A Tomato Book

by Joe Urbach

Description The tomato exists to be eaten. Its skin is there not to rebuff our advances but to be touched, to be bitten into. Its flesh is pulpy and delicately sweet. There are no seeds to spit out, no tough rind, and, apart from the tiny stem button, no inedible core. You just eat it up, letting its juices run down your chin. Tomatoes were born to give pleasure. They would do so even if they were as poisonous as rumor once said. In fact, that libel may have come about simply from the suspicion that something so utterly seductive must be up to no good. How often do you encounter something so desirable that is also so easy to get to know? To the uninitiated, an artichoke is a bristly enigma, but the smallest child can comprehend a tomato. The tomato is a softy. It is lovely and yielding and totally ours. Botanists tell us that the tomato is actually a fruit, not a vegetable. But other fruits have it all over the tomato; they have more flavor, more charisma. Mangoes are more voluptuous, oranges are juicier, raspberries more tartly delicious. As a berry, the tomato is just the wrong size. (Would you want one in your cereal?) The tomato's decision to defect to the vegetables was a good career move. As a vegetable, it competes only with sweet corn for allure. If the onion is the vegetable that can make you weep, the tomato is the one that can make you smile. A pile of cucumbers or cabbages or kohlrabies or carrots in the farmers' market can be abstractly beautiful, but the moment you lay eyes on a basketful of bright, ripe, red tomatoes, you can't help but get happy. If they're cherry tomatoes, you want to pop one or two or three of them right into your mouth. Tomatoes are their own best sauce as well as the best sauce for almost everything else! In this latest book author and newspaper columnist, Joe Urbach dives into to health benefits and history of the tomato. A journey from fear of poisoning to the fame they now enjoy. From the beginnings of ketchup, to the reason the ketchup bottle is shaped the way it is. Along the way, Joe lets us in on just how good these perennial garden favorites really are. Oh, and if you have ever wondered why a garden tomato tastes so much better than a store bought one - Joe answers that too!