I love to cook my family's traditional recipes using the same ingredients and brands my parents and their parents used. Doing this gives me a warm feeling...comfort that I can depend on the outcome of my process.
After using a certain brand of tomato paste all my life (I won't mention names but it's initials are Hunts), I opened a can about a year ago to find that, unlike a paste at all, it's contents poured out of the can. It was slushy...more like puree. I didn't know what to do with the stuff...it didn't act like the paste I'd grown up with. Yes, a can of tomato paste can have a character or even...some might say...a personality!
I became outraged over the fact that a product such as this staple of my kitchen could become 'undependable'. So, I contacted the company.
They responded by sending me an email saying they were sorry I'd had a bad experience (which was nice) but then they offered me a year's supply of that very same stuff that I was complaining about! I was so stunned at the offer and how it failed to even confront the basis of my complaint that I froze, thanking them and giving them my address. It happened so fast, I guess. But now, I've got a pantry full of mushy paste and am finding that even the competition's paste, whenever I've tried other brands hoping it isn't an industry-wide epidemic, fairly oozes out of it's can, too!
Have other cooks experienced this or am I getting to that age where small, seemingly inconsequential events push me over the edge? Is it an inconsequential event? Conspiracy maybe?
Sure, it's just tomato paste...but don't cataclysmic uprisings like world wars have to begin somewhere? WMD...Gulf of Tonkin...all made up...not even true! Whereas I have a pantry full of evidence.
I could be led to believe that the mystery of diluted paste could spark unrest in the least likely places. Like my kitchen.
No comments:
Post a Comment