Recipes

Ratatouille Is The Solution To A Late-Summer Gardener's Problems

When the garden offers too much of everything, ratatouille delivers flavor in return.

WASHINGTON, DC - Slow-Cooker Ratatouille photographed in Washington, DC. (Photo by Deb Lindsey For The Washington Post via Getty Images). — This rustic French dish is as much the solution to gardener's problem as it is a recipe.
(Getty Images)

At the climax of the 2007 film Ratatouille, a cold and heartless restaurant critic named Anton Ego finds himself suddenly changed. He is remembering his past, thinking about what life was like before he became cynical and judgmental. What causes his epiphany? A single taste of ratatouille.

The French Provençal dish is not a fussy one for haute chefs. It is a rustic concoction devised more-or-less as a solution to an agricultural problem. In late summer, gardens simply produce too much: Too many tomatoes, too many eggplants, too many squash, too many peppers. Ratatouille is simply the idea of cooking all of that down into one dish of concentrated summer.

Almost every summer for the past fifteen years, when I find my kitchen stuffed with a bounty of produce, I’ve called up Francis Lam’s recipe for “Weapons Grade Ratatouille.”

(MORE: Celebrate Summer With Pyet DeSpain’s Three Sisters Salad)

I can’t remember exactly why I started using Lam’s recipe, rather any of the dozens of other classic renditions of the dish. It likely has something to do with his prose style. Lam, who happens to be one of the more celebrated food writers of our time and the host of The Splendid Table, wrote this one with an almost-manic enthusiasm for the dish.

The key to his recipe is to mostly ignore the squash and eggplant, which are simply roasted with just a touch of browning in the oven, and focus on creating the greatest concentrated tomato jam you’ve ever tasted in your life.

Lam forgoes cooking time entirely and instead demands that you spend your entire afternoon in the kitchen, slowly caramelizing onions, shallots, garlic, and peppers before adding four pounds of pureed tomatoes to be simmered for who knows how long, until six pound of ingredients have been reduced into a single pint of concentrated flavor.

In all of the fifteen years of cooking this dish, I don’t think I’ve ever actually reached the pint-size reduction he calls for. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you take your time and slowly cook down those tomatoes until you simply cannot wait any longer.

At that moment, you’ll have what Lam describes as, “flavor that doesn’t quit — a finish that lasts forever. You’ll know it’s ready when it gives the oil back up, it makes squishy noises when you stir it, and when you taste it and suddenly want to punch a hole in the wall.”

That’s when you know you’re tasting summer in your spoon. A single bite is enough to warm even the heart of an old, cynical food critic.

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