Tomatoes

Fresh tomatoes are good only in season and marvelous only at the height of the season, when they are also at their cheapest. Throughout some nine months of the year, they are perhaps the only canned product indispensable to a kitchen. Some commercially canned tomatoes are quite good, but all contain too many seeds and often there is a slight edge of the unpleasant metallic taste that, in tomato pastes, is so aggressive as to ban them from the kitchen. Peeled, halved, and seeded, home-canned tomatoes are always the best. Sterilizers carry their own instructions, which vary with the method. Season only with salt, count a pound of tomatoes for a pint jar, cover them with a purée of rapidly boiled and sieved tomatoes, leave a good inch of space at the surface, and sterilize for forty minutes.