Heirloom tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes: Out of the past and in your future?
Published in Cheese Connoisseur magazine
Summer 2010
By Janet Eastman
SOME say that there’s nothing better on a lazy summer day than to sit in the shade, a book in one hand with a chilled Caprese salad at the ready. Well, put that book down. It’s time to pay more attention to the heirloom tomato in your salad. If you do, you’ll discover that the tales and truths about these tasty treasures of the past are as captivating as any bestseller.
Tomato’s long vines have spread out across the planet, forever changing cuisines and fortunes. The seeds from the heirlooms we eat today were prized by royalty, traded by railroad employees, smuggled across borders and created long ago for profit. The popular Mortgage Lifter got its name during the Great Depression after a West Virginia radiator repairman sold enough of its seeds to pay off his debt.
Like any good read, the origin of the domesticated tomato is swathed in confusion and historical controversy. It wasn’t until 1893 that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a tomato was more vegetable than fruit.
That’s because heirloom tomatoes are easy to love but they’re hard to define. How can you categorize something that can be sweet, citrusy or salty while looking like a plum, pear, lemon, squash, persimmon, white potato, green sausage, chili pepper, ox heart or, if you squint, black truffles?
They can weigh as little as a few ounces or pound the ground when they drop from the vine. They can be round, oblong, flattened, with cracks, irregular folds and something that looks like a little tongue hanging out of the top. In short, they can be just far-out alien looking. Some may say ugly.
Like the supermarket-commodity hybrid tomatoes, heirlooms are thought mostly to be red. Yet varieties also sport insides and outsides that are white, black, orange, yellow, green, pink, purple. They are striped, swirled, speckled and even clear. With swift cuts by a knife, they can make salads and appetizer platters look like patterns found in kaleidoscopes.
Heirlooms, as you can see, don’t have a unifying appearance. But they have one consistent trait: These open-pollinators duplicate the seed that bore them. Hybrids can’t make that claim.
Also unlike high-tech hybrids, nature’s heirlooms were not designed to be machine-picked unripe, packed into crates and carted for days in trucks. They may not always be pretty, but heirlooms do what they should: smell and taste like real, old-fashioned tomatoes.
All summer long in Alpharetta, Georgia, home gardener and author Cherie Everhart enjoys her Insalata Caprese made from fresh, mild mozzarella and tangy Little Lucky tomatoes. Another of her summer favorites is a grilled cheese sandwich that combines a strong white Cheddar with the sweeter, classic tomato-flavored Brandywines.
Top chefs rhapsodize about splitting soft Burrata cheese balls in half and allowing the silky center to ooze onto the plate and mingle with the juice of heirloom tomatoes. The sweet-milk taste of Burrata, which has a similar eat-it-quick optimal shelf life as heirloom tomatoes, complements the heirlooms’ rich, intense flavors.
Try this: Slice your favorite heirloom tomatoes and place them on a bed of salad greens. Add creamy Burrata with its hint of the leek-like Apulian asfodelo herb. Drizzle on a dressing made by blending a fruity Kalamata olive pureed in extra-virgin olive oil. You can upgrade this dish by using Di Bruno Brothers’ white truffle-honey Burrata piqued by white balsamic vinaigrette.
Or not. It doesn’t take a culinary degree, fancy recipe or a lot of thought to bring out the best in a real heirloom tomato.
Simply, get one that was grown as close to home as possible, picked when its juice is about to burst out of skin tenderized by the sun, and bite in. Its genuine, nostalgic taste should deliver you back to the summer vacations of your childhood (real or imagined) when slices of Mom’s or Dad’s tangy Tigerella, sweet German Red Strawberry, smoky Chocolate Stripes, zingy Lady Lucy or lemony Manyel on really good white bread with mayo was all you wanted.
Tomatoes are beloved because they’re familiar. They are the most popular heirloom vegetable sold, reports Everhart in her new book “The Complete Guide to Growing Tomatoes: Everything You Need to Know Explained Simply – Including Heirloom Tomatoes” (Atlantic Publishing Group, Inc., 2010, $25). [To be released in July; I worked off a proof and interviewed the author]
These heritage seeds have now found a fertile home in every state in the U.S. They are benefiting from the renewed mainstream practice of eating healthy by buying locally produced, natural food. And some culinarians have figured out that if they don’t want a rubbery store-bought tomato, they better scratch out a patch of land and grow their own.
In the height of summer, you can’t go a day without seeing tomatoes in some form. They’re grown on apartment terraces and in farmhouse gardens. They’re tossed into breakfast, lunch and dinner. To many of us, piles of freshly harvested tomatoes on the kitchen counter symbolize carefree summers, just as the closing snap of the last canning jar lid sounds the alarm of the approaching autumn.
So you better get to the farmers market now. Heirloom tomatoes are one of those treats best enjoyed in season.
Where to find variety
You’ll never tire of heirloom tomatoes. That’s because their wild nature forces them to be much more interesting than hybrids, which Everhart reminds us, have classically been bred to be big, round, red and resilient “so their flavors occupy a delicious but somewhat narrow box in the tomato universe.”
But this greater-flavor grail requires patience from small-scale farmers and home gardeners. Because heirlooms generally grow on big “indeterminate” vines, they need more space, trellises and supports. These plants also take a longer time to bear fruit and ripen, and because of their irregular shapes and softer fruit, they need special handling. Adding to the grower’s woes, heirlooms tend to yield less than their bred-to-be-productive counterparts and are more vulnerable to disease and damage.
But they’re not entirely helpless. As Everhart, whose day job is as a chemical research scientist, explains it: “Our ancestors would never have gone to the trouble of saving seeds from plants that fared poorly.”
The heirlooms that can better sidestep disease and other downfalls include the bright orange beefsteak Kellogg’s Breakfast, crack-resistant Eva Purple Ball, sweet-flavored Tropic and the aptly named, reliable Homestead 24. If you’re thinking about planting some, ask which work best in your climate and soil type.
Organic vegetable farmer Chris Hardy has great faith in growing yesteryear’s tomatoes. He plants Old German heirlooms on a few acres in Ashland, Oregon to sell to restaurant chefs and at local farmers markets.
In his off seasons, he travels the globe in search of sustainable growing techniques. Along the way, he’s tasted tomatoes sprung from generations-old seeds. In parts of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, the tradition is to serve tomatoes with wild onions or garlic and fried or boiled mutton. In Armenia, he remembers savoring fresh tomato and cucumber slices sprinkled with green onions, sprigs of cilantro and a little salt and black pepper. Sometimes, the farmers he met there would add yogurt, a yogurt-dill dip or sheep Feta made nearby. “This ‘salat’ was eaten fresh, in season and grown using manure for fertilizer by farmers that their neighbors have known for most of their lives,” Hardy recalls, nodding approvingly.
His tomato travel also brought him many times to the farmlands of Sicily and the Italian mainland. Ripe tomatoes there are doused with fresh-pressed olive oil, salt and pepper, and served with homemade Mozzarella di Bufala and sweet basil leaves on the side. “This, of course, is always served before the vast repertoire of fresh marinara-covered pasta with meats and veggies,” Hardy says.
“When you buy a tomato from the store, you get a tomato,” he adds, eyeing his land that will deliver his heirloom crops later this season. “But when you eat an heirloom tomato grown by your neighbor, you’re part of a trade-and-share community. Isn’t it a blessing that food is the centerpiece of the human experience?”
Joyce Pendleton has found the perfect heirlooms for her sun-soaked Medford, Oregon home garden. Over the years, they have provided bushels of red, yellow and dark purple tomatoes from late summer to Thanksgiving.
“I love heirloom tomatoes because they’re delicious,” Pendleton says in May, standing over baby plants incubating in her greenhouse, “and I can save the seeds and they will grow true the next year. With anything genetically modified or crossed by man, often it won’t come true the next year. I don’t want to have a mystery.”
If she forgets to label her seeds, she says she can always tell early on which are the Yellow Brandywines. They’re distinguishable by their potato leaves. She and her husband Alan enjoy this large, golden fruit raw. “You’ll never see a ripe Yellow Brandywine in the store,” she says, “because they practically split open just taking them off the vine.”
Her surplus of fresh San Marzano plum tomatoes is used to make her famous tomato sauce, which she stores in glass jars in the freezer. San Marzano and other heirlooms are so popular that the biggest seed companies have tried to mimic their traits in hybrids. Taste matching in a lab, however, still misses the mark, say heirloom advocates.
Pendleton pairs slices of her Jaune Flamme tomatoes with mild cheeses. Or she dries them in her oven at a low temperature, which she can’t do with her too-juicy Yellow Brandywines. “Sun drying them was a big disaster,” she remembers. “Bugs got under the netting. That’s probably why some people have dehydrators.” She shrugs her shoulders in a gardener’s typical “Oh, well” gesture.
The afternoon is fading to evening and yet there are more stories to learn about Pendleton’s garden. But they may have to wait until another summer day. It’s dinnertime. And yes, heirloom tomatoes are on the table.
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Seeds for Sale
Hundreds of heirloom tomato varieties from the last century have disappeared from seed catalogs. Fortunately, legions of seed savers, acting like archeologists, are retrieving, preserving and passing on what they can. Here are two seed banks with heirloom seeds for sale:
--Seed Savers Exchange: A nonprofit organization in which members have passed on one million samples of rare garden seeds to seed companies, small farmers, chefs and home gardeners since it began in 1975 with two garden plants, Grandpa Ott's Morning Glory and German Pink Tomato, brought here from Bavaria. 3094 North Winn Road, Decorah, Iowa 52101, (563) 382-5990, www.seedsavers.org
--Southern Seed Savers Exchange: Established in 1982, it collects, preserves, distribute seeds (including organic ones) and develops new high-performance, open-pollinated varieties with desirable traits. P.O. Box 460, Mineral, VA 23117, (540) 894-9480, www.southernexposure.com