It's starting. The tomatoes are coming in....into my kitchen, that is. With the cool spring, moderate weather and rain, I was thinking maybe I would be spared the agony of the tomato adventure this year. When I think about last summer, I remember that every flat
surface in my kitchen was covered in tomatoes. I stewed them, canned them, mixed them with okra and
onion for soup, made homemade Rotel and frozen little Roma tomatoes whole. They
were on my table for every meal, sliced on a plate.
Every time I saw that man—my husband—coming in the house with another bucket, I cringed. My back
ached from standing on my little gel mat peeling, slicing, stewing
tomatoes. What makes all this work
unbearable is that I don’t like tomatoes!
Every summer of
my childhood, I watched as my mother, father, grandmother and great aunt made a
big fuss about summer tomatoes.
They squealed with joy when the first tomatoes were brought home by my daddy,
a farmer, and placed on the kitchen windowsill to ripen to the perfect shade of
red—brighter than barn red but not crimson.
Mother had a
special knife she used to peel tomatoes, the only way to serve them in our
house. No one was allowed to use
the long serrated knife for any other purpose. Her tomatoes were to be peeled
and cold.
Grandmother and
Aunt Ruth would pile sliced tomatoes on a big white platter and place it on the
table with a look of accomplishment like they had just presented a delicacy to
an honored guest.
“Don’t you want to at least try to like a tomato?” my mother asked
me every summer of my life until she died the year I turned 39.
“No, thank you,”
I would reply on my first refusal.
“Oh, come on and
try one,” Aunt Ruth would say.
“You like ketchup. You should like tomatoes. You like soup and spaghetti sauce, so you should like
tomatoes.”
“But I don’t like
raw ones,” I replied. They were
never convinced.
The next day at lunch
they (my mother, grandmother and great aunt) would again place a big plate of
sliced tomatoes, bacon and lettuce for BLTs on our 1960-style kitchen table.
The ritual would begin all over again.
It was as if I
were a family embarrassment. We would go out to eat or to someone’s home and
they would pass the tomatoes, and as taught, I would politely say, “No thank
you.” My mother would look up over her bifocals and say, “Nancy doesn’t eat
tomatoes.” The hostess would give her a nodding sympathetic look.
Since I was an
only child living in a household with four adults, I was outnumbered. I never
gave in. I ate bacon
sandwiches—just bacon and mustard.
How could anyone
who loves being Southern as much as I do, not
like tomatoes?
I endured all this questioning at home and
thought it would stop there. What
did I do but marry a tomato-loving man from a family of tomato lovers? Same scenario plays out every time
there is a family gathering.
It also happens
with my friends. We go to a restaurant and I order the salad without tomatoes.
One says, “You don’t like tomatoes?” with that squinty look of disbelief. I might get a taco and say, “Please
hold the tomatoes.”
“Hold the
tomatoes? It’s not a taco without
diced tomatoes."
It sounds like a
broken record that will not stop playing, like the movie Groundhog Day where Bill Murray wakes up to the same day over and
over.
I must admit that
I do like fried green tomatoes. That’s just because they are in the same fried
family as a French fry, and you can put ketchup on them. Maybe that gets me
back in the good graces of my family, friends and in-laws. If I lived in the
Mid-West or the North and didn’t like tomatoes, would it be such a big deal?
So, I'll say it again. I don’t
like tomatoes! Furthermore, I don’t like turnip greens or anything else that
looks like dandelion leaves. And while we’re confessing Southern sin, I don’t
enjoy or think I would have liked William Faulkner at all. So there!
