A la Carte: Holding tight to tomatoes 

By Rachel Hergett EBS COLUMNIST 

Fall is my favorite season. I love watching nature shift its color palette. I love the crunch of leaves underfoot. I love the drastic temperature changes, the first snow dusting the mountains and the sudden urge for hygge—the Danish term for cozy comfort, like curling in front of a fire with a book and a warm beverage.  

But there is one part I do not love. With the chill in the air comes the end of our already short mountain growing season, an end to the (sometimes literal) fruits of summer. Mostly, I will miss the tomatoes.  

As fall approached this year, I kept hearing a familiar refrain from my mom and stepdad: “come pick tomatoes.” What used to be a large garden in their backyard is overgrown. Grasses have overtaken the soil and returned it to the domain of the dogs. Years ago, a new space was created, tucked against their house in the Bridger foothills and open to the morning sun. They call it the garden. I maintain that a garden holds a variety of plants. The only variety here is in the size and color of the tomatoes grown therein. It is a tomato patch. And for it I am grateful. 

We are blessed with a food system that allows for fresh produce year round. I will be able to buy tomatoes in the dead of winter and they will be sufficient… as in mediocre or just fine. But who strives for mediocrity? 

To use the phrasing of today’s youth, garden tomatoes “hit different.” The flavor is more robust. The guts have more meat and less water. They are simply tomatoes at their most tomato-ey. 

My stepdad starts his tomatoes inside in the spring, babying them with lamps, and carting trays of the starts onto the deck when the sun is out to harden them to life outdoors. When it is time to plant, protective water wells surround them. These are eventually outgrown, as the patch of tomatoes begins to go wild toward the end of summer, producing hundreds upon hundreds of tomatoes—tiny golden cherry tomatoes that provide unmatched bursts of sweetness and larger red tomatoes for slicing. 

The tomato patch was still producing in October this year, and my last visit yielded so many tomatoes I had to unload the bowl in the middle of picking because the weight was getting hard to carry. The unmistakable smell of tomato plants, both grassy and spicy, covered me as I tested the ripest looking fruits, seeing if they would fall off in my hand.  

When I say the tomato patch produces, I mean it produces. I only picked the tomatoes that were perfectly ripe and ready to eat, knowing more would be ready the next day, and still I had too many tomatoes. Some, I left with my mom, who had plans to make her new favorite tomato recipe—southern tomato pie. I dropped others off for my cousin in town. I ran an errand and gave some to the clerk behind the counter, going back to the car for more when her excitement at the fresh tomatoes was obvious. And still, I have tomatoes. 

I ate all the little cherry tomatoes first. They feel like they are ready to burst when they are ripe, and many do, meaning they don’t keep well. Plus, they are essentially nature’s candy. The rest, I’ve been rationing, doling them out into caprese or Greek salads. But what makes my heart happiest is a classic BLT—bacon, lettuce and tomato with mayo on plain toasted wheat bread. With fresh garden tomatoes, a BLT reminds me of summers of my youth and visiting my grandparents in Billings. They were farm kids and simple folk when it came to food. So much of what we ate came from their prodigious garden. And sometimes, when it was too hot to cook, grandma would announce that BLTs would have to suffice for dinner.  

Then, I don’t think I would have written an ode to tomatoes, preferring green beans, carrots and cucumbers from the garden. However, time and memory change our experiences and our taste buds. Biting into a BLT now and letting the sweetness of the garden tomato mingle with the salty bacon leads to a wave of nostalgia. It reminds me to take joy in the simplicity, to enjoy each garden tomato—as long as they last.  

Rachel Hergett is a foodie and cook from Montana. She is arts editor emeritus at the Bozeman Daily Chronicle and has written for publications such as Food Network Magazine and Montana Quarterly. Rachel is also the host of the Magic Monday Show on KGLT-FM and teaches at Montana State University.