What Money Can't Buy (Almost)

"Only two things money can't buy;

True love and home-grown tomatoes"

- Old Song


Fresh tomato season has snuck up upon us. I'm not talking about those spheroids that are hard as baseballs, flavored weak as water, imported from foreign lands like California and Florida, and available year-round in the local Safeway; oh no, I'm talking the meaty, red as first-water rubies, off the vine delicacies I get at my local hardware store (light bulbs, chain saw oil,local vegetables). These are early-maturing varieties, trucked down from the Amish farmers in Hanover County, Pennsylvania, and taste like the essence of summer. Attack one armed with a salt shaker - the juices run down your chin and the flavor pops on your tongue.

Grocery store tomatoes are picked green for better shipping and turn red by the application of ethylene gas which breaks down the chlorophyll. Unfortunately, the gas does not affect insoluble calcium pectinate, which in real tomatoes, breaks down into soluble pectin, allowing that satisfying chomp.

We take our tomatoes seriously around here. A crab cake sandwich just doesn't taste right without a slice of ripe tomato. Better yet, make a crab salad and fill a hollowed out tomato. Add a crisp white wine and lunch does not get any better.

The great Earl Weaver, manager of the Baltimore Orioles back in their glory days at Memorial Stadium, had a tomato patch out near the bullpen and woe betide any grounds keepers who interfered with his crop. He is said to have handed out fresh tomatoes like game balls to his star players. I'm sure Cal Ripken must have become sick of them.

If you want to be really decadent, try sauteing an onion in good olive oil until it caramelizes; add a stick of pepperoni, sliced thin; and a good ripe diced tomato. Let it cook on high heat until the tomato just starts to break down and add a half cup of sour cream. Meanwhile, the prudent chef will have boiled a pound of rigatoni, taking care to remember that this particular pasta always takes longer than originally thought. Drain the pasta and pour into the pot of sauce. Toss to mix and eat. This is a very rich, old Venetian recipe my grandmother taught me (even thought she was a Triestina to the core). Enjoy.

Botanically speaking, tomatoes are true berries. The ancestral form, found in the Andean foothills are tiny and mostly eaten by birds which disperse their indigestible seeds. The seeds are indigestible to us as well and many a sewage treatment plant has tomato vines growing riot around the periphery.

Tomatoes were taken to Europe by the Spanish with the other spoils of the Aztec and Inca conquests: gold, jade, corn, and chilis. When they reached southern Europe, tomatoes were greeted as Mana from Heaven, and become an integral part of the cuisine. Thomas Jefferson brought tomatoes to North America after serving as Ambassador to France and travelling widely through Europe. He experimented with various cultivars and ate them regularly to the great alarm of his friends. At the time, tomatoes were called "love apples", grown as ornamental plants only, and were widely believed to be poisonous. This is only partly true; the leaves, vines, and raw green fruit contain alkaloids such as solanum, scopalamine, and various other nasty things which act as natural insecticides. Tomatoes are in the same botanical family, Solanacae, and related to peppers, potatoes, and tobacco; all of which produce various witches' brews of defensive chemicals.

Another Solanacae, Jimsonweed, contains a powerful hallucinogen, and was originally called Jamestown Weed after the first English settlement in Virginia. It seems several settlers during one of the regular food shortages tried eating this particular weed. They were out of it for several days and the practice soon caught on among their bored and hungry neighbors and had to be suppressed by the authorities. The settlers soon switched to growing and using tobacco, which, as we all know, is completely harmless. Interestingly, the tobacco they originally obtained from the Indians and grew as a cash crop is not the same one may find in the average pack of Luckies today. John Rolf, of Pocahontas fame, imported a different species for the plantations from Central America. The early form is still grown in parts of Europe where it is used for insecticides.

The tomatoes from the hardware store don't quite measure up to home-grown. I haven't planted any this year, but neighbors have. Tomatoes are prolific enough that I expect to see a bag or two left on the doorstep before long.