We first need to establish the degree of my childhood aversion to tomatoes. It was fear, not dislike, since I’d never actually tasted one. There wasn’t a single form in which they weren’t scary: I rejected them as ketchup, gazpacho, soup, salsa, sauce, and in their natural form. White pizza only, please, and cream sauce on pasta. My sisters could chase me with a tomato and I would flee in terror—though granted, it was always safer to run if they were chasing me.
I’ve lied to you already. I said it was a childhood aversion, but it lasted until I was thirty.
In college, my fellow Girl Scout camp counselors created an “eww, get it off me!” dance to commemorate the time I accidentally sat on a ketchup packet. I accepted dinner invitations with the warning that I couldn’t eat tomato, and maybe I made it sound like an allergy even if I didn’t say that outright. I’d grown used to the question “What do you mean you don’t eat tomato?” Nobody blinks if you say you don’t eat Brussels sprouts or okra; it just so happens this particular fruit/vegetable is so ubiquitous that people are downright incredulous when you say you don’t eat it.
No tomato had ever harmed me, to my knowledge. There was no root for my distaste. It wasn’t like the day I asked my grandfather for a banana, and he gave me one; and I asked for another, and he gave me another, and so on until I had eaten all the bananas in the house and fulfilled my entire lifetime quota. I don’t know where the tomato aversion came from. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes at a formative age? Death by deadly nightshade in a previous life? Whatever the reason, I’d written tomatoes out of my life. That’s why it was so remarkable that Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life reformed me in one sitting.
My band was on tour in the South, and I was in the backseat reading. It’s one of those “my year of ___” books, where the author and her family had decided to live entirely off their family farm in Virginia (with a few necessary exceptions, such as coffee). There’s an eye-opening chapter on turkey sex, a hilarious account of her daughter’s chicken-raising enterprise, and who knew that you could only pick one or two stalks from an asparagus plant in its first couple of years, or else it would “sink into vegetable despair and die”? Certainly not me; I’d never gardened.
And then I came to the chapter on growing tomatoes, a chapter so lush in its descriptions I could practically taste the tomatoes…and I didn’t mind. It helped, too, that she described the tomatoes I’d grown up observing as “anemic wedges that taste like slightly sour water with a mealy texture.” I’d been justified in my aversion, clearly. The Jaune Flamme she described, slow-roasted and sprinkled with salt and thyme, bore absolutely no relation to what I thought of as a tomato.
We pulled into Durham with enough time to grab dinner on 9th Street before heading to the venue. My drummer and I chose a taco place, the kind with all the ingredients arrayed in silver dishes behind glass.
“Hey Tony,” I said. “Dare me to put tomato on my taco.”
He laughed. “You don’t eat tomatoes.”
“I will if you dare me.”
He dared me, and I did. I’ve had better since, but the important thing in that moment was that they were inoffensive, and I didn’t die, and maybe I hadn’t needed to run from my sister or to have done the get-it-off-me dance.
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Sooner or Later Everything Falls into the Sea
Kingsolver planted varieties like Silvery Fir Tree, Siberian Early, Brandywine, Green Zebra, the aptly named Dolly Parton. She wrote that they’d bear fruit in orange, in purple, in stripes; I’d never seen any evidence such things existed. July in Maryland rolled around, and a friend arrived at our house one day with a basket of farmers market tomatoes in a range of shapes and sizes and colors that proved Kingsolver was no liar. My friend had planned a themed feast: a tomato tart, a kaleidoscopic bread salad… I can’t remember what else, but it was tomatoes all the way down. I stayed away from the kitchen, afraid I’d talk myself out of it. By the time he was done cooking, the sun had set. We ate outside in darkness; I found I didn’t mind the taste when I couldn’t see them. No, not didn’t mind: I LIKED them.
The next spring, I planted a vegetable garden for the first time. I spent hours at the garden center, getting to know dozens of heirloom varietals. I chose Early Girl, quick-growing; Lemon Boy, perfect yellow globes; Sweet Millions, with grape-like clusters. I cheered the thick stems, the earthy-smelling leaves, the first yellow flowers, the adorably tiny green orbs that grew larger every day, and gradually took on new hues. (The dog discovered his own love of gardening around then, initiating a years-long war involving progressively higher chicken wire and his amazing Spider-man impersonation).
When I picked my first ripe homegrown Early Girl, it was heavier than I expected. It looked nothing like the tomatoes I’d grown up fearing, nothing like the watery Beefsteak tomatoes at the grocery store. Deep red all the way through, velvety, acidic, sweet. I ate it with the basil I’d grown alongside it, farmers market mozzarella, balsamic vinegar, and a crusty bread. It was worth the thirty-year wait.
“Fresh garden tomatoes are so unbelievably tasty, they ruin us utterly and forever on the insipid imports available in the grocery,” Kingsolver wrote, and with her lovely descriptions, turned me into both a gardener and a tomato-eater. If this is a strange digression from science fiction and fantasy, it still has something in common with the other posts in this series: a single book can truly change your life—and even your tastebuds—forever.
Photo: Heavybluesman. Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Sarah Pinsker’s stories have won the Nebula and Sturgeon awards, and have been finalists for the Hugo, the Locus, and the Eugie Foster Memorial Award. Her first novel, Song For A New Day, will be published in autumn 2019. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels and a fourth she swears will be released someday soon. She was born in New York and has lived all over the U.S. and Canada, but currently lives with her wife in Baltimore in a hundred-year-old house surrounded by sentient vines. Find her @sarahpinsker.
I don’t blink, but I do roll my eyes pretty heavily. This antipathy towards sprouts is just pure social hysteria. My nephew never used to dislike sprouts, because my sister never made a thing about them, they were just served normally and accepted as normal food. Then she let my nephew stay overnight at one of his friends, whose parents made a big song and dance about how sprouts were yucky and wasn’t he special for liking them when all the “normal” kids hated them. Since then he’s thrown a tantrum every time they are even mentioned.
Never, ever read “The Hollows” series by Kim Harrison. GMO tomatoes did to the regular human population what GMO corn did to mutants in LOGAN.
Deer have ended my gardening days, but my organic tomatoes were famous among my elderly mom’s friends because the tomatoes tasted like a tomato should taste. Organic and heirloom is the way to go for the best tomato.
My relationship with tomatoes is … complicated. I like them in sauce/puree versions, am generally OK with having them chopped, and stewed tomatoes just make me gag.
Are you sure? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txfdGlxEsG8
@random22 #1: There do seem to be some people who experience Brussels sprouts as bitter no matter how they are cooked. Maybe it’s like the cilantro thing–?
Anyway, yeah, Brussels sprouts get unfairly targeted. They are my second* favorite vegetable, when I can get them fresh. Toothsome, tasty, and satisfying even if cooked in nothing but a quarter inch of water (halve them first), the best morsel of leftover veggie to put into miso soup, and fantastic as coleslaw if you have the patience to deal with all those teensy cabbage shapes.
*First is Alaskan-grown carrots, which can be two inches thick and still sweet as an apple.
I’m perfectly happy with tomatoes in a stew or pasta sauce where it is one flavour among many, but find ketchup and similar nauseating and will avoid fresh tomatoes like the plague. Sundried ones though are quite tasty.
On the other hand frozen cherry tomatoes make for wonderful slingshot ammunition.
And I agree, properly grown tomatoes taste utterly different to the beefsteak mass produced watery cardboard the supermarkets sell. Still don’t like them when fresh though.
@random22
Brussels sprouts are filed for me alongside kale, broccoli, most other cabbages and cauliflower as things that aren’t worth eating. I find when cooked they also tend to have an unpleasant sulphurous tang. Makes for great cow food though.
Now you can turn your attention to the REAL threat: cranberries.
I love ketchup and tomato sauce. I do not like raw or whole tomatoes they are flavorless and I don’t like their texture.
I hope nobody mentions the most evil of vegetables. The vegetable that needs to disappear from this good Earth forever…
The onion. I think I just gagged writing the name.
I like tomatoes but my grandmother’s explanation of why she peeled them wasn’t pleasant, but peeled tomatoes make the best natural salad dressing because of all the juice! As per Brussels sprouts, I don’t like ’em cooked but they’re great eaten raw–the more you eat the spicier they get!
Sorry to hear that, #10, caramelized onions, along with garlic, make any dish exponentially more delictious. Butr I understand- cilantro tastes soapy to me.
When tomatoes were first introduced to Europe, it was commonly thought that they were poisonous. Maybe some of that history rubbed off on you!
In one of L.M. Montgomery’s books, a character eats cucumbers and milk, to bring on exciting dreams. He is told that he is lucky to have survived, as the combination is “rank poison!”
A fresh warm tomato straight from the vine with a little salt on it is one of the best things in the world. Sadly, I lost the “dog wars” a long time ago and get mine from the farmers’ markets. My husband won’t eat the fresh tomatoes, but he loves any form of cooked ones. I don’t get it. He doesn’t eat onions either though, so go figure.
Re: Brussels sprouts, it’s not social hysteria when they just taste bad. I love all vegetables and will eat any, but I’ve yet to meet a Brussels sprout I’ve enjoyed. People offer all kinds of recipes and I try each one, hoping to find one that works. Alas, I have not. But feel free to offer one here. I actually will try it, unless it involves a red wine because I’m allergic to the tannins in them.
@14
There’s a way of roasting brussels sprouts that gives them a nutty flavor and no bitterness. I’ve had them in better restaurants but haven’t been able to duplicate it myself. I know it involves halving them, coating in olive oil, and roasting at 400F for 20 minutes or so, and I think dusting with parmesan at the end. Someday I’ll figure it out. Why something that simple sounding is so hard to duplicate…
@@@@@ mayhem no. 6: When I hear somebody describe a brassica as “sulfurous,” my first thought is that the brassica was overcooked. Even people who love brassicas (raises hand) hate that sulfurous flavor that comes from overcooking them.
I’ve been close enough to poverty to want to know how to cook every vegetable that’s cheap, such as cabbage,* so if you want recipes that might add interest, I can post them here. But if they’re “not worth eating” raw because they taste bitter or otherwise non-foodlike to you, not because they’re boring, never mind.
*I am working on canned beets, because my reaction right now is “Well, it’s a beet. There it is.” But canned beets are cheap where I live. Beet risotto, maybe?
Mushrooms and bell peppers drive me up the wall (particularly mushrooms. So rubbery, ugh!).
@@@@@ 5 Jenny Islander You’re right about the Brussels sprouts. They (and other cabbage family plants) contain a bitter chemical that some people can taste and others can’t. It’s a genetic thing–sometimes when I was teaching intro bio we’d pass out slips of paper soaked with the chemical so students could find out which version of the gene they had. I can taste it and I’ll still eat Brussels sprouts and kale occasionally if they’re cooked well, but they’re definitely not my favorite veggies. Cabbage and cauliflower taste a lot less bitter to me, broccoli is in the middle.
Your phobia of tomatoes brings to mind my phobia of dead flowers, though that one does come from an early childhood trauma — I touched a peony and it fell apart in my hands. I still hate peonies, and I shut my eyes and hurry when I absolutely must walk under a blooming magnolia tree.
I doubt even Barbara Kingsolver could cure that phobia, though as far as I know, she hasn’t tried. But she’s one of the most persuasive writers I’ve ever encountered — her essays were my moral compass for years — so I can well believe your experience.
I’m a tomato snob. I’m fine with sauce, but avoid gazpacho — despite Barbara describing her love for it in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle — and refuse to taste ketchup on account of being revolted by the smell. I only ever buy fresh tomatoes in summer when local farms have them, and then I focus on buying (lots and lots of) Sungolds and Golden Raves, the two sweetest and most luscious varieties I know of.
I seem to have an unusual aversion to all but the mildest greens. Bok choy, spinach, Napa cabbage, and romaine lettuce are OK. Basil pesto is my favorite food ever. Chard, kale, collards, other cooking-geens, most other salad greens but especially arugala, etc.? No thanks.
I loathed Brussel sprouts for their bitterness for years and years and only ate them, under protest, at Christmas and Thanksgiving, but around the time I turned thirty it stopped, possibly because we discovered a recipe that involves cooking them in bits of bacon, which goes a long way towards masking the bitterness.
It’s still present, but it’s no longer like eating a poisoned golfball.
It’s an exception to my general rule that most vegetables taste best raw. Broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, onions, peas, beans, etc: all best uncooked.
Ermahgerd! Brussels Sprouts
12 oz bag of shaved brussels sprouts
2 tbsp butter
Chicken broth powder
or
¾ cup chicken broth
marjoram leaf, cut
paprika powder
Ready the broth infusion: prepare ¾ cup of broth on the stove and bring to boil. Add 1 teaspoon of marjoram leaf or other herbs or spice for flavoring. (This works well.) Quickly remove from heat and allow to steep for 10 minutes. Strain mixture into a measuring cup and set aside.
Evenly divide the shaved brussels sprouts into two 6-ounce batches. Heat a nonstick skillet on medium-high (70%) until hot. Add one tablespoon of butter, and when mostly melted add the first batch of sprouts. Stir and toss to coat with the butter for 15 seconds, then let it sit and caramelize for another 20 seconds. Liberally sprinkle paprika on top, then add half of the broth infusion. Stir and toss for another minute until the liquid is absorbed and the sprouts are softened. Transfer to a serving bowl and repeat for the second batch.
Makes enough to feed two hungry people with some left over.
@16 Fresh or canned, beets taste like dirt smells.
And they stain everything, even worse than tomatoes.