Peggy’s Prompt—tomatoes

I had a tomato sandwich for lunch today at Tomato Jam, one of my favorite small local lunch places. I like tomato sandwiches; I LOVE BLT’s, and since Candy Maier introduced me to pre-cooked bacon, I eat more BLT’s in the summertime than I used to, preferably using my own homegrown lettuce and tomatoes. But since I grow mostly cherry tomatoes, and even smaller ones called Bert’s Wild Cherry Tomatoes, the sandwiches made with them have to be eaten over the sink as those tiny sliced-in-half tomatoes have a tendency to shift wildly when you take a bite out of the sandwich.

The best tomato sandwiches I ever ate were in Iowa City in the early ‘70’s. I was working a few hours a week for a company called Westinghouse Learning Corporation which hired a lot of graduate students part-time to score open-ended responses (non-multiple-choice) to the National Assessment of Education Progress tests that had been given across the country to a sample of students in various grades. This was during the hot Iowa summer. But I digress.

One of the other scorers was a gal whose husband grew an organic garden (new in those days) and grew beefsteak tomatoes as big as a small cantaloupe. We would gather in the company break room kitchen at lunchtime, each with our baggy brought from home with lettuce between two slices of our favorite bread. The tomato gal would cut each of us one thick slice of the beefsteak tomato, sliding it onto our outstretched bread. The tomato slice would cover the entire piece of bread. Then we’d slap on the other slice of bread, take our place at the sink, lean over and eat our tomato sandwich. The assembly line continued until all of us had our fill. All from one tomato. Maybe that’s why I grow such tiny tomatoes. I’m afraid of the competition.