What Would Mae West Say? A Tomato Manifesto.

Lemon Boys and Pesto, on Cranberry-Semolina Sourdough

I thought it was Mae West who said something about good sex being great, and bad sex being pretty good too, but I can't find the attribution, so maybe I'm wrong; apparently of similar mind, I did come across one Jimmy Williams (and again, I'm honestly not sure which, but my money is on the old Red Sox manager), who said, “Sex is like money, golf and beer - even when it's bad, it's good.” Whatever the case, I'm going to argue that sex is a really lousy analogy for tomatoes.

Because the thing about tomatoes is this: There is perfect, there is nearly perfect, and there is wholly unacceptable. "Middle ground" is a term better reserved for debating the relative merits of cooking beef to rare vs. medium-rare specifications, or figuring out how to get your tween daughter to clean her room. No, with tomatoes, the territory between "good" and "bad" is more like a DMZ: It's right there in front of you, it's clear and well-defined, and if you spend too much time inside it, you're likely to end up shot. Or, if we're talking about the kitchen, with a mouthful of mealy, watery, flavorless red mush of only the most casual, and likely offensive, relation to what your palate had greedily anticipated. Come to think, maybe that's the better analogy: If your favorite, wisened grandparent, full of love, spark, and pithy bits of folksy wisdom, were a succulent, ripe heirloom cultivar, then the drab supermarket tomato, mass-farmed for the ketchup-and-shitty-pasta-sauce market, picked sufficiently close to granite-like hardness that it will endure hundreds (if not thousands) of miles of open roads, piled en masse atop eighteen-wheeler bin trucks, without suffering so much as a blemish, is a bit like that woebegone uncle or black sheep cousin in a Chevy Chase family vacation movie (or, perhaps, from your own Thanksgiving table). You know that if you actually went out and ran a DNA test, it would confirm that he does in fact share genetic code with the rest of the family, but no empirical evidence, physical nor behavioral, exists to support that conclusion.


To bite into a fine tomato- one grown from an old school cultivar with a funny name like Purple Cherokee, Early Girl, or Green Zebra, and then picked from the vine within a day or two of true physiological ripeness - dressed with nothing but a pinch of good salt, is to hear a the voice of a properly tuned instrument: It attacks your palate, demanding attention, with notes of acid, sweet, and salty in varying degrees of dominance; it is simultaneously firm and contained (as your tooth pierces the skin), and supple and explosive (as the flesh comes apart in your mouth). Maybe there is a bit of Mae West in the tomato after all, so long as it's a good tomato? Never forget that the tomato is a fruit, and, really, it ought to taste a lot more like a fruit than a vegetable. But the not-good tomato, that is another story entirely, it is the festering swamp to the crystalline mountain lake, the yellow jacket to the honey bee, the mani/pedi to the ingrown nail. The skin is either as taught as a drum and nondifferentiable from its own flesh, or slack and loose as a failed botox, a wrinkled skin slipping across the mealy flesh underneath; the flesh will be hard and grainy if it has only just reached been unloaded from the truck; or it may be soft and farinaceous, if it's been on left on the shelf for too long. I'm not sure which version is worse, but it doesn't really matter, because they all suck. And I haven't even talked about the flavor: The most optimistic impression on the palate will be that of an unadulterated lack of flavor, because whatever flavors it does possess - bitter, green and vegetal - will, like the ne'er-do-well cousin come home for the holidays, inexorably offend.

Fortunately, there is an easy answer: Don't Eat Out-of-Season Tomatoes. We are, here and now and forever, adding this to the Proximal Kitchen's semi-official manifesto of eating. Or, to paraphrase the child-labor advocates over at Nike, Just Don't Do It. If it were up to me, I'd have everyone follow the approach of the crew over at the Healdsburg Bar and Grill who, during the many long months of Tomato Winter, will only put a tomato on your burgers if you force them to do it, over the chef's printed admonition on the menu, and at a grossly inflated charge (presumably intended to compensate the kitchen for the forced abrogation of the cook's Hippocratic oath only to serve you food that they actually believe will taste good as much as it is to disincent your poor decision).

Saturday's Tomato Matinee, couretesy of Soda Rock Farms

The good news, at this particularly proximal moment, is that our local tomato season, has truly sprung. Not exactly on-time, however. More like, Finally. As in, Finally, it's about [expletive] time, because I live where some of the finest tomatoes in the known universe grow, and it's just plain wrong to make me wait until  late August to get my fix. To live in Sonoma County is hardly to subsist amongst the forced deprivation of an extended tour on a nuclear submarine or offshore oil rig; I could certainly purchase the irredeemable supermarket facsimile year-round, and I've seen a few, peripherally local, heirlooms, since the last real vintage in the fall of 2009; but, as I've already tried to explain with a vigor equal to its , I won't - I can't - subject my family's taste buds to such effrontery, and neither should you to yours. Finally, however, the farmer's market is literally teeming with tomatoes, at the stalls of the dedicated specialists (Soda Rock Farms), as well those of the many other outstanding growers I'm lucky enough to shop with (Wyeth Acres, Preston Vineyards, and Early Bird Farm, to name but a few). I'm even getting regular contributions from my own garden, and I really suck at growing tomatoes.

I'll cook all sorts of things with tomatoes over the next couple of months, and you'll hear about some, if not most, of it here. Once in a while, I may get a little cutesy and try to dress them up a bit. For years I've been tempted, but failed to muster the courage, to mount an assault on Alain Passard's legendary tomate farcie confit aux douze saveurs at L'Arpege. Still and all, I will typically treat a tomato much the way I'd treat a peach, erring on the side of simplicity over complexity, mainly in an effort simply not to screw up a good thing. However, unlike a peach - the peach being one of those rare foods that seems almost impossible to improve either by fiddling with or adorning it - the tomato is a remarkably versatile foil, tolerating heat to cold, playing condiment to centerpiece, presentable from highly processed to nearly naked, served as an accompanying element in a dish of anything from seafood to steak to cheese. The first tomatoes of the season, however, deserve a special respect, a period of honest assessment and contemplation, and this - and here, I'm sure, Mae is with me - seems best done naked, or at least nearly so.

Thus, as we continue eat our way through the first few batches of ripe little gems from our own garden, the dominant themes resonate around salads and sandwiches. The variations are truly limitless, but I really liked the most recent incarnation, as pictured at the top of this post, so here you go:

Heirloom Tomato Sandwiches on Cranberry-Semolina with Pesto, Olive Oil, and Salt

You could use virtually any tomatoes here, and - ideally - I think you'd serve a few different ones, both for variety of color and flavor. A red-toned beauty (Purple Cherokee, Pink Lady, or Early Girl), a yellow (Tangerine or Lemon Boy), and a green (Green Zebra) would provide a gorgeous array of color as well as a distinctive breadth of flavors, sweetness, and acidity. Similarly with the bread, you could use anything, really, but a lightly toasted, crusty sourdough works particularly well. I hadn't planned it ahead of time, but this one - Cranberry-Semolina from the Full Circle Bakery in Penngrove - really worked well, with the chewy, sweet-tart bite of the cranberries adding just the right balance against the acidic tomatoes and the licorice notes in the pesto.

1. Toast some slices of the bread, preferably a crusty sourdough with a baked-in dried fruit (cranberries, apricots... nuts in the bread, for some reason, sound unpleasant to me, although I can't say why, because nuts and fruits go well together, there are already nuts in pesto... hmmmm...)
2. Top each slice of bread with a thick slice of tomato - ideally, a few different color - and then top each slice of tomato with a small quenelle of pesto. (Why bother with a quenelle? Because it takes almost zero effort and the uniform shape will look nice against the slightly irregular backdrop of the heirloom tomato and crusty bread, and because it will show off the effort you put into your pesto.)
3. Sprinkle with fleur de sel and drizzle the plate with olive oil, preferably from Dry Creek, such as that from Preston or the pricier, but unimpeachable (qualitatively speaking), Da Vero. 

Classic Pesto (from M Hazan)
I've talked at length about pesto and its Mediterranean cousin, pistou here, and I like all sorts of variations, and many have a particular place (with cheese; without cheese; for fish; for pasta Genovese), but nothing - and I've made and consumed many hundreds in my life - is ever quite the equal of the classic Italian variety, and no version seems quite so perfect as the simple food-processor method of M Hazan's, described accurately, along with some pretty decent comments and observations, here, in case you don't have the book (Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking, which, by the way, is one of my few "must have" cookbooks, certainly a Top 10, maybe a Top 5).

Hazan's is so easy, and so perfect, that I can not possibly add anything without also diluting it. However, I will emphasize that, if you're going to make pesto, in addition to following Ms Hazan to the letter, you must heed a few basic rules (these are, of course, common to all cooking, but the simplicity and intensity of pesto offers even less slack than usual):

• Use good basil. You really ought to grow your own - it's cheap and easy, even for a challenged gardener like me. Make sure it's the Genovese varietal: There are many basils, but you only want to make classic pesto with the particularly aromatic Genovese basil and its distinctive note of licorice.
• Use good olive oil (it needn't be your best - Costco's organic extra virgin is just fine, in fact), something with leaning more toward the grassy style, rather than a really buttery one.
• Use only freshly grated Parmigiano Reggiano and Pecorino Romano cheeses. Seriously, don't buy the waxy, shrink-wrapped, Swiss-cheese-tasting crap from the market, don't buy it pre-grated in tubs from Trader Joe's, and never, not ever, shall you pour grated cheese from a shiny green can.
• Be careful about your garlic: First, try to find a grower that offers more than one kind, and that can describe the difference. Some are just way too hot and spicy. Rose de Lautrec is my go-to garlic if I can only have one, but obviously whatever the Italians classically use for pesto would be fine. Just be careful, because they are not, not at all, all the same thing. This extends to measurements: What, precisely, is a "clove" of garlic? The same bulb could have cloves varying in size by a factor of 4; and different types of garlic could have their heat vary by a factor of 4; so you could have a recipe calling for "2 cloves" and it could mean 2 or 32, from one extreme to the other. There is no way to deal with this uncertainty except to learn to do it by taste, to learn the garlic you use, to learn how much for your pesto.
• Don't forget to season it, but don't risk over-salting until all the cheeses are incorporated, as Romano in particular is very salty. 

The only other thing