There was love in those tomatoes and deep pride, too. My father had a vegetable garden in our Alabama backyard every year, and presented those tomatoes to my mother like they were red jewels instead of garden variety Cherokee Purple or Big Boys.
He gave her flowers on occasion, but she liked tomatoes better.
It was part of their lifelong courtship. He’d hand her a basketful and then leave more on the front porches up and down our street. Our Italian neighbors used them to make thick spaghetti sauce or marinara to pour over meatballs for dinner.
People didn’t eat as many salads in those days and the notion that you’d mix up tasty tomatoes with plain lettuce was frowned upon by the cooks on our street. My mother did what lots of Southern housewives did in the fifties. She served tomato sandwiches all summer, sometimes for more than one meal.
She used the tried and true white bread common back in the day. Wonder Bread, with those bland and flabby slices, was on every grocery shelf in the country, and on its own, it tasted like spongy paper. But when you slathered it with mayo — her brand was Hellman’s — and placed the tomato wedges on the bread, you just had to add salt and maybe a pinch of pepper to make lunch. A side of chips was optional.
She sometimes fried bacon and topped the tomatoes with that and some iceberg lettuce, too. If she wanted to add an extra touch, she toasted the bread first. The bacon grease soaked into the bland bread and improved the flavor. They hadn’t invented cholesterol yet, so we had no worries about that. The tomatoes were always there, coming in the back door as if on an assembly line.
And then they weren’t. When my father passed away at 73, my mother ate alone. Friends brought her vegetables from their gardens and Presbyterian church ladies brought casseroles to remind her to eat. Sometimes she remembered.
A few years later, she was in rehab after a stroke, making progress but still as thin as a stick.
She learned to get around with a walker, made crafts in occupational therapy, and even took an exercise class, the kind where you sit down to do the moves.
She tried to eat hospital food, but it had no flavor, she told us, nothing to get excited about. lumpy mashed potatoes and canned green beans. Tired-looking meat loaf. A ring of pineapple with a cherry on top. A tiny square of brownie left over from last week.
She was not one to make a fuss, so she didn’t. But my husband came up with a plan. Like a courier on a special mission, he brought contraband each time he drove the hundred miles see her. Looking over his shoulder to make sure he wasn’t being watched by hospital staff, he passed tomato sandwiches to his mother-in-law, one after the other.
He had to assemble them in the car so they wouldn’t be soggy. A food snob, he even used Wonder Bread, which he hated, but that’s what she liked. She may have gained a pound or two during her six week stay. There was love in those tomato sandwiches.
The key ingredient in a tomato sandwich is love - AL.com
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