Perfect summer tomatoes? Turn them into butter

Every summer, such as Clockwork, a specific type of group memory elevators. Tomatoes – real realities, of the kind of bruises if you breathe strongly Blts Or pegs to pay beside a Burger. For a passing week, we have become missionaries. We announce that they “only need salt.” We mention each other: the best they never see inside the refrigerator. We publish pictures of slices and sweating in the heat, as if the act of certificate alone may maintain it for a little longer.

It is easy to roll your eyes on the obsession of tomatoes – for sure I have, when I was younger and a little more charm around the daily pleasures – but recently I was thinking about what it reveals: a deep and hungry desire to feel over time through something tangible. Something we can taste. In a world in which the HUMS grocery section produces in addition to the non -seasonal consistency, the tomato season provides rare excitement from observation. Note that light has changed. The fruit is warm of the sun.

This is once, we eat something right when we are supposed to do so.

This type of observation – the calm and season New York Times MagazineShe writes that “no one takes changing the seasons seriously like the Japanese.” She talks about CoThe 72 Microseasons in the traditional Japanese calendar, each of them lasts a few days, with names such as “fish of ice” or “rainbows”.

It is a reminder of a few seasonal survival on the American day, unless you are lucky enough to stumble in the farmers market in July, the tomatoes will be like the sun.

Intestinal, I realize, it is used to be a kind of cooking celebration of agricultural microscopes. How to pay close attention. A way to distinguish what was mature, what was fading, what was required of savings. A practice I asked you to continue.

After that, in one of those pleasant coincidences that seem to be the universe pushing you, you coincided with an old cooking book in 1965 written by a comic writer who became a kind of poet of the pickle. His name was Leonard Luis Livinson, and most comedy spent writing his adult life – for radio, for TV, for Hollywood. But when published “The full book of pickles and tasteHe claimed that it was more laughing than anything he wrote at all. This says something, because this was not a humor book. It was a slightly honest, elaborate poem and completely charming to the art of preserving it.

“My world sauce has become” Books, “and Raconeur of taste recipes. (The reader, I have been sold).

I am a lollipop for people who become accidental academics through mania, and the type of people who fall into a personal passion for the extent that they appear with a Full classification In clouds. Levinson was one of them, and his book outperforms the fruits of this confirmation: some immortal estate – kosher, sweet pickled carrots, and angry grins – some of them are historically historian, such as CatsUp or the sliced ​​onion slices dyed with unbearable shades of Jade Green.

But the recipe that stopped me, the recipes that made my mouth water for the tomato season and grief at the same time, was tomato butter. No sauce. Not ketchup. Obesity. The slow cooked spread is made of tomato pulp and sugar, seasoned with ginger, cinnamon, clove, and bright with lemon juice. The cousin of the summer apple butter, but in some way more richer-Hariri, the sun’s driver. Bahar was built for summer evenings, when everything feels very and golden on the edges.

It is the Levinson version that I aspire to later this season, mostly because it gives a lot: four full mickels of 12 cups of tomato pulp and seven cups of sugar (in addition to a relatively teaspoon ginger, 1 teaspoon of cinnamon and a teaspoon). A stored filling relationship. But at the present time, in this initial early match for this season, I was making small batches at home – using any distance I can carry from the market, switch acid, sweetness, and spice level as I go.

I love ginger more than Levinson. Less sugar, brown instead of white. A pinch of salt is not in place here too – and a teaspoon of Miso It adds a kind of quiet and delicious bass note that makes everything else sings.

It is a thorough BLT. Wonderful to crack with cream cheese. It turns the normal egg sandwich into something transcendent in practice. And when the time comes-when the tomato boxes begin to diminish and feel that the shiver in the end of the summer is in the air-I will settle on the recipe. I will make a full batch. I will see it.

Then, one night, perhaps in late October, when the wind enjoys a little bite and the sky is very dark, when the smell of the season moves from protective sun and basil to something beating, alone – I will open a jar. I will publish it on a warm slice of Corn breadPerhaps with a little salted butter, I will remember: this exciting exciting window when tasting tomatoes like the same time.