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.