The Ugly Tomato

A fellow blogger pointed out recently on her page (which you can find here) that people tend to have wonderful, memorable anecdotes surrounding our dear friend, the tomato, and I felt inspired. My favorite tomato story isn't really a story at all, more like a memory of the first time I really tasted a tomato. But it also speaks to one of my major attractions to food--it gets all tied up in our memories and grounds us in them, and causing us to hold on more clearly to otherwise unremarkable moments about kitchen tables, conversations about nothing, and places we used to live.

Senior year of college, the three of us roommates sitting at the kitchen table in our apartment in Brookline in the Summertime. I still couldn't tell you how we got that apartment--it was too sprawling, too rambly and romantic for three girls still in college. Hardwood floors, working fireplace, built in glass cabinets, original 1920s molding, and no doubt, original 1920s dust. Steam radiators that hissed in the Winter and couldn't be adjusted for temperature. One of us took up residence in the old dining room, where she traded a little bit of her privacy for a chandelier and a walk in closet that used to be the butler's pantry. We adored it. No air conditioning, no dishwasher. Still, I've never lived anywhere nicer.

Too tired after work to make real food, the three of us sit down still in our work clothes and cut up the Brandywine tomato Stacey and I have brought home from the farmer's market. Misshapen, alien, heavier than you think it ought to be and sporting purple splotches, with streaks of yellow and green at the top. A crack of broken skin across the bottom, they'd never sell this thing in the supermarket. Nobody would want it. It's hideous. It's perfect. We cut it into slices, and the thing holds on to all of it's juices, doesn't waste them all onto the plate. We douse this monstrous tomato in olive oil, sprinkle it with salt and pepper and the three of us eat it just like that with forks and knives, all off of the same plate. Then we eat it with our fingers. It's sweet and slightly savory, not pale and watery and pink like the tomatoes we'd see at the store. It tastes like where it came from, we decide. Laugh all you want, but we decide it tastes just a little like the coast, like a little touch of coastal New England seawater somehow made its way into our ugly tomato through the soil. Finally, when it's gone, we grab chunks of Italian bread and drag it through the remaining oil and pink flecks of tomato juice, getting every last ounce of enjoyment out of this one tomato.