Cooking
This recipe, a riff on pan con tomate, calls for rubbing garlicky toasts with a halved tomato before applying, yes, more tomato.
Good morning. The tomatoes are perfect right now where I stay, dense with juice, sweet with just a hint of acidity, super robust. They take to salt nicely. They call for herbs, sometimes for cheese. I can use a half dozen or more over the course of the weekend, and doing so makes me feel as if I live in Southern California, driving to buy them in a restored Cabriolet (white, with white interior, vanity plates reading TOM8TO).
They tell me that summer will last forever. I’ll believe that for at least the next six weeks.
Tomatoes are great sliced and laid out on a platter, under dabs of burrata and torn basil leaves. You could use them in Hetty Lui McKinnon’s tomato, basil and olive pasta salad, in which the brininess of the olives offsets the sweetness of the fruit. They’re awesome in gazpacho.
But I like them best in a sandwich. In Melissa Clark’s tomato sandwich (above), particularly. She riffs on the classic Italian preparation of pan con tomate, rubbing garlicky toasts with a halved tomato so that the juices seep into the bread, and then applying mayonnaise, slivered onion, more tomato and sometimes a few slices of bacon so she’s left with a tower of a meal, a mess to eat at the apex of the season.
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Tomato Sandwiches
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Variations on the theme: You could make pimento cheese and tomato sandwiches, using the spread in place of mayonnaise. You could cook soft-shell crabs in butter and swap them for the bacon. You could put tomatoes on top of Cheddar toasts. Or you could make like my friend Gentile and keep it simple: tomatoes on white bread with mayonnaise and salt, to eat in the car on a long drive somewhere, Little Feat’s “Willin’” on the 8-track.
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