Last week I went out to Tim Stark’s farm for dinner. (Tim writes about and grows vegetables, both exceedingly well. I know him because I haunt his farm stand like a groupie every Saturday morning.) It’s a long, beautiful drive from New York through rolling hills, but it’s once you turn off the highway that things get really lovely as the road hugs a deeply forested river bank and passes through the sweet little village of Lenhartsville, Penn., before climbing briefly into the hills. Tim’s farm (or this piece of it, anyway; he works three parcels) sits on a south-facing slope embracing the sky, and looks for all the world more like a vineyard than any tomato field I’ve ever seen. I spent an hour wandering up and down that hill nibbling on what had been missed during the latest picking: tiny yellow Sungold tomatoes sweet as nectarines; seasoning peppers like a cross between passion fruit and electricity; and a raw leaf of lacinato kale so rich and metallic I can almost imagine being ready for fall.
But I’m not, and before fall gets here I’m determined to have one last gluttonous orgy of tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and the like. I brought home as many flawed tomatoes as I could and made about a gallon of gazpacho. I used one, just one, of Tim’s habanero peppers, but the soup still wound up being slightly too spicy for comfort. It replaced my mid-afternoon cup of coffee for the next week, though each glassful left me flushed and feeling like I’d narrowly escaped a dangerous accident.
Thinking about all those tomatoes while shopping the following weekend, I bought a bunch of assorted fish bits with the idea of making a bouillabaisse with rouille. Now, there are at least two schools of thought on boulliabaisse. One might be called “soup as sacrament.” Richard Olney’s paean, Lulu’s Provençal Table, runs in this mold, with five and a half pages of run-up to a two-and-a-half-page recipe. But it’s also in keeping with the spirit of the dish, I think, to wing it. So I sweated an onion in a big, heavy pot, then added a few cut-up tomatoes and thick-sliced potatoes, along with water, a little white wine, a splash of Pernod, and a generous pinch of saffron. While this simmered, infusing the broth and potatoes with flavor, I made the rouille: I roasted a couple of red bell peppers over my stove’s gas burner, peeled and seeded them, and puréed them in a food processor with a hot (but not too-hot) chili, a couple cloves of garlic, some cubed bread, and a healthy amount of olive oil. By then the potatoes were done, so I tossed in my cut-up fish pieces and shellfish and let them cook through. The soup was delicious straight from the pot, all sweet tomato, sweet fish, and winey sharpness, with a high bitter-but-floral note from the saffron, but stirring in a big spoonful of garlicky rouille sent it over the top to sublime. I served some thick grilled bread slices on the side and we slathered those with rouille as well, then dipped them in the soup. It’s a little like eating pesto on toast (which I admit to doing several times a year) but with tomato and fish soup. I might have to make this once a week until the tomatoes go away.
Pinterest
