Sunday Supper: Tomato Sandwiches

There's a windowsill in my kitchen that does nothing useful for most of the year. Come July, it holds tomatoes, lined up to finish ripening, and I will admit to checking on them more than once a day, like they might do something interesting if I'm not watching.

They never do anything interesting. They just sit there, getting redder and softer, until one of them is ready, and then somebody in the house makes a sandwich out of it before lunch is even officially a plan. That's the whole story of a tomato sandwich. It isn't a dish so much as a small act of patience that finally pays off.

The Tomato Does All the Work

Ask anyone who takes this sandwich seriously, and they'll tell you the same thing: it lives or dies on the tomato, and nothing else on the ingredient list is allowed to get in its way. A hothouse tomato from the grocery store in February, bred for shipping rather than flavor, cannot make a good tomato sandwich, no matter what's done to it. The whole thing has to wait for a tomato that's actually had time to ripen on the vine in real heat.

That usually means waiting until July, with the best of it running through August once home gardens and roadside stands are fully producing. Variety matters less than people think, though it gets argued about plenty. A Cherokee Purple brings a deep, almost smoky flavor. A Better Boy or a Brandywine is more classic and reliable. Some of the best sandwiches come from the ugliest tomatoes on the vine, the irregular, slightly overripe ones nobody would buy at a stand, because they're often at the exact point where sugar and acid balance out.

What Goes On It

The ingredient list is short on purpose:

• Soft white sandwich bread, two slices
• Mayonnaise, real and full-fat, spread edge to edge on both slices
• One ripe tomato, sliced about a half-inch thick
• Salt, more than you'd think
• Black pepper, cracked, to taste

The bread has to be soft enough to squeeze between two fingers. Anything heartier, anything with seeds or whole-grain ambitions, gets in the way of what the sandwich is actually about. The bread isn't the point. It's the thing that holds the point together.

Mayonnaise goes on thick, both slices, all the way to the edges. There is a loyal following in this part of Tennessee for Duke's specifically, and that following is not particularly interested in hearing arguments for other brands.

Salt goes on the tomato itself, not the bread, and goes on generously. Tomatoes can take more salt than most people expect, and it's doing real work there: drawing out flavor and balancing the acid. Pepper is cracked over the top, to taste.

Slicing and Salting

Slice the tomato about a half-inch thick. Too thin, and the slice falls apart under its own juice before it ever makes it to the bread. Too thick, and the bread can't hold it together.

Salt the slices and let them sit on a folded paper towel for a few minutes before building the sandwich. This draws off some of the excess moisture that would otherwise turn the bread soggy. A few cooks skip this step on purpose, preferring to eat the sandwich, juice and all, mayonnaise running down a wrist, and consider that part of the experience rather than a flaw in it. Either way works. The salting step is for anyone trying to keep the sandwich intact long enough to finish it without losing half of it to the plate.

Eaten Standing at the Counter

Unlike most of what lands on a Sunday table, the tomato sandwich doesn't always make it to the table at all. It's just as often eaten standing at the kitchen counter, made by whoever wandered in first and noticed the tomatoes finally looked ready. It serves as lunch as often as it serves as part of supper, and it asks for almost nothing: a knife, two minutes, and a tomato that's already done the hard work of becoming itself.

There's an informality to it that sets it apart from the rest of a Sunday spread. The roast and the cornbread and the green beans all call for some advance planning and time at the stove. The tomato sandwich calls for none of that, which may be part of why it gets made so often once the season finally turns.

Tomatoes Beyond the Sandwich

A tomato that doesn't end up between two slices of bread still has plenty of places to go in a Moore County kitchen. Sliced and salted, it's a side on its own, no bread required. Diced, it goes into a quick salad with cucumber and onion. Tomatoes that are ripening faster than anyone can eat them get canned or made into sauce, one more way a summer garden's abundance gets carried into the colder months.

But the sandwich remains the simplest use of all, and maybe the truest. It doesn't ask the tomato to become something else. It just gets out of the way and lets a good tomato do what no amount of cooking ever could.