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Published on 09/01/1997 All articles from this issue

September memories direct from the vine

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By Clyde Noel

A Side of Clyde

Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, said "The first thing God did was plant a garden. The garden preceded man and ever since, man has found deep personal satisfaction in a garden. It is when a man is eating his garden fruits that he is closest to God."

So it's the end of August, and thanks to the generosity of a couple of my neighbors, they gave my wife and me a couple of home-grown, vine-ripe tomatoes. If I bought them in Andronico's or Draegers, they would have cost about seven bucks.

When you have no home garden of your own, you need a friend with a tomato connection, because you can only get vine-ripe tomatoes at the end of summer in Los Altos. The rest of the year you have to buy those tasteless pretenders that people grow in a hothouse to make a buck.

Those others lack the juice and the flavor of the summertime home-growns. Even farmers' markets don't have the taste of the home-grown that are picked right from the garden and eaten quickly.

I grew up on the farm eating home-grown tomatoes from the family truck patch. My grandmother would cook white sweet corn and green beans with new potatoes, and right before we were ready for supper she would send me out to the garden to pick four or five of the deep globular shape, rich scarlet in color and the ripest reddest garden fruit. I would only pick the slicer kind.

My grandmother would slice them on the plate, and the juice from the tomato would mix with the green beans and even get into the corn bread. The mix was, and still is, indescribably wonderful.

Anyway, I took one of my friends' offerings and sat down and ate it like an apple. The juice ran down my chin, onto my shirt, like it did when I occasionally ate one in the garden.

I can still hear my grandmother: "Look at your shirt. Now I have to get another clean one from the wash line."

Back on the farm if you wanted a snack, you would use the tomatoes to make a sandwich. The fresh home-grown tomato sandwich is made with white bread. You cover both slices of bread with mayonnaise, salt and pepper the slices of tomatoes and then put them between the bread.

Eat quickly. The juice of the tomato slices will turn the white bread into mush and you will be wearing the tomato sandwich if you don't eat as fast as you can.

My grandfather used to sell some of his tomatoes on the side of the road at a little vegetable stand he ran in the summer. He also sold sweet corn, peaches, green beans and pumpkins. When the tourists came up from Philadelphia he would try to sell them cantaloupes along with other vegetables. He called them yellow meated midget watermelons and made a ridiculous profit.

Which tells you that you have to be careful when you buy produce at a vegetable stand - that goes for tomatoes because there is no taste like a home-grown.

I have eaten all my neighbor's tomatoes now and I am taking my shirts to the dry cleaners because my wife says the stains won't come out. I don't care if the stains don't come out because when I consider the ecstasy and the memories and the wonderful taste of those home-growns, it's a long way towards filling that passion for the ripe home-growns.

And to think, it wasn't that long ago I felt the same way about sex.

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