Tomahtas/Tomayters: Any Way You Call It, It Spells Bliss

with four tomato sauces for pasta

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Pasta al pomodoro—good to the last slurp

If it’s hard to imagine a Mediterranean kitchen without tomatoes, which was certainly the case before 1850 or thereabouts, it’s equally hard to imagine that pasta wasn’t invented on purpose to go with tomatoes (and as for basil, it’s clear that basil’s highest and best purpose is to flavor a tomato sauce of any kind).

I readily admit there are probably dozens of pasta sauces in which the tomato fails to appear, but there must be hundreds and hundreds of sauces that include some form of Lycopersicon esculentum, whether fresh from the garden or out of a can, sun-dried or pickled, or concentrated into that super-delicious Sicilian confection called stratto or strattu or estratto di pomodoro or, in plain English, tomato paste.

Concentrated into a paste, tomatoes become a flavor booster to add to just about any dish but especially to pasta sauces. It’s not surprising that Mediterranean cooks are experts at drying tomatoes, just like figs, splitting them open and setting them on racks to dry in the strong late-summer sun. But in Sicily, cooks like my late friend Anna Tasca Lanza go a step further, reducing fresh tomatoes to a puree that gets spread on platters or clean boards and set outside over several days to dry in the sun and reduce further to a thick concentration of tomato essence. At Regaleali, her family’s central Sicilian wine estate, Anna supervised the preparation, transferring the dark-red paste to jars and covering it with a thin layer of olive oil to preserve it through the winter months. You can find a similar Sicilian product here, made by Maria Grammatico in Erice, and here, made at Pianogrillo in Chiaramonte Gulfi.

Maine heirloom tomatoes

In North America we’ve become accustomed to a wide range of tomato cultivars, in our gardens, in farmers’ markets, even in the produce sections of enlightened supermarkets. These are for the most part what we call heirlooms, as if that was a specific variety.

My friend Charlie Costello, a tomato connoisseur, an expert tomato grower, and a seed-saver, told me about a young market helper who was selling heirloom tomatoes. “What’s the variety?” Charlie asked. “Variety?” said the helper, clearly perplexed: “They’re heirlooms!”

So what makes a tomato an heirloom? To answer that I can only quote my friend and fellow Maine gardener Barbara Damrosch, whose new book, A Life in the Garden, will be published in October. Here’s how Barbara defines heirlooms: They are “limited to varieties bred before the end of World War II, when the commercial seed trade switched over to patented F1 hybrids. Before that, all varieties were open pollinated, which means that you can save seeds from a favorite one and pass it down, like any family heirloom. . . . But seeds saved from F1 hybrids cannot produce fruits similar to the ones from which they came, which means you have to go back to the seller for more seed.” So heirlooms are open, transparent, free to all, and, I would argue, more democratic, if that means something to you.

Charlie Costello’s heirlooms: costolutos, Barcelona cherries, and golden nuggets

Happily, heirloom tomatoes come in dozens, possibly hundreds of named varieties, from deeply ridged costolutos, like the ones in the photo above, to green zebras with their delicate lime-green stripes; black Krims, which are actually purple-red in color; big, beefy Amish paste tomatoes, perfect for a dense sauce; greeny-yellow German cherry tomatoes; sweet orange Wellingtons; and old-fashioned ones like Mortgage Lifter (self-explanatory), Arkansas Traveler, and the cherished San Marzano. Just saying the names gives me pleasure but sampling them all is a revelation of flavors.

To my taste, there’s no better way to serve such fine fruit at this abundant time of the year than slicing them, the more the merrier, on a broad platter, contrasting colors, textures, and flavors, passing over them nothing more than a sprinkling of crunchy sea salt and a generous pour of extra-virgin olive oil, preferably a well-made Spanish picual, which is delectable in combination with tomatoes. (Two excellent picuals are Castillo de Canena’s Family Reserve Picual and Casas de Hualdo Picual, both available at La Tienda, the online distributor of fine Spanish food products.).

Next up on my treasured list of what to do with tomatoes is, I’m almost embarrassed to say it, a classic tomato sandwich—not even a BLT, but just thickly sliced tomatoes stacked on some very good grainy, seedy bread, and dressed with nothing more than that essential sprinkle of sea salt and in place of olive oil, a schmear of first-rate commercial mayonnaise.

But back to pasta, which is where tomatoes achieve apotheosis: Raw or cooked, embellished with slivered leaves of fresh green basil and parsley or just a dribble of olive oil, smoothed to a puree or chopped into chunks, tomatoes in any form give pasta a reason for being. And although we’ll consume all sorts of things on our pasta the rest of the year, at the height of summer, it’s pasta with fresh, ripe tomatoes that make us truly grateful.

I want to say just a couple of words about the most famous tomato pasta sauce of modern times, Marcella Hazan’s feast of pureed tomatoes, an onion, butter, salt--è basta! It’s called simply “Tomato Sauce III.” There could not be anything simpler but because of that, it requires very close attention to the ingredients. Most iterations of this widely published recipe call for canned tomatoes, usually a 28-ounce tin, and that’s what I use when I make the sauce, which I do frequently in the winter months, sometimes subbing a quarter-cup of a very flavorful extra-virgin for the whole stick of butter. But I went back recently to check on the actual recipe in my broken-backed, sauce-besmirched, oil-decorated, signed-by-Marcella first edition of The Classic Italian Cookbook, which has been at my side and mostly open on my counter top since its publication back in 1980. There I found that the original recipe calls for “2 pounds fresh, ripe plum tomatoes.” All well and good, but when simmered for the recommended 55 minutes total, the freshness of fresh tomatoes disappears and Poor Cook is left with something that tastes disappointingly like canned tomatoes, and not even the finest kind.

Nonetheless, the recipe gets rave reviews from everyone who tries it and who am I to quibble? So make Marcella’s recipe by all means, but make it (as I do) on a cold winter night when the snow is swirling, the wind is howling, and you think there’s nothing to eat in the house—except, there’s almost always a box of spaghetti, a tin of tomatoes, an onion, and a stick of butter. And you’ll be grateful for it.

And save this season’s fabulous fresh tomatoes, right out of your garden or a nearby farmer’s field, for something like the Sugo di Pomodoro that I developed with my daughter Sara for our joint cookbook, The Four Seasons of Pasta. It’s quick and easy, just what you want on the table when the weather is warm and no one wants to spend much time in the kitchen.

Or try the legendary summertime pasta dish from Rome called pasta alla checca. The name, checca, had me puzzled for a long time but it turns out it’s Roman slang for a queen and I don’t mean royalty, although why this preparation should be a favorite of Rome’s gay community is beyond me. It’s a much-loved choice in the old-fashioned trattorie in the heart of Vecchia Roma, and just what’s wanted on summer nights when the sampietrini, the cobblestones of the old streets, have cooled from the day’s heat and a light breeze springs up along the Tiber. You might be tempted to call it pasta salad but it’s not! This is hot pasta, quickly drained and tossed with a room-temperature sauce of raw tomatoes, fresh basil, slivered red onions, and plenty of fine, fruity olive oil.

I’ve added recipes for these and two more tomato-based sauces below. Just scroll down to view them although they are for paid subscribers only. (A girl has to pay the rent somehow!)

So go to it! With tomatoes at their peak of seasonal flavors, I’ve been eating them for breakfast (Catalan style, crushed into a slice of toasted bread that’s been dressed with olive oil and rubbed with a cut clove of garlic); for lunch, as the afore-mentioned tomato sandwich (and yes, sometimes with a thick slice of country-style bacon on top); and for dinner in as many different pasta dishes as I can summon.

The following recipes, which can all be found in The Four Seasons of Pasta, are for paid subscribers only. Please consider joining the gang on the kitchen porch: