Write Team: Tomatoes, aplenty

Are you seeing tomatoes in your sleep because your garden is overrun with loaded plants? Roma, heirloom cherry, or beefsteak – whatever type you grow, we are in the midst of the blooming season.

Even with the recent heat wave, many folks in September find themselves with more tomatoes than they can use.

Reddick Library recently held a tomato cooking class to share recipes and ideas for the abundant fruit/vegetable. (Tomatoes fall into the scientific definition of a fruit, but because we use them for cooking more as a vegetable, they are also in that category.)

Last year, my daughter had the biggest, most prolific tomato plant I have ever seen. It grew to be the size of a bush and we pulled tomatoes off of it every day. There were too many to eat so we chopped and froze them. It was nice to pull a bag out of the freezer in January to use for chili or salsa.

Tomatoes were once thought to be unsafe to eat because they were inaccurately classified as a member of a poisonous group of plants called Solanaceae. The toxic leaves and stalks, with their unpleasant smell, contributed to the lack of approval.

However, tomatoes were later found to be rich in antioxidants and Vitamin C, and by the late 1880′s, farmers in this country began experimenting and growing many varieties.

Joseph Campbell discovered that canned tomatoes kept well, and he invented - Campbell’s Condensed Soup.

Once people accepted the nutritional value of tomatoes and incorporated them into their meals, they became more popular. Since they are seasonal, tomatoes became a symbol of prosperity and good fortune.

In Victorian days, when people moved into a new house, a prized tomato was placed on the mantel to scare off evil spirits and bring prosperity to the home. Since ripe tomatoes don’t last, ladies would often recreate them with red fabric and fill them with leaves, cotton, or sawdust and put the stuffed tomato on the mantelpiece.

Women hand-sewed most of the clothing worn by their families, and the needles they used were very important. Needles were expensive and you needed to keep them sharp and in a safe spot. Ladies began putting their hand needles and pins into the fabric ‘good luck’ tomato, thus creating the tomato pin cushion.

A small strawberry was later added to the top, filled with emery powder which was used to sharpen pins and needles. As years passed, the pin cushion moved from the mantel to the sewing basket.

I own three sewing baskets: one was a wedding shower gift, one was a birthday gift from a good friend and one belonged to my mother-in-law.

Each is full of sewing accessories, vintage and new. I enjoy sorting through them when I’m working on projects, looking for just the right touch.

The strawberry attachment fell off my old pincushion years ago. Maybe this is a good month to buy a new one, since I’ll thinking about, chopping and freezing all those tomatoes anyway.

There’s “sew” much to do!

Karen Roth is a semiretired librarian/educator living in Ottawa. She can be reached at dbarichello@shawmedia.com.