The King and the Tomato
There are few things we look forward to with more anticipation every year than to the tomato harvest. This year, due to the cooler than usual summer, our harvest has been rather late. Last year we were enjoying our caprese’s and roasted salsas in July, but we’re nearly half way through August and just now getting our first tomatoes in.
We’re going to have a bumper crop this year. We have 24 plants and there may be fifty to 75 or so that are still green. What was ripe yesterday were the Black Prince, Celebrity and Early Girl varieties. Then there is the Lemon Boy where we didn’t get what we expected.
The Black Prince’s are smaller, about one inch in diameter. While they are called black, they are actually a very, very dark red with vague streaks of dark green. They’re a native of Siberia and typically will thrive when it’s too cool for other varieties.
The Celebrities are your quintessential red tomato. Plump and juicy, when sliced they make great steaks of moist flesh. They’re a hybrid, not an heirloom, and therefore don’t have the striations or unusual coloring that are common with heirlooms. They seem to be the vanilla ice cream of tomatoes in our garden this year.
The Early Girls are a smaller version of the Celebrities, a lighter red with a green, five pointed star of a hat.
The joke this year is that someone mixed up the identifying signs with the tomato seedlings at Van Winden’s, our plant nursery. The sign we have for this one plant says, distinctly, Lemon Boy and has a big bulb of a yellow tomato on it. But about two months in, the particular plant bloomed with branches of multiple tiny flowers. Come a month later, and we realized we had yellow cherry tomatoes, not the huge orbs that the Lemon Boy sign promised. We were a little annoyed at that at first. But now we’re going to use them in a salad later this week.
There may be no better way to enjoy fresh tomatoes than in a caprese salad. Word around the campfire is this salad came about because some time in the 1950’s King Farouk asked his chef for a lunch that would be light on his stomach. The chef took three ingredients that are ubiquitous in Italian cooking - tomatoes, basil and mozzarella and put them together in a sandwich.
King Farouk, by the way, was not a King of Italy. He was an exiled King of Egypt who had been deposed by the military. He was known for his lavish, over the top lifestyle, commissioning furniture in the Louis XIV style, giving him the moniker ‘Louis Farouk.’
He was thin early on in his reign, but once he got to Italy, he began to gain weight. An article in Time Magazine published in March of 1965 called him a “fat, flabby 45 year old” who “symbolized the gross results of a classically misspent life.” He died on March 18, 1965 in the Ile de France restaurant in Rome. They say his last meal consisted of oysters, roast lamb, and cake and fruit. At about 1:30AM, while enjoying a postprandial cigar, he clutched his throat, and dramatically fell forward on the table.
They say he was poisoned by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the first president of Egypt, who had had him over thrown and forced him to abdicate in 1956. But they didn’t do an autopsy.
Caprese of course, is the adjective form of Capri, named for the Isle of Capri, the island off the coast of Naples famous for entertaining the glitterati. I love the idea that King Farouk is sitting in some restaurant on the Isle, in the sun, with the girl of the week by his side. He probably had a heavy dinner last night, and was anticipating that night’s feast. Why not have a smaller than usual lunch? ‘Make me something light!’ he says to the waiter.
The waiter relays that request to the chef, and he, looking around, sees three ingredients that he’s had there all along, but never put together before. The sandwich goes out, and success! The King loves it! After that, why not add it to the menu? Insalata Caprese, named for the Isle of Capri, is born.
