THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, September 12, 1995 TAG: 9509120364
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Guy Friddell
LENGTH: Medium: 59 lines
This is the week people stop eating fresh tomatoes.
You have to make a conscious effort to go out and buy them. And then, if you're not mindful, the tomatoes sit around the house morose, un-et.
In most places tomatoes have been so plentiful this season as to constitute a glut. Why is it, after yearning for tomatoes through the winter, we become, overnight, indifferent to them?
One reason is the abrupt change from sweltering hot weather to crisp, cool days.
Tomatoes, so tangy, luscious, cooling, so downright runny, so easy to fix and eat, are a midsummer delight. As the mercury in the thermometer falls, so does, subconsciously, our hunger for tomatoes.
Another thing: The pace of the day picks up. School starts, clubs and societies resume, the PTA gets under way, football takes over, fund drives accelerate, there is less time to brood on mere tomatoes.
Even Labor Day, like its name, is strenuous. We get on the road and fling ourselves at some destination in a kind of last-gasp holiday.
Somehow, amid the ruck, tomatoes go by the board. And yet, there's a way to whet our appetites. You know, my wont is never to present a problem without a stab at a solution, and here is one to end our lassitude over tomatoes.
Place a slice of tomato, with mayonnaise, between two halves of a biscuit. You'll be amazed how tasty it is. There is something rare, distinctive, about the blend of tomato, mayonnaise and biscuit.
Especially if the biscuit be hot. The sandwich is a treat. It can't be beat for breakfast.
And I have an addition for the mayonnaise forum. Already mentioned are Hellmann's, Duke's, Sauer's. A friend, Den Jordan of Chesapeake, put me next to a jar of Mrs. Filberts Real Mayonnaise. I might have known that a brand named Mrs. Filberts would be up there with the best.
(On the jar she looks remarkably like an aging Tipper Gore.)
Joe Harkey at Virginia Wesleyan likes fat-free Kraft mayo. ``What I have discovered is that Hidden Valley and Kraft fat-free ranch dressing can be used for either a tomato or dill pickle sandwich,'' he writes.
Of course, the best mayonnaise of all is home-made. That had slipped my mind until Abbay Evanoff, wife of Ted, editor of Business Weekly, recalled it.
The ingredients are oil (canola or whatnot); a full egg; an egg yolk; salt; a half-teaspoon of dry mustard and of paprika; pepper; 2 tablespoons of lemon juice; and a dash of Tabasco sauce.
Abbay's sister, Eugenia Knox, insists that in a ``new recipe'' their mother left out the hot sauce and egg yolk.
My mother prepared it along the same lines, and I remember it as light and frolicsome. No wonder, as Abbay said, you have to make it once a week. ILLUSTRATION: JANET SHAUGHNESSY/Staff
by CNB