Tomatoes With a Past

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Community Plot Lines: Episode Five

In this episode, Dino Kraniotis shares the secret of his killer tomatoes, killer Greek Stuffed Tomato that is, and we travel to upstate New York to see the garden of heirloom tomato specialist Amy Goldman.

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Among the herculean beefsteaks, there's Polish Giant. "It's genetically primed to produce huge fruits," she said. It may not be the tastiest beefsteak, but it's certainly one of the largest. Among these heavyweights, she likes Radiator Charlie's Mortgage Lifter. She writes: "Eating a thick juicy mortgage lifter slab, marbled with white -- like fat -- is like having a last steak supper before you die and go to tomato heaven."

One of the most striking varieties is Jersey Devil, a paste type but huge, weighing a pound or more. Goldman describes it as sweet and rich.

She introduces readers to an oddball called the Reisetomate, whose lobes can be removed intact, like orange segments. In fact, most of them are oddballs, in that they are not the perfect smooth red orbs that we had come to believe defined the tomato.

How did the tomato become so diverse?

Wild forms originated on the western coast of South America and were domesticated over centuries in what is now Mexico. When the Old World met the New, the tomato headed east, all the way across to Asia. When it returned with the immigrant settlement of the United States, it came in all the variety of its localized versions and then proceeded to evolve.

The seeds of heirloom vegetables reliably resemble their parents, but the gardener can select traits over successive generations to create something bigger or tastier or a different color.

So each of these varieties comes with poignant and personal stories that in their own way are as enriching as the vegetables themselves. Nor is this a phenomenon assigned just to the past.

Two of the 200 varieties featured in the book come to us from Goldman herself. In 2002, she and her daughter, Sara, took a trip to the Galapagos Islands, where tomatoes grow wild, and Goldman collected a wild currant type with a high sugar content and has named it Sara's Galapagos.

In Italy in 1999, she found a ribbed Genovese type at a grocery store and saved the seeds. By growing successive generations, she was able to remove the genetic instability inherent in hybrids and now has an heirloom that is identical to its parent. She has called it Goldman's Italian American in honor of her late father's grocery store in Brooklyn.

She has no one favorite, and the varieties winnowed for the book are there because she likes them. "I picked what I thought was the most interesting, historic and delicious," she said over a salad of sliced, multicolored cherry tomatoes. "Why confine yourself to just one?"