Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [106]
1 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
½ teaspoon ground cloves
⅓ cup dark rum
1. Combine the raisins, onions, garlic, and tomato paste in a blender or food processor and puree until smooth, adding some of the vinegar as necessary to help the job along. Scrape the puree into a large pot. (Don’t wash the blender just yet.)
2. Peel the bananas and puree until smooth, again adding some vinegar if the mixture needs liquid. Add the bananas to the mixture in the pot, along with the balance of the vinegar, 4 cups water, the brown sugar, salt, and cayenne.
3. Bring the mixture to a boil, stirring frequently. Lower the heat to medium-low and cook, uncovered, for 1¼ hours, stirring often. If it feels as though it will stick, add additional water, up to 3 cups.
4. Add the corn syrup, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, pepper, and cloves. Cook, stirring frequently, for 15 minutes longer, or until thick enough to coat a spoon. To test its consistency, remove the pot from the heat, spoon a little ketchup onto a saucer, and let it cool. If very little or no liquid pools around the dollop, the ketchup is ready. If liquid does pool, resume cooking for as long as necessary. Cool to room temperature.
5. Puree the ketchup again in the blender or food processor until very smooth, working in batches if necessary. Rinse the pot. Return the ketchup to it. Taste for salt and pepper and adjust.
6. Bring the ketchup to a boil again over medium heat, stirring constantly. Add the rum.
7. Ladle the boiling-hot ketchup into sterilized half-pint canning jars. Tap on the sterilized lids, and lightly screw on the rings. Process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. Remove to a clean dish towel on the counter and wait for the lids to seal. Store in a cupboard for a year or more. After opening, refrigerate.
Makes 7 half-pint jars
CHAPTER 19
HAVING PEOPLE OVER
When I got married, my mother told me I needed to register for an ice bucket. She said, “You need pieces for entertaining.” She said I should register for good china. That I needed table linens. I needed cocktail napkins. I needed trays.
I told her that I didn’t see myself ever needing an ice bucket when I could just grab a handful of ice out of the freezer, and that people of my generation didn’t call things “pieces.” We didn’t “entertain.” We “had people over.”
So I didn’t register for an ice bucket. Nonetheless, I ended up with two ice buckets, both of them crystal, both of them beautiful. And for the next fifteen years, as I stubbornly “had people over,” I floundered trying to figure out how to make every party look casual and effortless. I would have been embarrassed to pull out a crystal ice bucket.
I used to cry every time we “had people over.” I became overwrought trying to deep-fry arancini while shaping the homemade spinach gnocchi and whipping up a soufflé for dessert and grabbing handfuls of ice out of the freezer for the gin and tonics. Every party was full of angst. I deserved it.
My mother was one of the most social people I know. In the decades after she and my father divorced I can’t remember once seeing my mother chop a clove of garlic or peel a potato, let alone fry arancini. Opening bottles of wine and boxes of Bremner wafers? That, I remember. She threw parties all the time, and her invitations always came with a breezy disclaimer: “I think I’ll just get a Costco lasagna. After all, it’s not about the food, it’s about the company.” I hated it when she said that.
Of course, she was right. You never caught my mother in the kitchen reducing a sauce when there were friends laughing in the living room. She set a glamorous table with her own wedding china, put ice in the ice bucket (hers was green teak), transferred the Costco lasagna to some glitzy serving plate, and brought it out with fanfare. Everyone had fun at my mother’s parties.
Only very recently did it dawn on me that “entertaining” is exactly the right word for “having people over.” The dinner party is a work of theater, and the linens and candlesticks