A short semi-fiction.
Bruschetta?
I barely know her.
That one always gets a chuckle out at tea-time. As long as you’re with friends who understand the irony behind such sexist overtones.
Sorry- I digress.
To make it is simple really.
You get some toast- a bit of bread from the house loaf (if someone remembered to buy it), hacked off from the back of a fridge. One of your flatmates turned it right down to the coldest setting because there aren’t freezers in the halls here.
There is a toaster, but it either leaves the bread all black so you have to scrape a layer off into the sink, or pops it up like it’s never seen heat in its carbohydrated life. Either way, get toasting. But keep an eye on the breadtoast as you prepare the other ingredients - a burnt base ruins Poor Man’s Bruschetta like nothing else.
Toast. That's how you start.
You have to understand that Poor Man’s Bruschetta isn’t called Poor Man’s Bruschetta to make fun of the working class. Just as the titular ‘Man’ does not equate to it being a meal reserved only for male tastebuds. It’s called so to harken back to a time of desperation, and struggle, and empty bank balances.
Of finding comfort in the smallest and homeliest of delicacies.
…
The word ‘delicacies’ was ironic. Nothing about Poor Man’s Bruschetta is delicate.
It’s also called that because I made it once when I was neck-deep in overdraft waiting for my student finance to come in. You looked at my sad little plate of raw tomatoes on toast, and asked me what in the hell type of meal I called that.
Poor Man’s Bruschetta, I joked.
The emphasis goes on the first syllable, pronounced ‘pore-mun’, which should clue you into the layer of sarcasm heavily spread on top of the title. I don’t know if you recognized that then, but it made you laugh the first time I said it.
Which was enough.
After you’ve begun to toast your toast (now there’s a frustrating turn of phrase), your attention should turn to the tomatoes. I hope you took them out the back of your fridge at the same time as the bread, because otherwise you may have some very frozen tomatoes on your hands instead of recently-thawed ones. The type of tomato, like most other ingredients in Poor Man’s Bruschetta, doesn’t really matter- salad, plum, cherry, tinned, stolen- just as long as it’s not like a pasta sauce or anything, because then you’d be making Poor Man’s Pizza instead.
I’ll teach you the recipe for that another time.
Whatever tomatoes you decide to use, chop them up into small wedges. Use a knife so blunt you could stab someone with it and barely leave a bruise. I don’t think I ever actually used a sharp knife in that kitchen we shared. But extra effort in the chopping process, and the torn tomato consistency, add to the dish’s wholesomeness- clean cuts have no place here.
It’s chopping up tomatoes, not haute cuisine.
I didn’t realise you could have tomatoes on toast until university. Like I didn't realise you could mix cereals or be in love with more than one person, or that just working hard wasn’t enough to get good grades. I realised you have to work better than hard. And even then it sometimes isn’t enough to make you feel like you can be as good as everyone else.
It’s like when one time I found out that you pronounce ‘Yeats’ like ‘Yates’ because someone joked about how stupid it was to say ‘Yeets’. I nodded and murmured agreeing sounds and carried on listening to everyone else chat about how boring the selection of writers was for the English paper that year. How the syllabus didn’t showcase a broad enough range of voices. How it could leave some people feeling excluded.
Like that time I had to google who the pre-Raphaelites were in the middle of a bus station because you were all chatting about how even though you’d gone to different schools you’d seen the same exhibition. You got annoyed at this guy who said he didn’t see the point in them as an artistic category, how we wrongly idolized them and their muses. You started speaking really fast, breath quickening as you argued for the fluid magnitude of such painters, their focus on the beauty of humans and nature together. My breath was quick too. I so hoped you wouldn’t ask me to back you up.
I felt so stupid then.
After chopping the tomatoes, you need a clove of garlic- or more than one if, like me, you’re an anti-vampire who can’t get enough of the stuff. It doesn’t matter if the clove is so old it’s all wrinkled and starting to split, revealing little shoots of green ready to burst out into the world. As long as it’s not blue you can still eat it without getting sick, Chop it up into little bits- another long-winded job exacerbated by the blunt knife.
Repeat this exercise with an onion, any old onion you can find. Maybe that half-bit of white left over from the procrastination chilli you made over the weekend, or even some residual granules stuck at the bottom of the shaker. I normally choose a spring onion if I’m feeling posh. There’s something endlessly satisfying about removing one green sprig from its elastic-banded brethren, peeling away one wrinkled layer, and cutting along the line to form a collection of tiny disks in various shades of green. It’s a less intense zing than you get with a regular bulb, and you don’t cry when cutting it. Or if you do cry it’s not because of the onion.
Sometimes I just like tomatoes on their own, without the onion or garlic, or even the bread. There was a time when I used to buy an entire punnet and just eat all of it, and that was my breakfast. You used to laugh at me for only eating tomatoes. I like them a lot. They’re a fruit, I said, so it’s basically like eating raspberries. But I wouldn't put them in a fruit salad, you said, which was fair. Didn’t stop me from eating them though, because I liked the way you rolled your eyes every time I took the punnet out of the fridge.
It’s at this point that you may start to kick yourself as you realise you shouldn’t have put the toast on so soon. Having popped up sometime during the tomato-chopping process you’ve now got to decide whether to put it through the dreaded re-toast, or leave it as is. Depending on which option you pick, it’s either going to be stone cold or reheatedly hard. It's your choice at the end of the day. Neither is pleasant per se, but both you and the Poor Man’s Bruschetta will survive just fine.
The main argument for risking a re-heat is to make the next step easier. In real bruschetta recipes, the writers tell you to source only the finest olive oil and lightly drizzle atop your fresh sourdough with vine tomatoes. Which sounds really nice if you have money to waste, so instead I'd just opt for any old margarine or soy/sunflower-based alternative spread. There’s probably not that much of a difference anyway, and you can’t steal any more of your posh flatmate’s condiments if you want to escape a passive-aggressive sticky note slapped across the fridge. If your toast is warm, the stuff will spread like a dream, soaking saltily down into the crust. Looks delicious now right? The golden slice that will be simultaneously soft and crispy, pleasantly greasy with a comforting chew.
But trust me, It’s worth waiting just a little while longer.
I think Poor Man’s Bruschetta might be one of the best things I got out of Cambridge. Sorry, because you probably expected me to say a degree, or knowledge, or an increased sense of self-worth. But the truth is I find myself using those things less and less as the days away from university take over my world. I find myself biking to work a completely different version of myself than the adolescent you met that day at the opposite end of the corridor. I’m on the train, eyes full of sleep and a resignation to the fact that most days I can’t make any difference whatsoever, despite what I was told growing up. My bank account is still empty though, so I eat Poor Man’s Bruschetta when I have nothing else in.
It’s a little like going home.
After you’ve muddled around the tomatoes and garlic and spring onion, you put them all on the toast. Pile them high, with little bits of red and white and green tumbling down the side, tomato juice soaking into the toast, definitely cooling everything down again if it wasn’t before.
Keep. The Toast. Whole.
It’s more satisfying to eat when you’re holding the bread like a plate. Then top with salt and pepper. This is important, and relatively simple. Someone in the kitchen should at least have these in stock, but if not use the sachets you stole from hall or the chip van after a night out. You can also add vinegar if you want. Sloshings of it. If you happen to know someone who buys balsamic: good on you, you’ve done university right
You always used to buy balsamic vinegar as a treat to add to your pasta sauce. I remember one time we set off the fire alarm because you put too much of the stuff in with the peppers you were frying. I opened the door without knowing and the smoky steam billowed in my face, right down the corridor and into the alarm. We had to stand out in the snow in our dressing gowns. Everyone else hated us at that moment, but afterwards it became one of those jokes we always came back to. For the rest of the year we made sure no-one entered that kitchen when you were frying peppers. Even though that plan didn’t always work- especially when we got back late at night and were too tired to remember to close the door if we wanted to do toast or something- we only got caught out a couple more times.
After you’ve finished reminiscing, draw your attention back to the Poor Man’s Bruschetta.
Take a second, observe what you’ve just created.
Consider how much care has been put into this big bit of bread you’ve dropped onto a tiny plate. Pick it up, smell the mix of vegetables and fruit and toast, the sharp tang of salt and balsamic lingering above everything else. There are crumbs stuck to the plate because of kitchen condensation.
The second is over, and you bite
And it is delicious.
It is cool, and salty, and fleshy. There’s a hint of sweetness alongside fresh vegetables- just the right amount of health balanced with taste and body. Out of everything I know, which as I realise more each day isn’t much, I am certain the Poor Man’s Bruschetta has the power to make everything half a percent better.
I fed you Poor Man’s Bruschetta when you were crying in June three years ago. It wasn’t much, and I stole your sunflower spread to make it, and I didn’t ask first. Someone left crumbs in the yellow, but I promise it wasn’t me.
We ate in the corridor because the kitchen was too small for a table, then we washed up with the lemon liquid you kept locked away in a cupboard for safekeeping. Then we went back to work, because you weren’t crying anymore. Even though you were sad, you could smile again.
It’s not much, but it’s what I have, and it means the world, like you do to me.
When I remember those years we spent together, I don’t think it will be the arguments or the imposter syndrome or the deadlines I’ll focus on. It won’t even be the dates, or the parties, or the group dynamics that are now stretched like webbing from my heart right across the world.
No.
I think what I loved most of all was spending time with you, just the two of us crouched in that harshly-lit corridor with our big bits of toast.
You,
And Me,
And the food that got us through.
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