Summertime Tomatoes

Can You Believe It’s Not Fruit?

French women and virtually all foodies rave about tomatoes in season. If you’ve heard nothing else about the magic of seasonality, you have almost surely heard (dozens of times) that the difference between a fresh tomato in season and a supermarket tomato in December (or July, for that matter) is night and day. A specimen of the real thing can seem like a meal; the common counterfeit defames even a BLT.

If daffodils and strawberries tell me it’s spring, nothing says summer like a sunflower and the red of a perfectly ripe tomato. Why do we wax rhapsodic over this most common vegetable, which everyone learns and then forgets is a fruit? (Important distinction, since you might par hasard put one in the refrigerator, and nobody would do that with a ripe fruit, would they? Of course not.) The thing about the tomato, my favorite fruit that isn’t a strawberry, is that it actually is rather like a strawberry: of all fruits, these two have been optimally designed to capture the energy of the sun and turn it into some of the best eats on earth.

Now, do a tomato wrong—pick it unripe, ship it north, set it to brood on a supermarket shelf—and you’ll get exactly what you deserve: a potato with a little extra lycopene. Actually, I’m being grossly unfair to the potato, but tubers will have their moment in winter. For now, however, it’s summer, and in summer you should permit tomatoes to do their thing: let the sunshine in. The best tomatoes (and basil, for that matter) I ever tasted were in Puglia, Italy. French women brook no chauvinism where produce is concerned: best is best. Maybe it was the local combination of heat and dryness, but the intensity of the flavors was unequaled, and the Italians know a good thing when they taste it; on the autostrada near the tomato canning plant in Avellino I’ve seen caravans of trucks in summer laden with tomatoes on their way to becoming sauce. (By the way, a good tomato sauce in can or jar is worth ten rotten tomatoes on the shelf: come winter, it’s the best way to keep this sacrament of summer in your life and profit from its matchless concentration of nutrients. And, oh, the taste!)

An old friend of mine has tomatoes every day for breakfast during the season, which is basically the summer months, wherever he is. I suspect that, being an older gent; he’s not only hooked on the taste but wants the lycopene, a known prostate-cancer inhibitor. A cousin who’s never had a prostate, however, also likes tomatoes for her breakfast. She used to make her own confiture de tomates, a jam of seedless tomatoes
(though she would keep the skin), puréeing them with a pinch of sugar and adding a vanilla bean before transferring it to a sterile jar. At breakfast, she has her slice of bread with the confit smeared on it, hold the butter. Tell me it’s not a fruit!

In New York, I could not survive summer without New Jersey beefsteak tomatoes, a large variety with a distinctive flavor. Brought to market fresh from the farm, they are delicious sliced and served with slivers of mozzarella, a light dressing, and fresh basil—what the Italians call an insalata aprese, though it’s enjoyed many places far from Capri. I apply the same recipe in Provence, where the day’s main meal's lunch (as often as not followed by an afternoon dodge-the heat siesta, then, toward sunset, an outing for some illicit raspberry picking from the communal bushes along the road). Late dinner, served outdoors, often consists of no more than a tomato salad with some nice country bread to mop up the juice and dressing, fresh goat cheese, and various fresh fruits for dessert. Sounds like not much? Trust me, no one leaves the table unsatisfied.