Hot enough for you?
Ain’t that just like Coyote? Ain’t
that just like the Strong Sun Moon?
Blasting
that unbearable, that stifling, that maddening heat just when you were on a
roll. Makes you want to just sit at home
in air-conditioning and watch bad TV and bad baseball. Just when the days get
long, just when the shore opens, just when the trees are bearing all that
fruit, just when the local farmers’ markets are bedecked and bedizened with all
that summer bounty.
Including the heirloom tomato, one of the greatest foods of all time…
…and I do mean all time. Although this is relatively a new food on the
farm stand scene, it’s actually been around for a long, long time.
This is, by anybody’s standard, an old food.
According to the farmer’s almanac, the first of the tomatoes are normally
ready by the first full moon of July, usually by the rising of the next moon of
the cycle: the Ripe Berries Moon. That makes
sense.
After all, the tomato is, technically, just a giant berry.
But this abnormal heat – this gut-wrenching, sweat-pumping,
underwear-clumping heat -- has launched tomato season a week or so ahead of
schedule.
Ain’t that just like Coyote?
I’m not complaining. Citybillies,
take Jon Spruce’s advice: get your hands on some local 2012 heirloom tomatoes. If there’s one thing out there enjoying this
heat, it’s a tomato.
I even got a recipe for you. Fry up
two slices of bread, preferably sourdough bread. Schmear on a guilt-free layer of
mayonnaise. Add thick slices of ripe
tomato. Sprinkle on some good salt. Eat over the sink, alone.
The heirloom tomato is, without question, the greatest comeback ever in the
long, troubled history of grocery. Back
when it was first marketed to restaurants and to grocery stores, it went under
the name of ugly tomato. It was the corporate way of explaining to the
paying public that these tomatoes were supposed to be wrinkled, cracked, scarred,
misshapen and, even, ripe when green, orange or yellow.
Only years later did they start selling it under the more distinguished name
of heirloom.
Yes, after years and years of subjecting the public to the year-long,
season-defying crops of perfect, consistent, bland, dry, tasteless tomatoes,
the Big Ag marketers had to re-educate us on the old-ways lesson that, in the
wild, things sometimes get a little ugly.
Does this look ugly to you?
Each tomato is like its own little starburst. Each one is like a little sun. The best part? Although you can tell which tomatoes are the
same kinds of tomatoes, each one has its own rays of colors, its own patterns
of wrinkles, its own carousel of flavors.
The tomato as an individual. Sorry to
say, but it’s a 21st Century Concept.
Well, more accurately, it’s a 21st Century Comeback.
These tomatoes hearken back to the good old days, before that
large-scaled, mass-produced onslaught of big, red, perfect tomatoes, available
year-round, bombarded the produce departments of nation-wide supermarkets. Before the invention of refrigerated tractor
trailers. I don’t even understand why
anybody even serves tomatoes outside of Coyote’s moons. I’m talking to you, all you sandwich and
hoagie shop managers.
More accurately, though, these tomatoes hearken back to the ancient farmers of
South America and Mexico, the first civilizations to propagate the modern
tomato. From what we are told of
heirloom varieties and seeds, these are the descendants of the kinds of
tomatoes that people used to enjoy hundreds of years ago, going back to 700 AD.
Their return to our world of grocery and farm stands is a gift from the Old
World, a true and treasured heirloom.
There are some trees that can also be considered heirlooms.
Even though they may now be common all over our city grid, there are some
trees that had disappeared for eons but have returned to our modern world.
Heirloom trees.
These trees hearken back to the Old Days, to the wild back-wood groves of
colonial country or, even further back, to the very first days of trees
themselves, to the primordial soup that bedecked and bedizened the landscapes
of the super-continent we call Pangaea.
People are always asking me: Jon
Spruce, if you had a time machine, where would you go?
The answer is Pangaea.
