Photo by Judd Pilosoff; food stylist: Liz Duffy; prop stylist: Phyllis Asher
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What a Tomato Taught Me
By Tim Stark, September & October 2008
Heaven and heartbreak meet in a Pennsylvania farm field
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It was déjà vu with a big heaping expletive. For the third consecutive year, I had backed my pickup truck over the first Cherokee Purple tomatoes of the season. I had carefully picked the tomatoes, placed them in cardboard flats, and—just as I had done the year before and the year before that—set the flats down amid shoulder-high weeds.
This was in the early years of a farm that was more like a backyard garden expanded to several acres. I did everything by hand: planting, staking, picking, even weeding. Halfway through hand-weeding my field, I would notice how the section I had weeded first was already sprouting a new generation of quack grass and Canadian thistle.
Of the hundred varieties of heirloom tomatoes I grow each year—green ones, pink ones, pale yellow ones that grow fuzz and blush like peaches—Cherokee Purple has a special place in my heart. “Cherokee Burgundy” would be a more apt name, because the tomato stands out like a grand cru among worthy vintages: acidic, fragrant with fruit, a midsummer’s feast all to itself. Carved into fat, dripping slices, this tomato looks like a prime cut of medium-rare beef.
What's in a Tomato?
Tomatoes are full of goodness. A medium-size tomato contains:
• 22 calories
• 1 gram protein
• 5 grams carbohydrates
• 1 gram fiber
• 292 milligrams potassium
• 15 milligrams vitamin C
• 1,025 international units vitamin A
Plus, it is early to ripen in my field. I was mighty pleased to be picking those first Cherokee Purples. When you depend on tomatoes for your livelihood, you feast for a few months, when the crop is abundant. But by the time, nine months later, that you are waiting for your first tomatoes of the season to ripen, you are bouncing checks left and right. At night, when you come in from pulling weeds, there are 25 phone messages from customers who want to know how those Cherokee Purples are coming along.
So there they were, my lifeline to solvency, my eight flats of Cherokee Purples arrayed among shoulder-high weeds. My judgment must have been clouded by pride and overeagerness—We ought to auction these babies off, I was boasting to myself—as I backed up the pickup truck and heard a high-pitched scream that could have been audible only to my ears. I knew, as I jumped out of the truck, what I was going to find.
Timely Tomato Advice
How to choose
Ripe tomatoes are heavy for their size, with taut skin and a fresh smell.
How to store
Fresh, ripe tomatoes should be stored in a cool, dry place, away from direct sunlight. Never refrigerate them.
How to peel
Tomato skins peel right off after blanching; drop in boiling water for 30 seconds, then plunge in ice water until cool.
I had stood guard over those tomatoes, waking in the middle of the night to cover them with protective fabric against the cold or to ensure they received their ration of water. Reduced, like popped balloons, to a few colorful ribbons, my Cherokee Purples gave off a familiar delicious, musky, freshly crushed fragrance. Like Juliet waking to find Romeo’s lips still warm, I looked on in horror.
What flashed through my enraged mind next was a history of self- sabotage that had served over the years to reduce my options in life: the job interview I arrived at late because I took the picturesque drive en route, the date to which I forgot to bring cash, the Econ 101 final exam for which I didn’t study. Wasn’t the whole point of going to college so that I wouldn’t have to pull weeds for a living?
Things happen for a reason. And mishap can be the pivot upon which imagination turns the tables on a foolish consistency. The third time around, after the self-incriminations had subsided, I settled upon a new tactic, sorting through the ruins of those Cherokee Purples for salvageable fruit, then stopping off on the way out of the field for sprigs of basil. I picked up some cheese from the neighbor who raises goats. When I got to the house, it took me all of 30 seconds to put together a salad, and my wife and I shared a spectacular lunch that wasn’t meant for us. And in the ten years since, I have not run over a single tomato.
Tim Stark is the author of Heirloom: Notes From an Accidental Tomato Farmer (Broadway Books, 2008).
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