Of course, I had to grow, pluck my own and juice them. I even bit one on the vine like an animal — I am an animal — and sucked and chewed, thinking of another writer who acted on the same impulse before I was born, though with a different lure. Perhaps MFK Fisher transmitted that to me, a gastronomic Tesla.
As I get older, and maybe as others do, I tend toward something I will call “jeweling” my past, surrounding habitual memories with Wordsworth halos. This happens more often now, under pressure to consider the present a permanent past.
Jeweling is much less complex than “madeleining,” which common use would madden Proust, because he spent years narrowing dailyness to a wisp, with no patience for any work that a cup of tea, linden or other, entails. Scholars who masticate manuscripts found that he started his single-word fame by having his narrator’s brain jogged backward by toast and honey, not a cookie. Don’t ever mistake writing as recording.
“When you pour it, it goes ‘plop plop.’ ”
Never cared about television jingles, just the taste, and when I grew older, the non-texture texture, dead-red color and morose adult paradox of festive turning familiar has captured me, still in my eating highchair.
When did you have your first sip of tomato, Sacramento or other? Obvious question, but it obtains to how pleasure is created, adjusted, retained.
Usually I remember brands that populated long-gone Brooklyn shelves, but not in this case. Did I lift a thumbsize glass that gave us an adult treat alongside the Catskill shrimp cocktail (throned on chips of ice), sauced with beet-stained horseradish and Heinz? I can recall how special it was to bite into a gelid white thing, but ultimately it’s like anything from before, a nourishing fiction, basted with the unexpected tears of a dressed-up little boy.
The taste we call “tomato” is especially difficult to describe. Some of the reasons for this pertain to the wobbly nature of the fruit as presented, its many commercial guises and tiresome seasonal stardom, but I’ll take the easy route and say that U.S. tomato “identifiers” are various and contradictory. Apples and oranges? Tomatoes and tomatoes.
I recently received, during this sequestered period, four tomatoes “off the vine” the color of pumpkins, and as solid. They softened and changed after a week, but not all things that “ripen” can be eaten. Vegetables also are corpses.
No one wants to say these things in these times. I’ll find a way to make my reddish balls bounce. Someone grew them, I’ll eat them, I’m lucky to have them.
So this is a love note to all my tomatoes, and especially canned and bottled tomato juice, a sentimental Sacra-mento. To everyone who continues to make them: a big, scarlet kiss.
The napkin stains, again.
Ah. So you too! Every Friday night, my parents would take me to Fisher’s and I would want tomato juice which would come w a lemon slice. But I would also want the oysters with the horseradish sauce also on the appetizer list. So to solve the problem, I would have the tomato juice at home and then onward to the oysters. I still love tomato juice, but it’s hard to get beautiful fresh tomatoes in Arizona and deserts aren’t known for fresh fruit. So enjoy your tomatoes. It looks like I’ll be here for a long time. Love to you both, Tasha
One of the most delicious things I ever drank (or ate) was a glass of fresh-squeezed tomato juice downstairs at the late-lamented Fenton’s in Toronto. (The lofty upstairs was fancy and continental and expensive; the downstairs was snug, very British, and a relative bargain. The tomato juice was followed by a divine mixed grill and a dessert of Eton mess.) I’ve never had tomato juice as good again.
ps: Loved the piece, Jeff! I would pick out a favorite sentence, but they ALL are! Reading this alleviated — just a little, but a lot for its length — my own seemingly interminable sentence of house arrest.
I’m with Meredith Brody; so many beautiful sentences, but this paragraph made me stop to think:
“I recently received, during this sequestered period, four tomatoes `off the vine’ the color of pumpkins, and as solid. They softened and changed after a week, but not all things that “ripen” can be eaten. Vegetables also are corpses.”
I’ll never think of my bad produce picks–tomatoes, pretty on the outside but tasteless on the inside, top the list– the same way again.
Great piece! I love tomatoes and memories worthy of Wordsworth.
Oh, Jeff. When i was in junior high we were on “double sessions,” so I got home at 1 pm to an empty house. My first stop was the kitchen, where I opened an 18-oz can of Sacramento and slowly drank it all, along with five or six slices of buttered rye toast. Can’t do this anymore; reflux has banished the tomato from my diet. But yesterday a friend brought me a loaf of sliced caraway rye…..Thank you for this…..
I too remember a distant time in a hotel dining room with my grandparents. I was served a tomato juice on a small white plate with a paper doily and a lemon wedge. It was wonderfully cold and thick going down. Thanks for the memory Jeff❣️
Jeff, your lovely piece made me think immediately of my erratic relationship with tomato juice. I remember only two restaurants offering it with dinner in the small town where I was raised. — both were white-linen and for special occasions, My parents kept Sacramento in the rear of a kitchen cabinet, where it lived. The same can was probably there all through my teenage years. Decades later, when I became a travel writer, I decided that tomato juice might be the perfect drink while in flight; I may have read somewhere that it was a wise choice when airborne. To this day, my tomato juice is exclusively provided by flight attendants. But after reading your piece, I might have to crack open a bottle of my wife’s V-8 sitting in the pantry. It’s not the same, I know. Thanks for a sweet read.
Tomatoes! Yes, what a brilliant idea to bite a tomato while on the vine to determine its readiness. Cherry tomatoes are my favorites. Buying regular sized tomatoes is always a crap shoot, but the tiny ones are much more reliable. The trick is convincing my wife not to toss them to the backyard chickens when they begin to wrinkle; that’s when they’re best. On a recent Top Chef, the expert panelists suggested that roasted tomatoes develop an umami flavor. As a regular consumer of roasted tomatoes, that seems like a stretch to me. Maybe roasted asparagus, right? Certainly mushrooms? Tomatoes? Not so sure. Dreamy writing by the way.