Slow Food Old Food

 I like looking through old cookbooks, using utensils found at estate sales, hand cranked can openers, ugly pots.  I like thinking someone else used the spatula or knife or seasoned the cast iron pan. I like wondering what they cooked in these pots and how it tasted.  I like cooking from scratch and experimenting and improvising and using recipes as suggestions.   A long time ago a chef told me I'm an old world cook and I think he's right.  I have a friend who cooks like I do and when we talk about our foods it feels like we're two little old ladies passing recipes after a potluck.   But don't be thinking PH eats like a king every evening.  You would be mistaken.  He would vouch for that.

The other day I saw my sister-in-law's cookbook and just started to laugh.  It was wonderful. Spineless,  much used, stained, torn pages, you knew which part of the book she used the most.  Cakes and cookies.

What a treasure this book is! You know exactly which cookies were on her plate.  And her edition of the cookbook is from decades ago.  You aren't going to find avocado toast in this book.

I've spent the past couple of weeks making Aunt Marcella's Catsup (or as we say, ketchup.)  I remember the first time I made it, just after we were married. I had gallons and gallons and gallons of the stuff and it was decades before I attempted it again.  Aunt Marcella poured hers into washed out salad dressing bottles, she didn't process can it.   But tomatoes are different now and I wouldn't put this much time into this unless I made sure it was safe months from now. So I process mine.

She started with real tomatoes and cooked them down and put them through a sieve, the process takes two days and the house smells like ketchup.  And because that's how she did it, I do it too.I made two batches, two half bushels of tomatoes - four days of cooking it down.

While they were cooking I watched a few episodes of Pasta Grannies.  Do you know about Pasta Grannies?  It's a YouTube program and I'm addicted to watching 80, 90 even 100 year old Italian grannies making their pasta specialty.   One made her own tomato paste.  "Hmmm..." I thought.  So I tried it with the tomatoes I'd cooked down a few days before.  I didn't have a picnic table sized board on the roof of my home so the hot Sicilian sun could dehydrate them but I have a dehydrating feature on my oven and a pizza stone.  It sounded like slow low heat and a porous surface was all I needed. 

So I tried it, too.  This picture is three ladles of cooked down unseasoned tomatoes swirled on the stone in a 150 degree oven

 An hour later I had tomato paste.

Why do I do it?  It's not a health conscious thing, it's a taste conscious thing and I just like to do it.