. Heat ⅓ cup oil up in a small skillet, add garlic and a pinch of chili flake.  Cook until garlic is fragrant and opaque, then add lemon zest and turn off heat.  Pour this hot oil over zucchini in bowl and toss. 

4. When water is boiling, throw in spaghetti and cook to your liking.  If there was an occasion to let your pasta go a little bit past al dente, this would be it.  

5. Instead of draining the pasta in a colander, use  tongs to fish out the spaghetti right out of the pot and into the zucchini bowl, carrying some starchy cooking water along with it.  This is where the magic happens, where the hot pasta cooks the raw zucchini and the starchy water holds it all together.  

6. Toss with tongs to coat pasta, zucchini and oil.  Add a the juice of half a lemon, the torn basil, copious amounts of parmesan, and some more glugs of olive oil before serving.  And of course salt and pepper to taste. 

Note: the dish will yield some liquid at the bottom of the bowl; a potent elixir of zucchini juice, olive oil, and parmesan broth.  You probably shouldn’t tell anyone else at the table how good it is and just casually drain it into a little bowl for you to enjoy as a private treat.  

As a food founder, I am obliged to extol the virtues of my product with seasonal and holiday dishes; it's is one of the perks of my job.  Last Passover, I shared an updated recipe for my mom's brisket.  This year, I'm confronting a dish that I have been ambivalent about my entire life. As an equal opportunity lover of most cuisines, both high and low brow, I'm reluctant to unilaterally condemn certain foods (barbeque chicken pizza notwithstanding), but I have never cared for matzo brei, an Ashkenazi Jewish dish of pan-fried matzo and eggs, served most often during Passover. 

There are thousands of "authentic" preparations and unwavering opinions on how it's prepared, but in the most basic terms, matzo is moistened with water, crumbled into beaten eggs, then fried in schmaltz, oil, or butter until cooked (more controversially, matzo is moistened then pan fried before eggs are added).  It can be served sweet, with syrup or jelly, or savory, with salt and pepper.  If you like hard, dry scrambled eggs fortified with damp cardboard, you might like traditional matzo brei.  But if you prefer your eggs soft as a baby's cheek, seasoned with a little sea salt and a shower of chives, you may have as hard a time falling in love this dish as I.    

In fairness, I think the appeal is not the culinary integrity, but the nostalgic resonance; the fact that most of the folks who fell in love with matzo brei ate it once a year, prepared by a loving parent recreating a memory of being served matzo brei by a loving parent.  That's my trauma-free theory on why matzo brei persists.  

But I decided to make my first matzo brei in maybe 30 years, to see if I've been wrong about it.  I consulted several recipes and landed on a method that didn't allow the matzo to get too soft and wasn't too eggy.  It was fine. Better with some Bobbie's Boat Sauce Classic. Could be a good hangover remedy.  Then, I decided to improvise an unholy version of matzo brei that I knew would taste great: browning barely-damp matzo first in butter, then in Bobbie's Classic.  Then it becomes a swinging party, tossing Eastern European power couple onions and mushrooms with kimchi, then eggs.  This got a dollop of sour cream, followed by more Boat Sauce and my beloved chives.  It was good.  So good, in fact, that I ate and thoroughly enjoyed it again the next morning, straight from the fridge.  With just enough egg to marry the textures, it wasn't afflicted with the sad rubberiness of a hard scramble.  I was genuinely surprised, but even more than that, pleased that I could redeem this traditional dish for myself and my Boat Sauce community, and give it a worthy name: Meshugana Matzo Brei. 

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Meshugana Matzo Brei

Ingredients

½ onion sliced

¼ lb or about 10 mushrooms, sliced

½ cup kimchi, drained (sliced optional) 

4 large eggs

6 sheets matzo

Bobbie's Boat Sauce of your choice 

salt and pepper

butter, oil, or schmaltz

sour cream 

chives

Preparation

1. In a medium skillet, heat about 1 ½ Tbsp butter or oil and begin frying onions.  It's ok to let them brown in places.  After a few minutes season with salt and pepper, and add mushrooms.  Let this continue to cook for 5-10 more minutes, until brown and fragrant.  Add kimchi and remove from heat. 

2. Crack and whisk eggs in a medium bowl, adding a pinch of salt and pepper.  

3. Fill a larger bowl with cold water, and set a colander next to it.  Break matzos in half and submerge in water for ~15-20 seconds, then remove to colander.  Work in batches if necessary. 

4. In a larger skillet, heat about 3 Tbsp butter or oil.  When bubbling, add matzos, breaking up pieces with a spoon or spatula.  When it starts to brown in places, add a few good squeezes of Bobbie's Boat Sauce, allowing it to further moisten the matzoh and caramelize with the heat of the pan.  

5. Add mushroom mixture.  Without too much prodding, saute gently for a few minutes until thoroughly hot, then add the egg mixture, while lowering the heat. 

6. Cook matzo brei for another 2-3 minutes, stirring judiciously and letting the egg firm up on its own.  

7. Serve with sour cream, chives, and more Bobbie's Boat Sauce!

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My mother made a French apple tart for almost any special occasion, except passover. On the year anniversary of my mother’s death, I wanted to make one in her memory. She kept a file folder full of recipes for apple desserts, containing at least ten French apple tart, but there was no question which one I needed make: the most tattered, stained, and nearly-destroyed Xerox from her beloved Pleasures of Cooking magazine. I’d never made this particular recipe before; now I doubt I'll ever try another one. You don’t necessarily need a food processor with a slicing disc (slice by hand in 1/8-1/4 inch slices), but you will want one for the dough.

Glazed Apple Tart from Pleasures of Cooking, Vol IV, No 1, May/June 1981

11-inch partially baked Basic Pastry Shell (recipe follows) 

5 to 6 large (2 to 2 ½ pounds total) Granny Smith or tart apples, peeled, cored, and halved

6 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon lemon or orange zest, removed with a zester or grater

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

6 tablespoons apricot preserves 

1 tablespoon water 

1 teaspoon Cognac 

Special Equipment : Cuisinart food processor with thin (2mm) or medium (4mm) slicing disc. 

Adjust the rack to the middle level and preheat oven to 400ºF.   Insert thin (2mm) or medium (4mm) slicing disc in the processor.  Put apple halves in the feed tube horizontally and slice them, using medium pressure.  Arrange the slices on a board.  Separate the imperfect slices and set them aside.  

Insert the metal blade.  Coarsely chop the imperfect slices by turning the machine on and off.  You should have about 1 ½ cups.  Reserve 2 tablespoons and spread the remaining chopped apples over the bottom of the cooled crust.  Sprinkle 2 tablespoons of sugar and lemon zest.  Arrange the sliced apples over the chopped apples in overlapping concentric circles.  Fill the center space with reserved chopped apples.  Sprinkle the tart with the remaining sugar and dot with butter.  Bake in the preheated oven for 1 hour. The edges of some of the apples should turn brown.  Remove the tart from the oven, 

Melt the preserves with 1 tablespoon of water in a small saucepan over medium heat.  Press the through a sieve into a bowl and add the Cognac.  Lightle brush the glaze on edge of crust and over the apples.  Serve the tart warm or at room temperature.  It is best baked the day it is to be served. 

Basic Pastry Dough

1 sticks (4 ounces) unsalted butter, chilled and cut into tablespoon size pieces 

1 large egg yolk

1 ½  teaspoon salt 

5 tablespoons olld ater

1 ½ cups (7 ½ ounces)unbleached all-purpose flour

Insert the metal blade in the processor.  Add the butter, egg yolk, salt and water.  Combine them by turning the machine on and off 5 or 6 times, then process for 5 seconds.  Threre may be small lumps of butter.  Add the flour and process just until the mixture forms a mass of dough.  Do not overprocess.  Do not allow the dough to form a ball.  Put the dough and any little scraps on the bottom of the bowl into a plastic bag.  Work through the bag to press it together into a ball, then into a disc.  Refrigerate the dough for at least 2 hours, or overnight, or freeze it.  

Butter an 11-inch quiche pan with a removable bottom.  

Roll the dough onto a lightly floured surface to a circle about ⅛ inch thick.  Press into place in the prepared quiche pan.  Use kitchen shears to trim the dough, leaving a 1-inch overlap beyond the pan.  Fold the overlap inside to form a double thickness on the sides.  Press the dough firmly into place, pushing the crust up about /14 inch above the edge of the pan to allow for shrinkage in baking.  Pinch the rust to form a decorative edge,.  Prick the bottom and sides with a fork and refrigerate for 30 minutes, or until it is firm. 

Preheat the oven to 400ºF.  15 minutes before baking. Line the pastry shell with parchment paper and fill it with uncooked beans or rice.  For a partially baked shell, bake for 6 minutes.  Remove the paper and the beans or rice, prick the shell again and bake it 4 minutes longer.  For a fully baked shell, bak 12 minutes with beans and 6 minutes without, or until the shell is lightly browned.  Remover the shell from the pan and let it cool on a wire rack.  If there are any cracks in the shell, repair them with scraps of leftover raw dough.  

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I was four years old when I had my first epiphany that food would play a lead character in my life. Hiding beneath the dining room table with a pilfered box of Triscuits and foil-wrapped block of Philadelphia Cream Cheese, discovering the textural play between crunch, salt, and fat, I knew from that moment that food was meant for more than keeping me alive.  It bonded me to my family, it soothed my pain, and it perennially sparked my curiosity.  I yearned to cook every single recipe in Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls; The Big Burger Cake is my rosebud. 

Sixteen years later, at age 20, I encountered food writing for the first time.  I was on a train bound for Prague, having the requisite college-student-finding-herself-but-actually-still-getting-quite-lost-experience, carrying a Penguin Classics copy of Crime and Punishment.  I was hoping to be transformed by literature, or short of that, hoping to be noticed reading Crime and Punishment by someone on the train, preferably male, early 20's, with smoldering dark eyes and good taste in music. I impatiently waded through the set up, the murder, the investigation, and even the romance with halfhearted interest, but lo, when a passage about cabbage soup appeared, I was rapt.  The more Dostoyevsky wrote about food or hunger, the more interesting Crime and Punishment got. Like Raskolnikov, I too was starving, but for the subject that held my attention above everything else. 

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I studied English in college, with the intent of becoming a film critic, but food proved to be too powerful a distraction.  By the time I graduated in 1994, I had designs on creating a TV series that fused a late-night talk show with a cooking show.  That evolved to become "Eat Me", a scripted sci-fi/comedy/cooking show. For no particular reason, Portland, Oregon seemed like the best place to make it for public access television (the internet as we know it was still a few years off). My creative partner eventually went back East to attend law school, but I stayed behind in Portland, carving a life out of restaurant jobs and a few freelance writing gigs. My roommate worked for the Willamette Week and helped me nab some reviews for the annual restaurant guides, or the occasional editorial piece about mayonnaise.  I religiously read the NYT's Wednesday Cooking section and subscribed to all of the major food mags, and fantasized about being a food writer.  In that era though, it felt like there was no room in the food space for a 20-something who hadn't gone to culinary school or journalism school, who was neither a legitimate chef nor a published writer, nor willing to move to New York for an unpaid internship at Condé Nast. Finding the in's felt impossible, so I opened a cafe instead.  That was in 2000. By 2006, instead of being too young and too much of an outsider to write about food, I was too old and too conventional.  Food writing was hip and fresh and I was cranky and out of touch with culture because I was too busy making sandwiches and pies.  

At the end of 2010, after I abruptly transitioned from running two cafes to working in an advertising agency, I started my first food writing blog.  The conceit was to chronicle what I was doing through what I was cooking, replete with self-deprecation and "thaaats my life"-style detours.  I was having fun with it, and building a small body of work, but then two things happened:  I downloaded instagram to my phone, and my mother found my blog.

My mother has been the biggest influence on my life and my cuisine, hands down, no question.  Everything I cook is informed by the pallet that she bestowed upon me. She was the best cook in our extended family, our neighborhood, and our entire town. Her brand was to curse, sigh, and sarcastically mutter "Good Job, Betsy"  as she turned out flawless dishes and breads, and she was never safe around sharp knives or Cuisinart blades.  

Food and cooking is what bonded us, and what we could always talk about when other subjects (bodies, boyfriends, divorces) were uncomfortable.  That I was writing about food would have been a big deal to my mom, but I didn't want to tell her.  I was having too much fun writing without an audience, enjoying the freedom of anonymity on the internet, and had barely told any of my friends about my blog.  But one day, I let it slip to my brother.  And he told me that I should really share with mom.  You should tell her, he said. It would make her happy, he said.  So I did.  Soon, my mother was calling me promptly after every posting, wanting to talk about what I cooked, how it made her laugh, what she would have done.  She lived for each new post, and with each call, the joy I found in writing deflated like an old balloon. I couldn't get her voice or my projection of her voice out of my head, so I gave up trying, and turned to my iphone. 

My addiction to Instagram was, well, instant.  I went hard on it, posting and lurking in equal measure.  I could write less, tell more, and get instant gratification for pet memes and clever headlines.  Crafting the perfect sentence wasn't the point, and soon this app supplanted all of the attention I'd been giving to writing.  Even better, Betsy had no idea.  

In 2018, I launched a food brand, and found myself writing again.  It felt good to sync up words to my thoughts on food again, even if it needed to be cast through the lens of a single product.  Gradually, I began to write a little more, considering the possibility that my newsletter could one day serve as a body of work, and an account of running a small brand.  Once again, with immense pride and incalculable love, my mom trolled me. I could set my watch to the phone call that would come after a new post, and it filled me with dread.  For reasons I will be trying to understand for a long time, the more positively my mother responded to my writing, the more I struggled with feelings of illegitimacy and self-hatred, followed by guilt, then resentment.     

Then, in January 2022, my mother lost a swift battle with Covid-19.  On a Thursday, she was attending a Broadway show.  On Sunday, she went unresponsive after losing the ability to breathe on her own.  We had her on life support long enough to determine she wasn't coming back, and her body shut down a few days later. 

Since her passing, I turned 50, fell in love, and made countless life decisions and counter-decisions to land me squarely in the same place.  I've wrestled with depression and inertia and the will to continue selling a niche product.  I feel as lost as I've ever been, and I am at once relieved that I don't have to reveal this to my mom, and grieving the loss of one less person in the world who always wanted the best for me. 

On the one year anniversary of my mom's death, I decided to make an apple tart in her honor.  She's been a librarian and an archivist, and in addition to a huge cookbook collection, she kept dozens of files full of hundreds of recipes.  I discovered no less than ten xeroxed recipes for apple tarts, and decided to use the most dog-eared and water-damaged copy, from The Pleasures Of Cooking Magazine.  Normally when I'm cooking, I don't follow a recipe so much as make it from memory after reading it once, but in this case I kept the page close, and followed the steps as written.  Off the bat I was surprised by the technique for the crust; processing egg yolk, butter, sugar, salt and water before adding flour.  Then I was amazed by how easy it was to work with.  And then I was astounded by how tender and perfect it turned out.  

Making this tart briefly brought my mother back to me.  Of course the scent and flavor were instantly evocative of the dozens of holidays and dinner parties where she served it.  But it was following her recipe, the one she used so often that she kept two printed copies, in addition to the original in the magazine, is what really reconnected her to me.  I thought about how cooking was our shared language, and how much I resisted bearing my soul to her in the last decade of her life.  My mom suffered through bouts of severe depression, and I could see that forming in my own life. I didn't want to see that become our other shared language, so resisting her felt like an act of self-preservation.

My mother was the biggest supporter of my writing, and the reason why I stopped writing. I find myself called to write again, and to find that magic between words, meaning, flavors, and memories that piqued my interest as a toddler, a twenty year old, and a fifty year old. Did her death set my writing free?  I won't know the answer for a long time to come, but if it did, she would be so proud.   

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