INGREDIENTS
CRUST
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 stick butter
4 teaspoons baking powder
¾ cup milk
FILLING
2 pounds fresh tomatoes, sliced thin, or, in winter, two 28-ounce cans of good canned tomatoes, drained and sliced thin
3 to 4 tablespoons chopped basil, chives, or scallions
1½ cups grated sharp cheddar cheese
⅓ cup mayonnaise
2 tablespoons lemon juice
Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.
To make the double biscuit crust, blend by hand or in a food processor the flour, butter, baking powder, and milk.
Roll half of the dough on a floured surface and fit into a 9-inch pie plate.
Lay the tomatoes over the crust and scatter basil, chives, or scallions over them.
Sprinkle 1 cup of the shredded cheddar over the tomatoes.
Thin the mayonnaise with the lemon juice and drizzle it over the tomatoes and cheese.
Cover with the remaining cheddar cheese.
Roll out the remaining crust and fit it over the top, sealing the edges and cutting steam slits.
Bake for 25 minutes.
This pie can be made ahead and reheated at 350 degrees F till gooey.
Acknowledgments
I am the luckiest writer around and so grateful for my agent, Gail Hochman, and everyone at Brandt & Hochman, as well as my editor Jill Bialosky, my publicist Erin Lovett, and everyone at W. W. Norton. Lucky and grateful, too, for my wonderful kids, Sam and Annabelle, who support and indulge their writer mom. Thank you to my love, my husband, Michael Ruhlman, who makes every day happy. It breaks my heart that my mom, Gogo, didn’t live to see this book in print. But her fingerprints are on every page, and on my heart.
Some of the essays appeared in earlier publications:
“The Golden Silver Palate” in Alimentum and in Best Food Writing 2011
“The Best Fried Chicken” in Riverteeth
“Love, Lunch, and Meatball Grinders” in Parade
“Confessions of a Marsha Jordan Girl” in Yankee
“My Father’s Pantry” in Tin House
“Party Like It’s 1959” in Food & Wine
“How to Butcher a Pig” in Rhode Island Monthly
“How to Smoke Salmon” in Brainchild
“The Summer of Omelets” in Brainchild
“Tomato Pie” in Tin House and in Best Food Writing 2014
ALSO BY ANN HOOD
Morningstar: Growing Up with Books
An Italian Wife
The Obituary Writer
The Red Thread
Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
The Knitting Circle
An Ornithologist’s Guide to Life
Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine
EDITED BY ANN HOOD
Knitting Pearls
Knitting Yarns
Pages 114–15: Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Guacamole recipe courtesy Christopher Kimball.
Page 126: Li-Young Lee, excerpt from “From Blossoms” from Rose.
Copyright © 1986 by Li-Young Lee. Reprinted with permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.
Copyright © 2019 by Ann Hood
All rights reserved
First Edition
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10110
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JACKET DESIGN: CHIN-YEE LAI
JACKET ILLUSTRATION: TONGRO IMAGES INC / GETTY IMAGES
Book design by Chris Welch
Production manager: Lauren Abbate
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Hood, Ann, 1956–
Title: Kitchen yarns : notes on life, love, and food / Ann Hood. Description: First edition. | New York : W. W. Norton & Company, independent publishers since 1923, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018027425 | ISBN 9780393249507 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Cooking. | Hood, Ann, 1956– | Novelists, American—20th century—Biography. | LCGFT: Cookbooks. Classification: LCC TX714 .H6573 2018 | DDC 641.5—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027425
ISBN: 978-0-39324-951-4 (ebk.)
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