Tomatoes — First Ingredient, First Recipe — what an heirloom tomato is, and why people engage in a rotten tomato riot every year in Bunol, Spain.

It is the peak of tomato season, which means this week in the small town of Bunol in Spain, about 20,000 people gather from around the world to pelt each other with some 150,000 overripe tomatoes –as they do on the last Wednesday of August every year.

It also meant that last week in New York at the Union Square Farmers Market, I listened while a tomato lady spoke about heirloom tomatoes – why they are better, how there are 5,000 varieties of them, what the process is to preserve their seeds.

“What’s an heirloom tomato?” I asked.

She looked at me for the first time, and paused for just an instant — she seemed to be a polite person — before explaining that they are “tomatoes of value whose seeds will produce off-spring.”

I didn’t ask her what other kinds of tomatoes there are, at least not right away, since the people who had gathered at this booth in the farmer’s market to listen to Amy Goldman, author of “The Heirloom Tomato: From Garden to Table,” surely knew the answers to my questions, and I feared their impatience.

I had come to the farmer’s market on Diane‘s recommendation. In a moment of reckless inspiration, I had mentioned to Diane that I could do a “Julie & Julia” with Lidia Bastianich’s new cookbook, “Lidia Cooks From The Heart of Italy.” Diane liked this idea. But I think maybe she misunderstood what I was suggesting, or in any case took me way too seriously. Bastianich’s cookbook offers “a feast of 175 regional recipes”; I don’t know how I could possibly do all the recipes, the way Julie Powell did all of Julia Child’s recipes in “Mastering The Art of French Cooking.” It was a completely different situation. First of all, that was Julia Child’s first cookbook; this is Lidia Bastianich’s sixth.  Child’s cookbook was a celebrated masterpiece; Bastianich’s, while sure to be a bestseller, will not even be published until October. And then there’s the fact that Julie Powell could cook, and wanted to.

I could try the first recipe, I thought, and then I’d see. I noticed that the first recipe was a soup. There was a kind of neat symmetry to this: Julia Child’s first recipe was a potato soup. But the Heart of Italy cookbook soup was called Zuppa di Mele e Fagioli, which meant apple and bean soup. I don’t think I’ve ever eaten apple and bean soup. Besides it didn’t sound very Italian. As it turns out, the region from which this recipe originated, Trentino-Alto Adige — one of the 12 lesser-known regions of Italy in Bastianich’s new cookbook — borders Austria, which is why she also has recipes in that section for whole grain spaetzle and cauliflower and potato salad.

“You can wait until winter for the soup,” Diane advised. “Find something with tomatoes. They’re in season and you can go to the Union Square farmer’s market to get them fresh.”

I flipped through the cookbook and it opened as if by fate to “pasta e pomodori al forno” — pasta with baked cherry tomatoes.  Diane had told me her first rule was “cook what you like to eat,” and this definitely seemed to fit. It also seemed to be a simple recipe; I didn’t even have to make my own pasta; the recipe says to buy one pound of either spaghetti, gemelli or penne.  It is also from a little-known region of Italy with the lovely-sounding name of Basilicata.  It is a place, Lidia writes, “of mystical landscapes and very special people — people who want you to love their land and the intense flavors of their foods.”

So I had made it to the farmer’s market to buy the cherry tomatoes to get the first meal underway, and had come across Amy Goldman.

There are in fact other kinds of tomatoes besides heirlooms. They are called hybrids, and they are the off-spring of two different varieties of tomatoes, cross-bred to bring out certain desirable traits.  Few hybrids can reproduce; you can’t plant their seeds and expect to grow a similar tomato, the way you can with an heirloom. “Tomatoes have never been more popular, yet tomato land in America is dominated by commercial F1 hybrids with only their unyielding flesh to recommend them to the consumer,” Amy Goldman writes. “These hybrid tomatoes, bred to be grown in high plant densities and harvested mechanically, are a tool of industry and the market economy.” To Goldman, a gardener, cataloguer, author and even a sculptor of tomatoes (she re-creates them in bronze), as well as chair of the board of the Seed Savers Exchange, and a relative to a prominent tomato entrepreneur — her cousin Tillie Lewis owned one of the world’s largest canneries and was dubbed the Queen of the Pear-Shaped Tomatoes — hybrid breeding is clearly not good for tomatoes or for the people who eat them. “Tomatoes feed your soul as well as satisfying your more corporeal appetites.”

Tomatoes, it turned out, are an endless topic.  Some 144 countries produce 100 million tons of tomatoes a year, with Americans the largest consumers and among the largest producers of tomatoes — which makes sense, considering that it is the essential ingredient in our favorite condiments (ketchup, salsa) and in pizza (despite those odd “white pizza” enthusiasts) as well as most pasta sauces. How many salads are made without tomatoes? And let’s not forget tomato soup, which Joseph Campbell first offered in a can in 1897.

For all their ubiquity, there is something mysterious about the tomato. Many people may not know whether the tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, even though this is now a settled question: Scientifically, it’s a fruit, but gastronomically, and politically, it’s a vegetable, at least in the United States. The United States Supreme Court ruled on this issue in 1893: Some importers were trying to avoid an import tax on vegetables by claiming that the tomato was a fruit, but the Justices, for the purposes of the tax, legally classified it as a vegetable.

Tomatoes were indigenous to Latin America, and are believed to have been brought over to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors in the sixteenth century, although only Spain and Italy took to them; Northern Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous.

Anyway. I had a meal to make.

I told Amy Goldman that I was at the market to buy cherry tomatoes, and asked her where I could get heirloom cherry tomatoes. She said from the farmers, Lani’s Farm Inc. from Bordentown, N.J., one booth over in the market.

“The green ones and brownish ones are heirlooms, I assure you.”

Green and brownish cherry tomatoes?

I bought the tomatoes she had pointed out, but still felt ignorant, so when I saw a sign for a free Heirloom Tomato Tasting at the Hoboken Historical Museum, I decided to go, thinking that maybe there would be a curator there who could fill me in further.

The tomato tasting offered little tiny slices on paper plates of 19 different varieties of tomatoes, each with a name, like Mountain Pride and Yellow Brandywine and Schmeigg’s Striped Hollow. My favorite title was Mortgage Lifter, which I later learned was named not because it cheers up people who are facing foreclosure but because in the 1940′s a man was able to sell his tomato plants for a dollar apiece (a lot in those days), therefore paying off his mortgage.

“How can you tell the difference between a hybrid and an heirloom,” I asked one of the people behind the tables.

“I don’t know, we’re just volunteers.”

I couldn’t find a curator, but I found a farmer, and I asked him how you could tell the difference between a hybrid and a heirloom.

“You have to know a little bit about tomatoes,” Richard Sisti, farmer of Catalpa Ridge Farm, said matter-of-factly.
“That’s a hybrid right there,” he said. I was shocked. This was supposed to be an heirloom tasting. Aren’t hybrids the enemy?

Sisti didn’t seem to think so.

“Heirlooms don’t ship well. Hybrids are tougher.” Hybrids can also be less prone to disease.

Indeed, one garden blogger has laid out the pros and cons of heirlooms succinctly:
Pros:
# Exceptional flavor
# Highly unusual and interesting
# Sense of heritage and history
Cons:
# Not disease resistant
# Pests prefer them
# Lower yields

“Heirlooms have a wide range of flavor,” Sisti told me.

“Hybrids only have one flavor?”

“There are different flavors in hybrids too, but heirlooms have a wider range.”

“How can you tell whether something is a hybrid or a heirloom?”

“Probably can’t.” He must have realized that his answer disappointed me. “If you can get black tomatoes, they’re probably heirloom, because they’re not going to sell well.” He pointed to a cart of tomatoes with the label Nyagous Chocolat.

I bought a big Mortage Lifter, and then left. I had to get back to cook my green and brownish cherry tomatoes, before they over-ripened into the kinds they use in La Tomatina, the annual tomato bash in Bunol, Valencia that some say began as an anti-Franco protest in 1945.
Whatever the real story, it really looks like a lot of fun to slide around in a street full of tomatoes. I hope cooking a few of them will be too.

(Photographs of fresh tomatoes and the people who like them by Jonathan Mandell. Photographs of rotten tomatoes and the people who like them taken off the Web.)

The Bastianich series so far:

Lidia Bastianich, The Italian-American Julia Child?

Tomatoes — First Ingredient, First Recipe — what an heirloom tomato is, and why people engage in a rotten tomato riot every year in Bunol, Spain.

First Recipe, Part II: The Hunt For Peperoncino

First Recipe, Finally Cooked. Or: Why Many People Don’t Cook

Meatball. A Meditation