Pomodori

Each area of Italy has its own preferred tomatoes. Grandmothers use fresh tomatoes in the summer and early fall when they are ripe, sweet, and at the height of their flavor; otherwise they use canned tomatoes or the sauces they have put up when the tomatoes were at their peak. Small, meaty, and flavorful Pachino tomatoes, a favorite in the markets of Puglia and Sicily, are a new early variety, bred to appear before other tomatoes are available. Plum-shaped San Marzano tomatoes with their meaty pulp are most popular for sauces and for any dishes that need long, slow cooking as well as for tomato concentrate and the extract that was once routinely made in the south and Sicily. But there are more, each with its own flavor and characteristics: round and fat Venturas; heart-shaped cuor di bue, beefhearts; ripple-topped Florentines; ribbed Genoese tomatoes, costoluto Genovese, a late-ripening tomato that also appears in America in August and September; and long thin Romas. In the south clusters of cherry tomato—sized pomodorini are harvested and hung on a nail hammered into a well-ventilated wall of a house, and they can be used all winter long.