On Saturday at the Mount Pleasant Farmerts Market we took a while making up our minds about the tomatoes. After looking at the boxes under the tables, many of them with stickers from the Lancaster Produce Auction, we decided to buy some heirloom tomatoes. It occurred to me afterward that the nominal price per pound is the same as I paid for flank steak thirty-five years ago.
The price turned out to be worth paying. While cutting up tomatoes for taboulleh, I told my wife that we finally had tomatoes that tasted like tomatoes. This may have been the first time it happened in a couple of years. These tomatoes probably refute our earlier notion that the heavy rains of June had weakened the flavor; the hybrids we get just aren't very good. Next summer we may have to try growing them.
When I was a boy, my family pulled down our garage, mostly from an expectation that it fall down on its own. Half we covered with flagstones, half became garden. Out of dirt soaked with oil and filings from crankcases, probably sown with old rusted nails, splinters, and bits of tire tread, we got excellent tomatoes. But I don't think that I was properly appreciative of them, though I must have been made to eat them in salads.
While I cut up the tomatoes Sunday, it occurred to me why I might have been unenthusiastic about the tomatoes. The texture is too complicated for a child's preferences, with skin, flesh, seeds, and juice. The great principle of kid food is consistency of texture: the best meat is hamburger or skinless, boneless chicken breast; the best fruit is an apple, quartered; the best vegetable the potato, baked, mashed, or fried. Homemade chicken soup, with irregular bits of meat and with bits of fat spotting the surface, is far inferior to Campbell's with perfect little cubes of chicken in homogenized broth.
When we purchased and ate some heirloom tomatoes, I was struck how they compared with the kinds I had been accustomed to buying and eating (e.g., they look so different inside and outside). Nostalgia kicked in, and I began remembering my western Pennsylvania childhood and the backyard gardens with tomatoes, beans, green onions, and bell peppers. And then I suddenly felt really old. Your posting again reminds me of my infirmity, senility, and dotage. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteThe summers of the eastern US can be sweltering, but the produce goes a long way to make up for it, doesn't it? I hope that you will have many planting seasons left.
DeleteInteresting principle re kids' food. I am growing tomatoes on a balcony in Brussels. They are egg shaped & each time one ripens & is harvested it reminds me of collecting actual eggs. If you do grow some next year, I'd recommend the bushing varieties. I find staking tomato plants surprisingly difficult. I know someone who missed the brief window of opportunity in 1956 when she could have escaped Communist Hungary; she thought she'd wait to help her mother bottle the tomato crop and, by the time that was done, it was too late, the chance was lost.
ReplyDeleteI should have thought that the crop would have been in and bottled by the time the revolution got going in 1956. The nearest I have come to canning tomatoes was making ketchup a couple of of Labor Day weekends in south central Pennsylvania.
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