Rhapsody on a Theme by Pomodoro

More tomatoes. . . andante calando

Where did the summer go? We locals go downtown early in the morning, avoiding the heat and the tourist throngs, we do our shopping for the day, then we stand on the corner by the post office, shaking our heads: Where did the summer go?

And the funny thing is, it’s like that every year.

Now it’s late in August and summer rambles on, more slowly now, meandering from beach to lake to mountaintop, from garden to farmhouse kitchen to the fields of ripening corn, always with the poignant awareness that it’s coming now to an end, as it does every year, as it has since time began. The light shifts and grows more golden in late afternoon, there’s a chill in the night air and sleepers stir and reach for the extra blanket for the first time since June; along the roadside, clusters of sumac are starting to blush and the branches of old apple trees, long abandoned, are still weighed down with fruit.

And King Tomato continues to rule, in hundreds of shapes and sizes (literally, check out the listings here: www.johnnyseeds.com/vegetables/tomatoes/), from old standards to new discoveries, slicing tomatoes (beefsteaks, Brandywines), cherry tomatoes (Tiny Tims, sungolds), paste tomatoes (San Marzano may be the best known but Amish paste is a strong candidate too), and on and on.

While King Tomato rules, the tomato sandwich remains Queen of the lunch table. I am tempted to write a recipe for the tomato sandwich but I’m afraid I’d be insulting readers. Really all it takes is good crusty whole-grain bread, good mayo (Hellman’s preferred here on the kitchen porch), good butter (salty, slightly cultured, Amish-made) and the tastiest tomatoes in the market.

Tomatoes go on toast for breakfast, too, this time with extra-virgin olive oil and a shred of basil. But what about that affinity of tomatoes and good bread, isn’t that just a natural union? I think of all those Mediterranean combinations from Lebanese fattoush to Catalan escalivada to Tuscan panzanella and Andalucian gazpacho, which is basically just liquid panzanella with sweet peppers added. And all of these are dead easy  because you just mix everything up in a bowl and serve it--possibly excepting the escalivada which calls for roasted or grilled vegetables.

Fare la scarpetta

And now I will indeed write a recipe because when I go on-line, I see so many objectionable versions of my favorite Tuscan summertime dish that I think a corrective is necessary. You will always get panzanella right if you remember that it simply grew out of the Italian tradition to fare la scarpetta, to make the little shoe, the little shoe being the piece of bread you use to sop up whatever sauce is left on your plate. And yes, this is perfectly correct behavior in Italy. Only yesterday, an Italian acquaintance, a diplomat of impeccable manners, came to lunch on the kitchen porch and at the end of the meal quietly tore off a piece of bread to fare la scarpetta with the leftover lobster juice and sauce on his plate.

So instead of fare la scarpetta with the salad, why not just put the bread into the salad right at the start? And to make it more absorbent, why not soak the bread in water and squeeze it out beforehand? Genius ideas, quite clearly. I like to think my Tuscan neighbors have been doing this for a century or more, since tomatoes arrived on their tables and were sliced and dropped into a bowl with some most excellent olive oil and a few drops of wine vinegar. And someone said, hey, just put the bread in the salad!

But here’s the recipe:

Panzanella

Ideally, panzanella is made with what I call a country-style bread, rustic, coarse-textured, and deeply flavorful, preferably baked in a wood-fired oven. Lacking that, you’ll have to make do with whatever artisanal loaf is available but don’t even think about making it with ordinary sliced white bread. You will end up with a soggy mess.

I don’t like to put down a fellow food writer, least of all one whom I respect as much as I do Kenji Lopez-Alt, who almost always seems to strike a chord with me in his eminently thoughtful reflections. But his “Classic Panzanella Salad,” which I found on the Serious Eats website, is seriously deficient, indicating that the writer has probably never had panzanella made in a cool Tuscan farmhouse kitchen in the heat of summer at the time of Ferragosto, the great August holiday. His directions call for cubing the bread, toasting the cubes, and then soaking them in water. This is a) way too complicated, and b) also creates a sodden mess.

There’s no need to improve on something that’s close to perfect. So I went back to the drawing board, which is to say back to the old-fashioned way I learned to make panzanella many long years ago in the hills of Tuscany and have been doing it regularly ever since, whenever tomato season rolls around.

To make 6 to 8 servings, you will need:

• 1 pound stale (firm but not dried out) country-style bread—four 1-inch thick slices

• 4 large dead-ripe tomatoes, full of flavor and fragrance

• 1 large red onion, peeled and finely sliced

• 1 or 2 cucumbers (about ½ pound), peeled, quartered lengthwise, and

  thinly sliced

• a handful of fresh basil leaves, coarsely chopped or torn

• ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil

• ¼ cup red wine vinegar

• Sea salt and black pepper to taste

Soften the bread slices in a bowl of cool water, then squeeze each slice gently to get rid of excess liquid. Tear the bread into uneven chunks, discarding any thick crusts, and drop the chunks and any crumbs into a salad bowl. Cut the tomatoes in half and slice thickly or cut in chunks, dropping into the bowl with the bread. Add the onion, cucumber, and basil leaves.

In a separate bowl, beat the oil and vinegar together with a fork to emulsify. Add salt and pepper to taste and pour over the salad. Mix well, using your hands to turn the salad, and set it aside in a cool spot (do not refrigerate) for at least 30 minutes before serving to allow the flavors to develop.

And when you’re done with the panzanella, if there are leftovers, you know what to do: Tip them all into the food processor and buzz them with a little more olive oil, a few more drops of vinegar, and what do you have? Instant gazpacho!

Of course, you can also make gazpacho from scratch and here’s how:

Gazpacho

This is one of the quintessential preparations people think of when they think of Spanish food. I learned to make it, not surprisingly, in Andalucia, the hot, dry region of southern Spain, where my hostess kept a constantly refreshed pitcher of gazpacho in the fridge, ready for anyone who felt the need for a pick-me-up.

Make it as thin or as thick as you wish, by adding or withholding water (or ice cubes). Sometimes I make it with no liquid at all, so it comes out as more of a salad--like panzanella.

For 8 servings, you will need:

• 3 ½ pounds ripe, red tomatoes, dipped in boiling water for 15 seconds, then

  peeled, coarsely chopped

• 1 or 2 garlic cloves, chopped

• ½ medium red onion, chopped

• 1 green or red sweet pepper, chopped

• 1 long thin English cucumber, peeled and chopped

• 1 cup extra-virgin olive oil

• 2 to 3 tablespoons wine vinegar, preferably aged sherry vinegar

• 1 two-inch thick slice of stale (firm but not dried-out) rustic bread

• ½ cup very cold water

• ½ teaspoon ground cumin or more to taste

• Pinch of pimentón (Spanish paprika), the spicier the better

• Sea salt

• Pinch of sugar if needed

Put the tomatoes, garlic, onion, pepper, and cucumber in a blender and whirl briefly (in batches, if necessary) to puree. You could also use an immersion blender for this, moving it up and down to incorporate and puree all the ingredients. Add the oil and vinegar while you continue to puree.

Tear the bread into small chunks and soak briefly in the cold water, then gently squeeze out the excess liquid and add the soaked bread, along with the cumin and paprika, to the pureed ingredients, continuing to puree to incorporate the bread. Add salt to taste and if needed a pinch of sugar to bring out the sweetness of the tomatoes. Add more vinegar if it seems necessary and, if the soup is too thick, add ice-cold water until you get to the consistency you want. For picnics, it’s best served thin enough to sip from a mug, but if you serve it at table, with a soup bowl and spoon, a thicker consistency will be just fine.

Variation:

One evening, with unexpected guests, I found I had not quite enough tomatoes for a proper gazpacho. What to do? My eyes lit on two perfectly ripened avocados sitting in a bowl on the kitchen counter. In they went. The result was a gazpacho with an oddly greenish tinge (not unpleasant but not, you know, red) and a beautifully smooth, creamy texture that stunned the guests. I’m planning to keep avocados on hand throughout gazpacho season, just in case.

Gazpacho often gets garnished with some of its vegetables diced small, along with croutons (there’s that bread again) but there’s another version which I had in Cordoba that’s somewhat thicker (more bread in the mix!) and garnished with chopped hard-boiled egg and chopped Spanish ham (jamón serrano, though prosciutto will do if you can’t find the Spanish kind). It ends up a more substantial dish and I think makes an excellent supper for the kitchen porch crowd, perhaps with some good cheese and a simple green salad to finish.

Next week, if I survive the Whitney Family reunion: Taking stock of all those tomatoes, putting some by for winter.