Reflections: You say Tomayto . . .

Overabundance

What to do when the tomatoes keep coming

James Fox-Smith

If there’s any season for living off of the land, surely it is summertime. As I write this column in late June hthere are fillets of fresh-caught bass, bowls of blueberries, and foraged chanterelle mushrooms in our fridge. The chickens are making a dozen eggs a day, the fencerows are bristling with ripe blackberries, and a glance at the fig tree next to the barn suggests that by the time this annual “Cuisine” issue comes back from the printer’s, we’ll be up to our ears in figs as well. But right now, it’s tomatoes that’re keeping me up at night. Back in March, contemplating the weird tastelessness of some outwardly perfect grocery store tomatoes and spurred by visions of luscious tomato sandwiches and salads, I planted what seemed like a reasonable quantity of tomato seedlings— Creoles and Better Boys; with half a dozen Sweet Million cherry tomato plants for good measure. Sixteen plants in all. Mindful of past summer crises involving unmanageable bounties of cucumbers and yellow squash, I didn’t go berserk because I have a pathological horror of wasting food, which I suppose I inherited from my mother, who got it from her own mother, who was probably the last of my forebears to have experienced any real food scarcity. An inventive and generous cook, my mother is notorious for producing magnificent dishes in large quantity—far too much for any family of five to eat at a sitting—which would then be recycled over and over again as side dishes, served from progressively smaller receptacles, until the Fox-Smith family table began to resemble a tapas bar. To our dogs’ dismay, the prospect of good food going uneaten still fills me with dread— and our fridge with leftover containers. So, the fact that we are currently picking ten pounds of ripe tomatoes a day is both a source of anxiety, and a challenge to be reckoned with.

We’ve done all the obvious things. Salads and salsas are daily staples. There is pasta sauce by the gallon. Jars of preserved and sun-dried tomatoes are filling up the pantry. There are tomatoes on toast for breakfast and round-the-clock gazpacho (which makes for fantastic hot-weather quaffing). Lately, any time we leave the house we’ve started taking a couple of paper bags filled with tomatoes, and palming them off on unsuspecting passers-by.

But still they come. I’m beginning to get desperate. Somehow I found myself reading about La Tomatina Festival, an event held each August in Buñol, Spain, during which thousands of normally sensible people spend a day pelting one another with ripe tomatoes. Although the origins of La Tomatina Festival are lost to history, apparently the most likely explanation has the event beginning when a Saturday-morning farmer’s market during the height of tomato season erupted into a food fight. You can see how it happens: one minute you can’t get a decent tomato for love or money. The next, there are more than you can eat, cook, can, or give away. Suddenly those soft, ripe, tennis-ball-sized globes piling up on the counters start looking less like fruit, and more like ammunition. It’s a slippery slope that we haven’t yet started down, but if this goes on much longer it’s only a matter of time.

Louisiana has its own tomato festival—the Creole Tomato Festival— which happens each June at New Orleans’ French Market and is a weekend’s worth of tasty times in the form of cooking demos, tomato-eating contests, and food booths showing off various delicious things that one can do with Louisiana Creole tomatoes. But in this instance New Orleans seems to be allowing itself to be outdone by the good people of Buñol, since so far as I’m aware, the Creole Tomato Festival does not encourage attendees to start throwing tomatoes at one another. Given the abundance of Louisiana’s tomato crop, this would seem to be not only a potential solution to the summer glut, but a tourism opportunity, too.

None of this will last, of course. Between the heat, the humidity, and the inevitable arrival of stink bugs and hornworms—both of which have turned up in my garden during the past few days— the bounty can’t hold much longer. In a couple of weeks—maybe even by the time you read this—my tomato problem will be a thing of the past. I’ll be missing them already. So, this week we’ll relish the summertime bounty, make another sandwich, and maybe work on canning just one more batch to get us through the long, flavorless months to come.

Now, if we can just work out what to do with all the damn figs …