Kitchens of the Great Midwest (3 page)

 • • • 

“Do you know that half a cup of marinara sauce has almost eight times the lycopene content of a raw tomato?” he asked his wiggly daughter as he guided her through the slow field of couples that ebbed and pushed around them. “We’re going to find some good sauce tomatoes today.”

Eva looked up at him, pinching her eyelids against the bright sky, but making happy eye contact with him that seemed to say,
I love Dad,
or maybe,
I just took the runniest shit my father will ever see
. In direct sunlight, it was hard to tell.

 • • • 

Karen Theis’s tomato stall, which for close to a decade had supplied the five-county metro area with consistent, handsome Roma, plum, beefsteak, and Big Boy tomatoes—nothing fancy, just the major hybrids—was Lars’s first and only tomato stop. But that morning in September, it was gone, and in its place a heavy man and heavier woman sat on purple beach chairs, selling dirt-streaked, unappealing rhubarb (it was way, way past ideal rhubarb season) from a stained cardboard box.

“Oh. What happened to Karen?” Lars asked the hefty woman.

She stared back at him. “Who’s Karen?”

“Want some rhubarb?” the big guy asked. “We’ll bargain with ya.” Flies were landing on the sugary stalks, rubbing their front legs together. The couple made no attempt to shoo them away.

“Karen ran a tomato stall here for the last eight years, right in this location. Just wondering what happened to her, if she moved or is just on vacation or something.”

“Oh yeah, that name sounds familiar,” the guy asked, and then turned to the woman. “Why does that name sound familiar?”

“People have been asking about her all morning.”

The guy nodded. “That’s where I know it from.”

This kind of exchange was to be expected of people who attempt to sell rhubarb in mid-September. “So, what happened to her?” Lars asked again.

The woman looked at Eva in the stroller. “Well, that’s a cutie. How old is your daughter, one?”

“She’s about three and a half months. She’s big for her age. So you have no idea what happened to Karen’s tomato stall?”

As the guy leaned forward in his chair, Lars noticed that one of the armrests was missing, and the man had a series of bright red circles on his left forearm from leaning it against the exposed pole. “Sir, if I know one thing,” the man said, “it’s never call a woman fat. Especially at that young age where it seeps into their unconscious.”

“Can anyone help me find Karen Theis?” Lars shouted, looking around at the nearby vendors.

“Out of business,” a nearby vendor of Nantes-type carrots said. “The Orientals chased her out.”

Anna Hlavek, the herb vendor one stall over, yelled, “The Orientals didn’t chase her out, the Orientals grow better tomatoes.”

Lars met Anna’s gaze, and it apparently gave her license to continue her argument.

“What’s-his-name Oriental fella over there. That’s where the New French Café gets their tomatoes now, y’know,” Anna said, referring to
the trendiest of the new Minneapolis restaurants. “How’s your little girl?” she asked, stepping out from behind her stand to touch Eva’s hands and lift them in the air. “Sooooo big! Soooo big!”

Lars liked Anna, but people touching his daughter without asking him first got his blood up a little bit.

“Tell me again,” Anna said. “Is she one, one and a half?”

“No, three and a half months. She’s just . . . ambitious for her age.”

“Where’s that cute wife of yours? Still in California?”

“Yep,” Lars said. “It’s harvest time, for certain varietals.”

“Oh boy, how long is that going to take her?”

“Two weeks, I think.” It had been four already, but Lars knew that sounded bad.

“I can’t imagine a mother being away from her child for that long. My Dougie goes everywhere with me. I never let him out of my sight for a minute.” Lars saw a sullen, towheaded four-year-old sitting a few feet away, stabbing pavement cracks with a plastic knife.

“It happens in the wine business,” he said. “So where can I find a few tomatoes?”

 • • • 

The Southeast Asian vendor sat on a blue Land O’ Lakes milk crate, his body broad and oblong like an Agassiz potato, his fat tan legs splayed. He stared ahead—unsmiling, through Ray-Ban sunglasses—at everything, or nothing. Beside him, shimmering in the livid heat, sat platoons of beautiful, alien tomatoes, in heartbreakingly bright orange, red, yellow, purple, and stripes, in precise, labeled grids across a trestle table covered with a clean gingham tablecloth.

 • • • 

As Lars pushed his daughter’s stroller toward the stand, Eva reached in the direction of the tomatoes, her chubby fingers grabbing the air between herself and those brilliant little globes.

“Hi. Do you have samples?” Lars asked the vendor.

“No samples,” the man said, not taking his gaze from Eva’s outstretched hands. “You try, you buy.”

“Maybe I will, then,” Lars said. “I’m looking for a sauce tomato, something high in lycopene, like a Roma VF. What do you sell that’s like a Roma VF?”

“I don’t sell anything like a Roma VF. I sell tomatoes.”

“OK. So what’s a Roma VF, then?”

“Made in a lab by scientists.”

“OK.”

“Sir, if you want a lycopene-rich tomato, you want a Moonglow. Highest amount of lycopene. Of any heirloom.”

The vendor picked up a small orange globe, between a golf ball and a baseball in diameter, and showed it to Lars, not handing it to him. Lars reached for it, and the vendor set it back with its sisters again.

“The Moonglow is for slicing and salsas,” the vendor continued. “If you want a sauce tomato, you want San Marzano. Best in the world for paste and sauce.” He held up a long red tomato shaped a little like a red pepper and gently laid it in his own palm.

“I’ll buy a Moonglow, to try it.”

“Thirty cents,” the vendor said.

“Well dang,” Lars said. “At that price, it would cost me two bucks to make anything.”

“Cheaper by the pound. Individually, thirty cents.”

Lars sighed, but then exchanged a pair of gray coins for a soft, gleaming orange ball. He just had to. He bit into it like an apple, and orange water flung across his mouth and stuck to his beard. The sensation bothered him just for a moment before the flavor of the heirloom broke across his palate.

The approach was wonderfully sweet, but not sugary or overpowering; there was just a whisper of citric tartness. As he chewed the Moonglow’s
firm flesh, he closed his eyes to concentrate on the vanishing sweetness in his mouth. He thought of Cynthia and how the last time they were here, they bought Roma VFs for a dish to pair with a light-bodied Corvina Veronese. He thought about how much she’d love this—how she’d be coming up with wine pairings for each of this guy’s tomatoes—and wondered where she was in California right then. He thought about how this trip had been the longest yet and how it had been three days since he’d heard from her.

 • • • 

Lars shook himself from these thoughts and knelt to hold the other half of the Moonglow to Eva’s mouth. Grinning, she smeared its bright carcass across her radiant face.

He introduced himself to the vendor, told him what he did, and asked the man his name.

“John,” the vendor said, not smiling, shaking hands firmly but briefly.

“Best thirty cents I’ve ever spent in my life, John,” Lars said. “I had no idea that the Hmong grew such brilliant tomatoes.”

“They don’t. But if they’re lucky, maybe I’ll teach one of them how.”

“Oh jeez, I suppose I thought you were Hmong.”

“Christ, you people. I’m Lao, from Laos. Big difference. The Hmong, we let them in from Mongolia. Never should’ve done it. They were trouble from the beginning. Their Plain of Jars? Lot of poppy fields up there. I don’t have to tell you what they kept in those jars. It wasn’t water.”

Lars was taught always to listen politely, but the prejudices of this heirloom tomato grower—a sharply opinionated lot regardless of national origin—began to make him feel a tad uncomfortable. Because of this, his awareness clouded, and he only saw Eva out of the corner of his eye as she grabbed the corner of the tablecloth and pulled her way over to the tomatoes. The soft thud of massive amounts of fruit hitting the ground was unmistakable to anyone who’s ever worked with food.

“Oh crap!” Lars said, taking in the pile of tomatoes on the ground. “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap.”

John pushed past Lars with the decisive force of a first responder at the scene of an accident, and knelt over his tomatoes, unsentimentally sorting the resellable from the irretrievably broken.

When Lars pushed the tomatoes aside from his daughter’s face, he was shocked to find that she wasn’t crying, but rather trying to cram a broken Moonglow into her tiny mouth.

While Lars and John were able to save most of the San Marzanos, about half of the Moonglows and almost all of the pink Brandywines were bruised or splattered from their impact with the ground, the stroller, or baby Eva.

“How much do I owe you?” Lars asked, afraid even to look John in the face.

“Accidents happen,” he said. He put the broken fruit in a box under the tablecloth and sat back on his milk crate.

Lars removed a twenty and a ten from his billfold and held them out to John. It hurt him to do it; it was almost half a day’s wages.

“Here,” he said. “Please take it.”

The vendor didn’t speak or acknowledge the cash. As passersby and other vendors stared at him, Lars’s face burned with shame. After fighting through several seconds of silence, he had to put the bills away and understand that the depths of this debt might occupy a different space than money could fill.

 • • • 

On the fourth day without hearing from Cynthia, Lars started to call around. Their manager, Mike Reisner, had heard nothing, and neither of the owners, Nick Argyros or Paul Hinckley, had heard from either Cynthia or Jeremy. By the afternoon, he was calling wineries he knew they might have visited: Stag’s Leap, Cakebread, Shafer, Ridge, Stony Hill, Silver Oak. He even tried a few of the Rhone Rangers, like Bonny
Doon and Zaca Mesa; they all knew Jeremy St. George, but no one had seen him or Cynthia.

“Are you sure?” he asked the guy at Shafer. “They’d be there for the harvest.”

“Our harvest isn’t for several weeks,” the guy said.

Lars’s brother Jarl didn’t seem alarmed. “They’re probably driving back,” he said, lying on Lars’s shag carpet, still wearing the white dress shirt and tie from his job as a paralegal. Once Jarl had left the tyranny of their father’s empire, he’d wanted a job that required him to wear a tie every day; in Jarl’s world, people wearing ties would never have to make lutefisk or stick their hands in a hot oven or lift pallets of pullman loaves or otherwise suffer physically on the clock.

“But they flew out there,” Lars reminded him.

“Aren’t there wineries in Arizona and Texas, and places like that?”

“None of the big places in Napa saw them,” Lars said from his easy chair. Eva was on his lap, sucking on the end of a turkey baster.

“Maybe they didn’t go to the big places,” Jarl said. “Or maybe they’re somewhere good, like Riunite.”

“Riunite’s not a place.”

“Yeah it is. It’s in here,” Jarl said, pointing to his heart. “Get over yourself and like something that normal people like for once.”

“I like normal things. I just also like quality healthy things.”

“I like quality healthy things sometimes,” Jarl said.

This was not true. For a guy who insisted on dressing nicely all of the time, Jarl had terrifyingly provincial taste in food and wine.

“You, I haven’t even seen you eat a vegetable since the early eighties.”

Jarl seemed surprised. “Where was that?”

“And it hardly counts. The coleslaw at Charlie’s Café Exceptionale.”

“That was the best place in town. Not someplace snooty like Faegre’s.”

Lars shook his head. “Best Caesar I’ve ever had.”

“Christ, you’re a snob,” Jarl said, and looked at Eva. “Admit it. And you’re going to raise her to be a snob, too. She’s going to be the biggest
snob of all time. Between the two of you, the fancy food chef and the fancy wine drinker. Next time I babysit her, I’m feeding her Cheetos.”

“Don’t even think about it.”

“Cheetos and Hi-C.”

“Please, don’t.”

“
We
ate that kind of stuff as kids. What’s your problem with it now?”

“I just want my children eating stuff that’s actually nutritious.”

“Children?” Jarl asked. “Got some news?”

“Yes, we’re having another kid.”

“When? I thought you guys were going to wait five years or something.”

“No, last time I talked to Cynthia, I told her I want another one now. I don’t want to be a fat old man chasing around a toddler.”

“Then lose some weight, lardo,” Jarl said.

Lars’s phone rang.

“Can you get it?” Lars said, pointing to the baby on his lap.

“Oh sure,” Jarl said. He did four push-ups, with a clap between each one, his tie hanging to the floor like a long striped tongue, and rose to pick up the receiver in the kitchen. “Hello, Thorvald residence,” he said.

“Who is it?” Lars asked.

“It’s your work. Paul somebody.”

“One of the owners,” Lars said, setting his daughter on the carpet before running into the kitchen. “Keep an eye on Evie,” he told Jarl as he put the phone to his ear.

 • • • 

“Hey there, Lars,” Paul Hinckley said. He’d previously been a big-time lawyer in the Cities, and he didn’t know much about food, but he was more than a tad detail-oriented as a restaurant owner. He didn’t hire a graphic designer or an interior decorator for anything; he chose the logo, the typeface on the menu, the dining room’s color scheme, the design of the flatware and stemware, and even the names of some of the dishes.
He also liked to know what was going on with everyone on his staff all the time.

“Hello, Paul. What’s happening?”

“Well, hi, Lars. Say, just have a quick bit of news for ya here.”

“Sure, what’s going on?”

“Just wanted to tell you, we had a staff parking space open up, and we thought maybe you’d want it—you know, for all the hard work you’ve done for us.”