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The tomato sandwich was a favourite of mine growing up. Just bread and tomatoes and, looking back at it now, probably not even salt.
It wouldn’t cut it nowadays. No red onion, no cheese, no avocado or ploughman’s relish. But back then, onions weren’t red, cheese came in pre-packaged triangles with a cartoon cow on front, avocados had yet to make their way across the Irish Sea and ploughmen weren’t in the relish business.
But what we did have was tomatoes. And those tomatoes had the quaintest of qualities, the oddest of attributes, the most surreal of facets.
Those tomatoes had flavour.
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Those tomatoes had taste.
In fact, a sure sign of being taken seriously as a living entity around the house was being given permission to buy the tomatoes down the town. There was a small fruit and veg shop on the main street that also served as a delicatessen of sorts and that was where the purchase took place.
I’d seen my mother do it a hundred times and knew that the tomatoes had to be examined at length. They had to be squeezed and scrutinised. They had to be frowned over and analysed.
To arrive home with specimens that were too hard or too squishy or, God forbid, had a hue that could be interpreted in any light as green would have signalled failure as not only a shopper but quite possibly as a daughter as well.
And so the job had to be done with some panache. A certain swagger and confidence, neither of which, of course, I possessed. The whole thing would invariably turn into a charade, a piece of impromptu theatre which took place on a regular basis in the bright, airy section of that small shop on Navan’s Trimgate Street.
I would rummage through the contents of a cardboard box with a fierce and serious intent, occasionally coming across a tomato that had slipped through whatever version of quality control existed at the time. Thrilled at my wondrous powers of observation, I would shake my head and move it decisively to one side. And all the while, the two solemn shopkeepers in their white coats would, if they’d noticed me at all, look on and to their eternal credit, not raise their eyes in unison.
We had neighbours across the road who grew tomatoes. The juiciest of tomatoes. The most delicious of tomatoes. In truth, these were the crème de la crème of tomatoes. To all intents and purposes, it was like having a Champagne vineyard on our doorstep and my father lived for word that these tomatoes were out.
Invariably, a paper bag would appear on our kitchen table sometime during the summer and Da would open it up and inspect its contents with the anticipation and wide-eyed wonder of a child at Christmas.
Tea that evening and for a set amount of evenings thereafter would involve a leaf of lettuce and some chopped up tomato sitting serenely on your plate.
And the sight of both somehow announced that all was right with the world.
But back then tomatoes were part of the everyday fabric of life.
One of my clearest childhood memories is of standing in my aunt’s glasshouse, surrounded by a motley crew of cousins. Some family occasion was taking place but for the life of me I can’t remember what. We were all staring up at our grandmother who was picking tomato after tomato from the soaring plants and slipping them into our outstretched hands. We ate them like apples, biting into their sweet, succulent flesh. “To test”, she declared, “to see if they’re ripe enough”. Had she produced a mound of chocolate or a crate filled to the brim with the chewiest, brightest, sugariest sweets around, we couldn’t have been happier.
We left that glasshouse bereft of colour and wandered back into the house.
But the era of the tomato is now officially over.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this happened. When the tomato’s zest for life was successfully siphoned away. But producers have to take the bulk of the blame here. They clearly made a decision somewhere along the line that it simply wasn’t worth the effort. That tomatoes were there for that splash of colour amongst the verdant greenery, and nothing else.
The tomato sandwich is now a thing of the past. An anachronism. A culinary oddity. And we and evening teas and life in general are the sadder for it.