table talk / By Simona Carini

Actual Tomatoes, Size Small

A different Caprese

(Sept. 9, 2010)  “There are no seasons in the American supermarket. Now there are tomatoes all year round: grown half way around the world, picked when it was green, and ripened with ethylene gas. Although it looks like a tomato, it’s kind of a notional tomato, I mean, it’s the idea of a tomato.”

I heard this passage at the beginning of the documentary Food, Inc. and wrote in the notebook I had brought with me: “notional tomato” (quotation marks included). I then looked up “notional” in my dictionary and learned that its antonym is “actual.” Actual tomatoes, fruits that, besides looking like tomatoes, taste like tomatoes, are now in season, and all I can say is: “carpe diem” — get locally grown tomatoes and enjoy them.

cherry toms PHOTO BY SIMONA CARINI

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A few weeks ago, in front of a plate of pasta with roasted small plum tomatoes, my husband declared solemnly that tomatoes are his favorite food. While I myself would not go that far, I have been a tomato lover for as long as I remember. Wandering around the vegetable garden of some acquaintance, picking a tomato or two and eating them immediately was a favorite pastime of mine when visiting the countryside as a child (I grew up in Perugia, a city in central Italy). This preference for tomatoes au naturel caused my father and my aunt Lucia to wince: “At least put some salt on them,” they’d say. What for? was my response.

I twisted a tomato off the vine, brushed it with my hands, inhaled close to its skin, then bit into it, diving into a fresh aromatic pool that spoke of the earth and of the sun. Eating a tomato was a multi-bite affair, and squirting juice and seeds on my hands, face and clothes was part of the enjoyment. I don’t remember seeing small tomatoes in the vegetable gardens I roamed as a child: I remember meeting those varieties when I moved to California.

Within the context of smallness, there is variety in both size and shape. If the sight of pear-shaped tomatoes doesn’t bring a smile to your face, what will? The color palette goes well beyond red (in Italy, we say rosso come un pomodoro literally “as red as a tomato”) to include colors like yellow-white, golden orange, red-brown. A pint of mixed cherry tomatoes at the farmers’ market intrigues the eyes, before engaging the palate. And the names please the ear: Black Cherry, Brown Berry, Isis Candy and Sun Gold are just a few examples.

When selecting a pint of small fruited tomatoes, you can choose between mixed and single-variety baskets. Several two-way comparisons on my part have all ended with the verdict that I like all the varieties I have offered to my taste buds, each with its own look and its own personality. 

Cherry tomatoes make a perfect snack, with the caveat that once you start eating them, it’s difficult to stop. If I leave a bowl containing cherry tomatoes on the kitchen counter, it becomes empty within a few hours — a state of affairs for which my husband and I share responsibility. So, if I want to prepare a dish with them, I need to make sure I hide the quantity I need.

Summer tomato salads have always been a favorite of mine. In the Caprese salad, tomatoes are paired with mozzarella (fior di latte). From the initial idea I had of preparing a Caprese salad with cherry tomatoes, it was a short distance to one that would include also the bite-sized mozzarella called “ciliegine” (ciliegia is Italian for cherry). I never realized that plan, though, because I immediately decided I would first roast the cherry tomatoes (something I have been doing a lot this tomato season).

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