Stewed Tomatoes and Mom’s Kitchen

My mother believed the quickest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach. It wasn’t just a saying—it was a strategy. And when she married my father, she put it to work with the quiet determination of a woman from Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a town known mostly for its floods and its resilience.

My dad was born in New York City. He wasn’t a man about town—he didn’t strut or name-drop—but just being born in the five boroughs gives New Yorkers a certain cosmopolitan confidence. They carry it like a birthright, even if they’ve never set foot in a museum or ordered anything more exotic than a pastrami sandwich.

When my mother served stewed tomatoes at the very first dinner she cooked for my father, he raved about them, and she took note. The next night, she served them again. Another rave. She was two-for-two.

On the third night, she ladled out the stewed tomatoes once more, expecting a hat trick of compliments. Instead, my father looked up from his plate and said, “Vivian, don’t you know how to cook any other vegetable besides stewed tomatoes?”

She never made them again. Not once in the 55 years that they were married. The tomatoes were banished, a casualty of early marital diplomacy.

It was a moment that said everything about their dynamic. My mother, practical and perceptive, knew how to read a room—and a husband. My father, polite but direct, had a way of delivering feedback that stuck. And somewhere between the floods of Johnstown and the sidewalks of New York, they built a life that balanced grit with grace.

Years later, I’d discover broccoli in a Navy chow line and fell in love with it. Finally, I had another vegetable besides corn that I liked.  When I asked my mother why she’d never served it, she said simply, “Your father didn’t like it.” Another vegetable eliminated by the boy from New York City.

But the stewed tomato story stuck with me. It wasn’t just about vegetables—it was about the quiet negotiations that shape a household. The unspoken rules. The culinary ceasefires. The way love sometimes means knowing when to retire a dish, even if it once won applause.

And maybe, just maybe, the quickest way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach—it’s through the stories that simmer behind the stove.

My mother, ever the strategist, had a motto later in life: “The first one to complain about the food is tomorrow’s cook.” But if you were Whiskers, our beloved dog, you never had to worry. Chicken was his favorite, and Mom made it just for him. We’d walk in, catch the aroma, and say, “That smells good—what’s for dinner?” She’d wave us off: “Get out of the kitchen. That’s for Whiskers.”

So dinner often included leftovers for the humans and fresh roasted chicken for Whiskers. We sat around the table, forks in hand, watching him savor every bite like a four-legged food critic. No one said a word— but we were all thinking of that classic line in the movie When Harry Met Sally, “I’ll have what she’s having.”

Peace & Love, and all of the above,

Earl