The first red tomato appeared in my garden this morning. It was a cherry tomato, a half-inch in diameter, but it was still ripe and delicious. It got me thinking that southern Ohio/ Kentucky tomatoes must be the single best argument for locavore eating. From the time I was a kid, I can’t remember any food—not chocolate, not chili, not even blueberry pie—tasting as good as a sun-warmed tomato straight from the garden.
I eat all the tomatoes I can get from July to October, and I hardly touch them from November to June—I’ll even pick them out of a salad at a restaurant during the chillier months of the year. Nothing is worse than a cottony, flavorless winter tomato, but a summer tomato—ah, that is the stuff. If I had written Dandelion Wine, that homage to summer, it would have been called Fresh Sliced Tomatoes. If I tackled my own version of Rememberance of Things Past, the trigger for a million memories would be a tomato straight from the garden, not a warm madeleine cookie.
My uncle used to pack a couple of suitcases of Rabbit Hash tomatoes (the Ohio River valley, on either side, is the mecca of homegrown tomatoes) and take them to Florida where he’d trade them for hotel rooms and restaurant meals, because they had nothing like a good northern summer tomato down in the tropics. I’ve had meals in August that consisted of a tomato and basil salad followed by gazpacho (cold tomato soup) and baked tomatoes. And I consider them some of the best meals I’ve ever eaten.
When they are plentiful, I can sun-dried tomatoes, and when I open a jar of them in February, I get exactly the same feeling Ray Bradbury describes when they open a bottle of his grandmother’s dandelion wine in the depths of winter: it’s summer in a jar. Here’s to red, ripe, Cincinnati tomatoes—coming soon!
