Homemade isn't always where the heart is

by Beth Teitell
Thursday, May 23, 2002

What counts as ``homemade''?

Slice-and-bake cookies? A Boboli pizza? Guacamole from Trader Joe's that you transferred, lovingly, into one of your nicest serving dishes?

Memorial Day is almost here, and you know what that means - besides permission to wear white shoes. It's get-invited-to-a-friend's-barbeque-and-be-asked-to-bring-something season. Potato salad. Chocolate chip cookies. A dip.

Here's what I want to know: How many ingredients do you have to combine to claim you were the chef, and does it matter if some of those ``ingredients'' are things like a ready-made pie crust, or hummus or a poached salmon from the prepared-foods section of Bread and Circus?

I ran the question by a noncooking friend. ``You know what bugs me?'' she asked. ``It's that `homemade' is presumptively good. People act as if you're a better person if you make brownies instead of buying them. Why? Rosie's brownies are better than mine. Isn't the truly nice thing to recognize my shortcomings and not inflict them on others?''

She was on a (store-bought) roll: ``And tell me something,'' she continued, ``which is more important, to be a well-informed and attractive member of a party, or to have made your own salsa?''

The time she doesn't spend chopping cilantro and dicing tomatoes and jalapeno peppers, she explained, she can devote to reading ``The Corrections'' or shopping for a new outfit or working out. ``That's what I do for my friends,'' she concluded.

But fighting ``homemade'' is like criticizing mom or (home-baked) apple pie. At a time when delicious and interesting food from anywhere in the world is available all over Boston, the dish with the most cachet is something -no matter how bland - that comes from your very own kitchen. If you've grown your own herbs, or churned your own butter, so much the better.

Part of the problem may be the definition of ``homemade.'' Can't we all agree to just lower the bar? The other day, when my husband jokingly questioned the legitimacy of my ``homemade'' pumpkin pie (which I make by scooping ``Pie in a Can'' mix into a Keebler's graham cracker crust), I was ready with a response: ``If I didn't do anything, would the pie exist?''

No, it would not.

One of my friends married a homemade kind of guy - he makes his own tomato sauce from scratch - and now she's turned into a homemade person, too. I called and asked her what life was like on the other side. ``Making things seems more difficult than it is,'' she confided. ``You just add flour and baking soda and butter and you've got something delicious. It's an easy way to get compliments.''

Hmmm. Maybe I should reconsider my pie recipe.

Meanwhile, another friend lives (and dines) on the other side of the bell curve. I called her around 6 p.m. the other day, and as she rode herd on her three young children she mentioned it was her husband's turn to make dinner. ``What's he cooking?'' I asked. ``He's not,'' she said. ``He's picking up something from the deli. In our household, that counts as making dinner.

``If he gets something hot,'' she added, ``it's homemade.''