L’IMPORTANZA DEL POMODORO (THE GIFT OF SUMMER: ON THE IMPORTANCE OF TOMATOES)

If sweet corn spells high summer for Americans, in other parts of the world it’s the tomato that reigns as the emblem of the summer kitchen. The warmth, the sunshine, the very energy of summer brings to mind fresh, quick tomato sauces bursting with the taste of ripe fruit, sweet and tart with a bitter edge at the end. It’s hard not to believe that god invented tomatoes just to go with pasta. (And then invented basil to go with tomatoes.)

Raw or cooked, embellished with leaves of fresh green basil and parsley or just a dribble of olive oil, smoothed to a puree or chopped into chunks, tomatoes in any form give pasta a reason for being. We’re content to eat all sorts of things on our pasta the rest of the year, but at the height of summer, give us fresh, ripe tomatoes to make us truly grateful. Then, after we’ve licked the bowl of pasta al pomodoro clean, we’ll be off to the kitchen to make tomato sauce, la pomarola, putting it up in jars for our winter pantry.

And not just any tomatoes. In open-air markets all over Italy, from Genova to Catania and everywhere in between, we look for the finest specimens from local farms—plum-shaped San Marzanos, perfect for sauce; deeply ridged costolutos, looking like a tomato in a Baroque still life; heart-shape cuor di bue, or oxhearts; little grape-clustered datteri growing like the dates for which they are named; and last, but hardly least, pomodorini del piennolo del Vesuvio, the small, tough-skinned but tasty cluster tomatoes that are grown in the south, often harvested vine and all, and hung in an airy pantry to last through the winter, growing ever sweeter as they concentrate their flavors.

But here’s something odd: Although it is dead easy to find fabulous tomatoes at the height of the season throughout Italy, there is not the range of choice that we have come to experience in North America, where we can add to all of the above-mentioned such old-timey, newly popular favorites as green zebras with their delicate lime-green stripes; black krims, which are actually purple-red in color; big, beefy Amish paste tomatoes, so perfect for sauce; greeny-yellow German cherry tomatoes; sweet orange Wellingtons; and old-fashioned ones with curious names like Mortgage Lifter and Arkansas Traveler. In fact, to the delight of American shoppers and gardeners, we have available tomatoes from all over the world—the Crimea, China, Spain, India, the Middle East, Scandinavia, and of course Italy—brought back to the tomato’s birthplace in the New World by early and more recent settlers from all those places to which the tomato has migrated over the course of its history. Once upon a time tomatoes in North America were a uniform round red fruit that you either sliced into a salad or cooked in a sauce—and unless it came from your own garden, you probably bemoaned its lack of flavor. Nowadays, tomatoes come in all shapes and sizes and tastes to suit all comers.

Don’t be afraid to use any and all of these tomato varieties, whether Italian or Chinese or native Mexican, in our tomato recipes. You’ll quickly discover that some varieties are better for long-cooked sauces, while others work best raw in salads or quickly cooked to yield up all the bright taste of summer. But it could be that a brilliant orange Earl of Edgecombe would be just fine in a spicy ripe tomato sauce, giving it a beautiful color too. In other words, just because our recipes usually call for ripe “red” fresh tomatoes doesn’t mean you can’t use another color, another size—as Shakespeare reminds us, “Ripeness is all.” In general, juicier tomatoes are better for quick-cooking pasta sauces, while thick-walled paste tomatoes are what we look for when we’re making long, slow-cooked ragùs and sauces to put up for the winter pantry.

We love our summer pasta with tomatoes—fresh cherry tomatoes, blistered in a pan so that the fruits collapse and the juices brown and caramelize, or plump plum tomatoes, skinned, seeded, and chopped, sautéed in oil with a pinch of salt and slivers of basil, spooned over ricotta ravioli or tossed in a bowl of spaghetti. One of the best of these summer treatments is a curious dish of hot pasta with raw tomatoes called pasta alla checcha, which we discovered many years ago in Rome. It was a dish to be consumed on hot nights in the Eternal City when we lingered at tables in little trattorie and osterie on back streets, arriving late in the evening when the heat had finally risen from the cobblestones and a cool breeze off the Tiber freshened the torpid air. Pasta alla checca is a brilliant answer to summer’s heat—fresh tomatoes, chopped with slivered red onions and basil, olive oil, maybe a splash of wine vinegar, the cold sauce turned over hot pasta. A boon too to the cook in hot weather, requiring no more energy than a quick, easy boil up of the pasta before serving.

A quick glance through our recipes will confirm that not every pasta sauce by any means has tomatoes in it. Nonetheless, tomatoes are almost ubiquitous; sometimes, even when they don’t stand up and shout, their presence will be noted as a touch, often nearly invisible, like the mere edge of a spoonful of tomato paste, estratto di pomodoro, that blends into everything else and raises the flavor profile of a meaty ragù. Not just a star of the summer table, tomatoes, whether preserved in a pomarola sauce, or sun-dried to a paste, or just tossed whole into the freezer, are integral to the winter table as well.

Having said all this, we offer a small selection of recipes for producing great tomato sauces. The first is a quick, barely cooked, easy sauce for when the best tomatoes are in season. The second, la pomarola, is equally to be prepared with fresh seasonal tomatoes but it’s cooked a little longer and is similar to what Italian cooks might preserve for the winter pantry—and we’ve included directions for doing just that. Finally, we offer a way to boost the flavor of fresh tomatoes that are perhaps not at an ideal stage of ripeness.