Perfect summer tomatoes? Turn them into butter

Every summer, like clockwork, a particular kind of collective amnesia lifts. Tomatoes — real ones, the kind that bruise if you breathe on them too hard — return, and we remember they’re not just filler for BLTs or wedges to shove beside a burger. For a few fleeting weeks, we become evangelists. We declare that they “need nothing but salt.” We remind one another: the best ones never see the inside of a refrigerator. We post photos of them sliced and sweating in the heat, as if the act of witnessing alone might preserve them just a little longer.

It’s easy to roll your eyes at the tomato mania — I certainly have, when I was younger and a little more cynical about everyday pleasures — but lately I’ve been thinking about what it reveals: a deep, hungry desire to feel the passage of time through something tangible. Something we can taste. In a world where the grocery store produce section hums along with seasonless consistency, tomato season offers the rare thrill of noticing. Noticing that the light has changed. That the fruit is warm from the sun. 

That for once, we are eating something right when we’re supposed to.

This kind of noticing — the quiet, seasonal kind — is something writer Ligaya Mishan recently explored in a piece for The New York Times Magazine, where she writes that “no one takes the changing of the seasons as seriously as the Japanese.” She’s talking about the ko, the 72 microseasons in the traditional Japanese calendar, each lasting just a few days, with names like “fish emerge from the ice” or “rainbows hide.” 

It’s a reminder of how little seasonality is left in the average American day, unless you’re lucky enough to stumble into a farmers market in July, tomatoes stacked like suns.

Pickling, I’m realizing, used to be a kind of culinary celebration of agricultural microseasons. A way to pay close attention. A way to mark what was ripe, what was fading, what needed saving. A practice that asked you to linger.

And then, in one of those gentle coincidences that feels like the universe is nudging you, I came across an old cookbook from 1965 written by a comedy writer who became a sort of pickle poet. His name was Leonard Louis Levinson, and he’d spent most of his adult life writing comedy — for radio, for television, for Hollywood. But when he published “The Complete Book of Pickles and Relishes,” he claimed it got more laughs than anything he'd ever written. Which is saying something, because this wasn’t a humor book. It was a sincere, slightly obsessive, utterly charming ode to the art of preserving. 

“I became a chutney cosmopolite,” he wrote, “and a raconteur of relish recipes.” (Reader, I was sold).

I’m a sucker for people who become accidental academics through obsession, the kind of folks who fall so deep into a personal passion that they emerge with a whole taxonomy in tow. Levinson was one of them, and his book brims with the fruits of that fixation: some timeless — kosher dills, sweet pickled carrots, snappy gherkins — and some charmingly dated, like walnut catsup or minted onion slices dyed an improbable shade of jade green.

But the recipe that stopped me, the one that made my mouth water for tomato season and mourn its eventual end in the same breath, was tomato butter. Not sauce. Not ketchup. Butter. A slow-cooked spread made from tomato pulp and sugar, spiced with ginger, cinnamon, cloves, and brightened with lemon juice. The summer cousin of apple butter, but richer somehow — silkier, sun-drunk. A condiment built for summer evenings, when everything feels a little overripe and golden at the edges.

Levinson’s version is the one I’m eyeing for later in the season, mostly because it yields so much: four full pints from 12 cups of tomato pulp and seven cups of sugar (plus a comparatively restrained ½ teaspoon ginger, 1 teaspoon cinnamon and ¼ teaspoon cloves). A pantry-filling affair. But for now, in this more tentative early stretch of the season, I’ve been making tiny batches at home — using whatever haul I can carry back from the market, tweaking the acid, the sweetness, the spice level as I go.

I like more ginger than Levinson. Less sugar, and brown instead of white. A pinch of salt isn’t out of place here either — and a small spoonful of miso adds the kind of quiet, savory bass note that makes everything else sing.

It’s outrageous on a BLT. Fabulous on a cracker with cream cheese. It turns a plain egg sandwich into something practically transcendent. And when the time comes — when the crates of tomatoes start to dwindle and I feel that first late-summer shiver in the air — I’ll settle on a recipe. I’ll make a full batch. I’ll jar it.

Then, one night, maybe in late October, when the wind has a little bite and the sky goes dark too soon, when the scent of the season shifts from sunscreen and basil to something earthier, lonelier — I’ll pop open a jar. I’ll spread it on a warm slice of cornbread, maybe with a little salted butter, and I’ll remember: that fleeting, perfect window when tomatoes tasted like time itself.