Heirloom Tomatoes

I don’t know about you, but when the salmonella scare a couple of months ago had restaurants and supermarkets pulling American tomatoes off their sandwiches and shelves, I didn’t feel hard done by. I don’t buy them and am inclined to cast them aside when eating out. Not because I fear salmonella, per se, but because they don’t seem worth eating.

As Barbara Kingsolver opined so aptly in her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (a wonderful, essential read for anyone who eats– get thee to a bookstore), those blemish-free, coded and labeled import tomatoes “taste like slightly sour water with a mealy texture. I’m amazed those things keep moving through the market but the world apparently has tomato-eaters for whom ‘kinda reddish’ is qualification enough.”

Better, instead, to wait patiently to indulge in the feast, which starts about now (a little later than usual due to a cool spring) and lasts until frost. The real things are ripening on vines as we speak. They’re not always picture perfect – lumpy, oddly shaped and sometimes scabby. But, ah, the flavour. The juicy sweetness serves as a reminder that tomatoes are, indeed, a fruit. And the taste simply doesn’t compare to its imported counterpart.

There are actually thousands of varieties of tomatoes. Those we’ve become accustomed to pack up easily, travel well, look uniform and unblemished – because that’s what grocery shoppers want – and will last a very long time between picking and eating.

These days, you’ll see lots of locally grown romas, beefsteaks and cherry tomatoes at the farmers’ markets. But if you look a little closer, you’ll also find heirloom varieties. Their names alone will have you interested – Cherokee Purple, Persimmon, Hillbilly, Jubilee, Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter (named by its developer, who, legend has it, was able to pay off his house in short order after crossbreeding his best tomato plants and selling the resulting tomatoes for a good price).

Heirloom tomatoes range in colour from gold and green to dusky rose and purple. They come as tiny as a grape and as large as, well… apparently there’s a tomato named for Dolly Parton, so I’ll let you use your imagination.

Brenda Knechtel grows about 10 heirloom varieties (plus standards, like beefsteak) on the farm she shares with husband Maynard near Wellesley. Reading through the seed catalogue for tomatoes, she says, “is like having a history lesson” because, in some cases, varieties date back hundreds of years (the Persimmon, for example, traces back to 1781) and to places all over the world. Her Matt’s Cherry tomatoes are grown from seeds passed down by an aunt who sold vegetables at the Kitchener market for 50 years and was given the seeds by one of her customers.

Heirloom vegetables, Knechtel says, pull more nutrients from the soil than hybrids – so not only do they taste better, they’re better for you. The hybrids, she says, are all about “society’s need for perfection.”

Heritage tomatoes are certainly outweighed by standard types at the farmers’ markets but they’re there if you look for them. You can also buy from Knechtel Family Farm directly, where they welcome customers six days a week (no Sundays) between 8 and 6. There’s no stand, but they’ll pick vegetables (none of which are sprayed) right there for you – it doesn’t get much fresher than that. (“People come by expecting a stand and say, ‘Well, show us what you’ve got,’ ” laughs Knechtel. Gesturing to the crops around her, she says, “I say, ‘It’s all right here.’ ”).

For directions to Knechtel Family Farm, check out the Buy Local! Buy Fresh! map. And happy tomato feasting. Enjoy them while you can – the famine lies ahead!