Forty years ago, Martha Holmberg knew exactly what she wanted to do: train as a chef at one of the top culinary schools in France.
She didn't know she would eventually author or co-author nine cookbooks, including a James Beard award winner. She didn't know she would write hundreds of pages on the humble tomato, creating an authoritative text on the fruit, Simply Tomato, which hit shelves this June. She didn't know she would cultivate a successful career on the east coast, then in Portland, then in a new, developing food scene in Spokane.
Back then, when Holmberg was in Denver prepping salads for a small cafe, she only knew that for $25,000, she could study at École de Cuisine La Varenne, the premiere bilingual culinary school started by Anne Willan on the Rue Saint-Dominique in Paris.
But Holmberg didn't have 25 grand. So she put her name on the work study waitlist, which was about two years long.
A month later, she missed a phone call. The cassette tape on her answering machine played back a posh British accent: "This is Anne Willan. I'm looking for an intern to work with me on a new book. I can't pay you. But you'll get all your school for free after we're finished."
Holmberg took the unpaid internship in Washington D.C. and moved in with her parents to save on rent. On her first day working for Willan, she answered the phone. The voice on the other end — that sing-song voice — had brought French cooking to the televisions of servantless American home cooks.
"This is Julia," the voice said. "Could I speak with Anne, please?" Holmberg put Willan on the phone with, yes, Julia Child, a good friend of Willan's. Holmberg breathed a sigh of relief.
"Okay," she told herself, "this is all going to work out just fine."
Holmberg did eventually earn a grand diplômé, the highest culinary degree, from La Varenne. She then went on to be the editor-in-chief and publisher for Fine Cooking magazine, food editor for The Oregonian, founder of MIX magazine, and CEO of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. Holmberg most recently worked with Joshua McFadden on the award-winning Six Seasons: A New Way with Vegetables.
To celebrate her newest cookbook, Simply Tomato, Wishing Tree Books hosts Holmberg on July 27 to share more about her work. Holmberg is chatting with local food writer and baker Kate Lebo, who helped Holmberg test recipes for the book, about everything from good essays, good eats, and, of course, good tomatoes.
A diligent intern, Holmberg kept answering phones for Willan. Willan was impressed, boasting to a colleague that Holmberg was a "wonderful administrator."
"F— you, lady," Holmberg thought to herself. "I'm a chef."
Holmberg finally started school at La Varenne when she was 30. Her enthusiasm never waivered. I love reducing, she wrote in one of her first notebooks. She geeked out over the simple process of cooking down liquids to make powerful spoonfuls of consommé and jus.
After she graduated, Holmberg worked as a personal chef, then took a job at the legendary Greenbrier resort in West Virginia. But she had started culinary school at a different stage of life than the twentysomethings willing to glorify the abuse and intensity of high-end kitchens.
"And then I realized, they're all working when everybody else is playing," Holmberg says. "I also got a taste of writing about food from doing the internship. And I was like, 'Oh, well, this is really cool, because I get to be around food. I get to cook food. I get to eat food. But I don't have to grind it out in a restaurant every day.'"
As a French-trained chef, Holmberg could speak a kitchen's language. As a writer, she could translate it for a lay audience. And once she admitted that she was, indeed, a good administrator, she could lean into her executive skills of meeting deadlines and coordinating logistics. So she wrote and edited magazines for people who wanted to learn how to cook, ensuring that recipes were successful and chefs were properly recognized for their work.
Holmberg spent the last decade and a half in Portland, Oregon, finding a sense of home on the west coast. She and her partner John moved to Spokane in 2021 when they felt the need for a new life and more camping and better access to trout fishing. They pared down their kitchen and packed up the car. But Holmberg knew one thing would stay the same.
"Tomatoes is the one thing that I can think, way back, all my various houses — I always had some kind of tomato," she says. Spokane would be no different.
Holmberg's tomato garden is more like a jungle gym. Stakes and cross beams look like parallel bars, with small strings hanging down like ropes. The gymnasts are tomato vines, trimmed and trained to climb up the strings so that clusters of heavy fruit eventually hang over the top.
"I keep thinking, 'Wouldn't it be great to go to study and get your Master Gardener certificate?'" Holmberg says. "But I'm not very disciplined. Sounds like way too much work."
Content as an amateur gardener, Holmberg says tomatoes have the highest effort-to-payoff ratio, since "the difference between a homegrown tomato and a grocery store tomato is just night and day, right?"
She considered them a personal, bumbling adventure. That is, until publishers came knocking.
"I think my agent said, 'You've been writing everybody else's book. You need to write your own book. What do you want to write about?'"
Holmberg doesn't remember thinking much about it.
"I was just like, 'Oh, how about tomatoes?'"
Despite the fruit's global fan club, there aren't many cookbooks dedicated solely to the simple tomato. Holmberg changes that. She gives the tomato main-character energy on toast and sheet pans, in pastas and cocktails.
She even revisits something she dismissed years ago for being too fussy: tomato water.
"It's like clear tomato juice that drips out of the tomato and it's really intensely flavored, and like, whoa, the essence of tomato," she says. "But it seemed to me to be something that you only did in a restaurant and not something for a home cook."
But with gallons of fruit from almost two-dozen tomato plants collecting in her kitchen, Holmberg realized tomato water was a pretty hands-off process with dramatic, delicious results. It freezes well, transforms risotto, and invigorates sparkling sodas.
Simply Tomato is meant to be used year-round, and Holmberg doesn't snub respectable tomato products like canned tomatoes and tomato paste. (She does, however, recommend buying whole canned tomatoes and dicing, chopping, or pureeing them at your own discretion.)
Her love for reduction never waned. As she developed the book, she started dreaming of single variety tomato concentrates. "Imagine concentrated Sungold paste!" she says, wide-eyed.
Simply Tomato gives chefs at every skill level these brand new, savory daydreams. Creativity and celebration should be the prerogative of any home cook, Holmberg says, no matter if you're feeding a crowd or yourself.
"I really want people to cook for themselves whether they have anybody else there or not," Holmberg says. "I lived by myself for a long time. And I was like, 'Well, who better to cook for than me?' You can cook exactly what you want and you can feel good about yourself." ♦
Simply Tomato with Martha Holmberg & Kate Lebo • Thu, July 27 at 6 pm • Free • Wishing Tree Books • 1410 E. 11th Ave. • wishingtreebookstore.com • 509-315-9875
