The $64 Tomato

by William Alexander

  The tomato flourished in Italy’s mild Mediterranean climate. It would still be a while before tomatoes found spaghetti—the first-known published recipe for a pastaand-tomato dish doesn’t appear until 1839—but the tomatoes were at least in the kitchen. The same could not be said for northern Europe, where xitomatl was catching on a little more slowly. The English in particular, who grew tomatoes as ornamentals (nonedible plants), were initially convinced that the fruits were poisonous, possibly because of the plant’s uncanny resemblance to a relative named—for good reason—deadly nightshade, Atropa belladonna. Other northern European peoples were wary as well. In fact, in the eighteenth century the great Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus bestowed upon the tomato the botanical name Lycopersicon esculentum, literally “edible wolf peach,” perhaps an indication of its public image. So while northern Europeans were avoiding tomatoes like, well, the plague, Italians were busy breeding cultivars and inventing lasagna.

  This would not be the first time that Europeans would view a New World plant with suspicion. Potatoes, also South American natives, met a similarly cool reception when introduced shortly after tomatoes. As late as 1744, Prussian peasants refused to eat this starchy vegetable that Frederick the Great had sent to relieve their famine—until forced to at the end of a bayonet.

  That both the tomato and the potato originated somewhere around Peru should not be too surprising: they are botanical relatives, both being in the Solanaceae family. Personally, I had always viewed this alleged botanical relationship with some skepticism—after all, they seem to have absolutely nothing in common—until I grew both potatoes and Brandywine tomatoes in my garden, and the similarities revealed themselves. For unlike the classic, sharply lobed leaf seen in most tomato varieties, the Brandywine heirloom has flat leaves that look remarkably like potato foliage. In fact, they are so distinctive that I don’t bother to label the plants when I start them on the windowsill or set them in the garden; there is no mistaking them for other tomatoes.

  As further evidence of their familial relationship, potato flowers bear a fair resemblance to tomato flowers and even develop tiny green fruits that look like baby tomatoes. Sometimes it takes a home garden to make a believer of a skeptic.

  Tomatoes may first have been cultivated after they traveled to Central America (practically down the block, geographically speaking), but the tomatoes in my home garden and yours derive from European, not Central American, cultivars. The tomato completed its curious round-trip back to the New World in the baggage of European settlers. As the first colonists were primarily northern European, not southern Italian, the tomato was not originally grown in the colonies as a food but was instead treated as an ornamental or, at best, a plant with some medicinal properties. Still, the fact that the colonists took the trouble to include tomato seeds in their transatlantic luggage suggests that they thought fairly highly of them.

  It wasn’t until the early nineteenth century that the tomato, a full three hundred years after Cortés, made its way into American kitchens, though. In fact, among the first American gardeners (not counting the Aztecs, of course) to grow tomatoes for food was none other than my old hero: statesman, orchardist, visionary, and tomato farmer Thomas Jefferson! This third president of the United States served tomatoes at a White House dinner in 1806 and grew them annually after retiring to Monticello in 1809. This was at a time when most Americans still viewed tomatoes with suspicion, many believing they were poisonous.

  Incidentally, potatoes started to become popular in America at about the same time as tomatoes, and guess who is credited with introducing french fries (not to mention the first pasta machine) to America. Yes, him again.

  HUNDREDS OF YEARS AGO, Italians discovered that tomatoes could be preserved through the winter by drying them on their tile roofs. Thus the sun-dried tomato was born, though it was most likely considered a distant second-best to fresh tomatoes, not the gourmet item that today adds a dollar to the price of your salad. Anne and I had dreamed about making our own sun-dried tomatoes the night we lay under that starry sky awaiting Big Machinery, and indeed the following year we set up production. And it was a production.

  Not having a tile roof, I made a large wooden frame in the shop (why is it that so many of my culinary projects begin in the woodshop?) and stapled to it a galvanized screen. This took the entire morning, as it necessitated one trip to the lumberyard and two trips to the hardware store (I ran out of staples). Then we harvested dozens of cherry tomatoes, sliced each in half, and placed them on the screen. We put the frame in the sun and waited for the tomatoes to dehydrate.

  The reason that sun-dried tomatoes are so tasty lies in the chemistry of the fruit. Tomatoes contain significant amounts of both sugar and acid, part of the appeal of dried and fresh tomatoes alike. But never is the sugar/acid balance more apparent than in dried tomatoes, for after the moisture and most of the weight has evaporated, the intense essence of the tomato is unmasked, and each bite is both tangy and sweet, tart and toothsome. A lot of taste in a very small package. There may be another reason why tomatoes—especially these concentrated, sundried tomatoes—are so tasty, and so adept at flavoring other foods: they are high in glutamic acid, the naturally occurring form of the flavor enhancer MSG (monosodium glutamate). This might explain why we love to dip our french fries in ketchup and why a mere dollop of tomato paste makes a beef stew so much tastier. Even the British, when they were still shunning fresh tomatoes, had started using them sparingly to improve their soups.

  Food chemistry aside, Anne and I were greatly looking forward to a winter of sun-dried tomatoes. After days of lugging them inside at night on the rack to keep off the dew (it took two of us to carry the frame) and moving them back outside in the morning, we still didn’t think they seemed quite dry. But who knew how dry is dry? Well, now I know: dry is drier than you can get tomatoes in New York in August, when for days at a time, the humidity might never drop below 80 percent. When a rain front moved in and stayed, we decided these tomatoes were as dry as they were going to get, so we brought them inside and bottled them. Within a couple of months, they were boasting the most lovely white mold. They were obviously inedible, although I thought, given the love and attention we had lavished on these tomatoes, the mold might hold some miraculous medicinal property, a new penicillin.

  I’ll never know, because we dumped them into the garbage rather than turn them over to science. We never tried to sun-dry tomatoes again. Instead we get a similar effect by making what some call tomato confit, slow-roasting quartered, seasoned tomatoes in a slow oven for a couple of hours.

  As with many of my failures, I did salvage something good out of it. I found another use for the drying frame: screening compost. Every time I pull it out, I remember that furry, luxuriant white mold. And wonder if I threw away the cure for cancer.

  JUST WHAT IS THIS PLANT that spawned the fuzzy mold—a fruit or a vegetable? This somewhat tired debate would probably have been dismissed with a gloved wave from Jefferson two hundred years ago. Yet it was renewed recently when several New Jersey state legislators introduced a bill naming the tomato the official state vegetable, sparking a weird partisan debate in the state-house—Democrats claimed it was a vegetable, Republicans insisted it was a fruit. I have a hard enough time as it is explaining to Katie the ideological differences between Republicans and Democrats. How to explain this one?

  When more than a few observers pointed out with some glee that the tomato is indeed a fruit, embarrassed legislative aides went scurrying and dug up a century-old U.S. Supreme Court ruling that declared the tomato to be a vegetable, at least for the purposes of the Tariff Act of 1883. Democratic legislators proudly waved this narrow ruling about import duties in front of the television cameras but had to be careful about which sections they quoted from, because the Court, in its decision, flatly stated, “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are fruits of a vine.” In fact, the tomato is not only botanically a fruit (because it is a ripened mature ovary containing s
eeds, and that happens to be the very definition of a fruit), it is specifically a berry, which is something to consider the next time you pop a cherry tomato into your mouth.

  Thus there really isn’t much to debate here. We may not have heard the end of this story, though. Almost hilariously, this campaign to name the tomato the official state vegetable happened a mere year after a losing attempt (to the blueberry) to name the tomato the official state fruit! I fear that if the tomato loses out again, next year some determined legislator will try to get it designated the state animal. Jefferson must be rolling in his grave.

  Christopher Walken, Gardener

  You got the wrong guy, Ace.

  —Christopher Walken in The Deer Hunter

  August. Heavy-hot, sticky-still August. The garden was five years old. I was approaching fifty. The air was thick with the heavy, pungent smell of fresh horse manure, steaming faintly from its towering heap. Anne and I had brought it in over the weekend, in 18-gallon Rubbermaid bins, from a nearby stable. We made four trips—sixteen bins, 288 gallons of horseshit—shoveling wordlessly side by side as we filled and loaded, filled and loaded. We had made arrangements through a mutual friend of the owner’s, and when we drove up, the owner at first ignored us. When we finally got her attention, she apologized, saying, “I figured you couldn’t be the folks comin’ for the manure. Not in a Saab.” And I thought, She’s right. How absurd we must have looked, the doctor and her husband shoveling manure into their Saab station wagon. There was probably a dichotomy there worth exploring, but not on this day. Too tired. Too hot.

  It looked as though the groundhog had found a way in and had once again taken a single bite from half a dozen tomatoes. Does he have to do that? I would gladly grant him six bites of one tomato; why does he have to ruin six tomatoes by taking a single bite out of each? Is he finicky? Is he always disappointed with that first bite and hopes the next tomato will be sweeter? Groundhogs do seem pretty selective when it comes to choosing tomatoes. I have never, I mean never, seen a groundhog eat an unripe tomato. They always seem to eat the tomato one day before you plan to pick it. Do they judge by color or by smell? If color, could I trick them by growing only varieties of tomato that are green when ripe? Although that doesn’t sound very appetizing to me, either. Anyway, I think they judge ripeness by smell. I vaguely remember reading somewhere that groundhogs, like most burrowers, have very poor vision.

  I flung the bitten tomatoes into the tall grass in the failed meadow and walked down the unmowed center grass path to the vine bed as the August morning sun drew beads of sweat from my temple. The vine bed was a depressing sight, unkempt and thick with weeds and clumps of bluegrass, littered with the last unpicked, rotting cucumbers, bloated and yellowish. For that matter, I was a depressing sight, unshowered, unshaven, and bloated from a steady summer diet of BLTs, feeling exhausted, slovenly, and lazy. I wondered, Am I becoming my garden, or is my garden becoming me?

  After five years of toiling, I had begun to question the entire enterprise. My early-morning drives to the garden center for yet more mulch or to the stable for yet more horse manure took me past a golf club, where on any given day, dozens of men my age were passing their mornings socializing and (mildly) exercising and apparently having one hell of a good time. Why had I locked myself in a self-imposed purgatory of endless weeding, pruning, and harvesting? This was what I did for fun?

  I flopped down on a bench to think about this. I know there was certainly one reason I persisted: we were hooked on the food. On vine-ripened Brandywine tomatoes, on crisp sugar snap peas, earthy-tasting potatoes, and greens that awaken your mouth. In other words, I was farming.

  At some point, without even realizing it, I had crossed a line. I remembered a stupendous dinner we had one Autumn evening: pork roast with apples, acorn squash, baby lettuces, Peruvian potatoes. Anne pointed out with pride that everything except the pork came from our garden, and I stopped in midbite, intrigued. Pig farming. Could we, I wondered out loud, raise a couple of pigs? Just think, fresh, organic pork. Forks froze in midair. Mouths stopped chewing. Silence smothered the table as three terrified faces stared at me, then at one another, not sure if I was kidding. I wasn’t sure if I was kidding.

  But on this oppressive August morning, I was sure of this: my interest in gardening as hobby was waning, as was the purely aesthetic appeal the garden once held for me. I had to figure this out, and soon. I (more than anyone, probably) didn’t want to give up the food, either, but the growing of it was wrecking me. I had to reduce the labor. And the first place to start with was with the grass, the goddamn grass.

  Those lovely paths that our landscape architect had seduced me into were killing me. On the day Bridget proudly unrolled the garden plan, with its broad strip of grass down the center and narrower strips along each side, I intuitively felt it was a bad idea, but as it turned out, not for all the right reasons. She insisted it would look “grand,” and Anne and I deferred to her professional judgment and succumbed to her gorgeous smile. And indeed, it was grand—I have to give her credit for that. After all, it was only a few strips of grass; how hard could it be to mow? Since we had Carmine and crew to mow the rest of the yard with his forty-eight-inch mowers, I could surely spend a few minutes each week mowing the garden. It did seem very—well, English, I guess. Still, I’d had vague misgivings.

  That first summer, the grass came in like wildfire, Kentucky bluegrass wildfire. In no time at all, a thick, lush carpet of green neatly bisected and enclosed the beds, and it was time to mow. But to bring a noisy, fume-spewing gasoline engine into the garden seemed a sacrilege. In an English-gentleman moment of delusion, I decided I would purchase a hand mower to use in the garden and the orchard. I had been eyeing the $400 model in the Smith & Hawken catalog for some time. “This is not your father’s mower,” the copy promised. Indeed not. This was a silent, finely tuned instrument, crafted in Germany, land of Henckels kitchen cutlery and the Mercedes-Benz, where they still know a thing or two about blades and craftsman-ship. Why, I’d want to cut the lawn every day with an instrument like this. But $400! There was another model I’d seen, the L.L. Bean Classic Reel Mower, “quiet, safe, and reliable” with a “scissor-like tip.” And only $139. I wanted to buy it, but Anne suggested that I first look at Home Depot.

  “Home Depot!” I sniffed. “I wouldn’t buy a mower from there. They just carry junk. L.L. Bean has scoured the globe to find just the right mower for their catalog [and for their not-quite-affluent, snobbish clientele like me] and I think I trust them a little more.”

  Nevertheless, I stopped in at Home Depot just to humor my wife. They had the exact same mower as in the L.L. Bean catalog, for $79. I might be a snob, but I’m not stupid. I brought it home. In retrospect I like to think I bought this mower so you don’t have to, so let me try to explain why the gasoline-powered rotary mower is far and away the most popular mower in the world.

  The Classic Reel Mower does not cut tall grass. It does fine in grass that is one or two inches higher than the height you are cutting it to (grass that, in my book, doesn’t really need to be cut yet). Anything more than that, and the grass hits what the industry calls the shrub bar, a steel bar that protrudes across the front of the mower. The purpose of the bar is presumably to deflect shrubbery so that you don’t accidentally mow down your shrubs. In practice it deflects tall grass as well, so you can’t cut tall grass, either. And in the spring (and this was spring), the grass is always tall. Ten minutes after you cut it, it’s ready for a trim.

  The Classic Reel Mower cannot mow backward. This should be patently obvious, even to an idiot like me, when you stop to think about it, since the blades are set spinning from the forward motion of the wheels. But after years of using a power rotary mower, you unwittingly develop the habit of going back and forth, especially under trees and around tight spots. The kind of trees and tight spots you might find in, say, an orchard or a garden. Additionally, when pulled backward, the mower tends to lift up rather than roll back,
so you end up literally carrying the mower around the yard.

  The Classic Reel Mower cannot trim close to walls, fences, or other objects. On a rotary mower, the wheels are set at about two, four, eight, and ten o’clock, so you can get the housing pretty close to an adjoining wall at three or nine o’clock. But a reel mower is linear in shape, with a pair of big, clunky wheels on either end, so you cannot get closer than five or six inches to a wall. Since most of my grass paths bordered either a stone wall or raised beds, I was unable to cut almost a quarter of the grass.

  All I can say is, thank goodness I found all this out with a $79 mower, not a $400 one, which shares all these inherent problems. In the end I wound up cutting the grass with my old Sears rotary, but that was no picnic, either. Each path was about two and a half mower widths wide, and maneuvering the mower to make a U-turn while keeping my feet out of the beds at the end of each narrow path required ballerina-like agility. And even with a rotary mower, I never could cut the grass that grew along the jagged stone retaining walls, so every couple of weeks, I had to come in with that nastiest of power tools, the Weedwacker.

  This was sheer torture for me, as using the Weedwacker requires first putting on long pants and finding safety goggles and ear plugs, then yanking on the starter rope and fiddling with the choke for five minutes until it comes roaring to life. Then you pray that the “bump” mechanism, which feeds the orange plastic cord, continues to work; otherwise you have to take the device to the workshop, disassemble it, and rewind the cord (and repeat two or three times) until it finally works. And where, I’d like to know, does all that plastic cord go? I ran through a twenty-five-foot roll in a season, so somewhere there must be twenty-five feet of pulverized plastic cord incorporated into my garden beds. Not a pleasant thought.