Ben Pope: Passage Reading — Tomato and Mozzarella Salad

Maybe you'd like to read something.

Sure.

It's called Tomato Mozzarella Salad.

Yeah, I've been trying to write more short stories recently.

My partner is a chef, so I wanted to write a recipe that was also a short story.

And so that is this.

This tomato salad looks simple, but it often takes two cooks to really make it sing.

It's a hand-me-down family recipe.

I used to hear my parents struggling with it in the kitchen, and so I decided to put my own spin on it.

No doubt my grandparents had their own version too.

Some cooks will tell you what makes a dish great, particularly a salad like this, is the quality of the ingredients.

But in this case, I strongly feel that it's actually about what you do with them.

So all hands on deck.

Ingredients.

Six to seven tomatoes, heirloom.

Three mozzarella balls, basil, lot, vinegar, balsamic, pine nuts, one long display plate.

Take your tomatoes.

Ideally, these are heirloom tomatoes with a long and storied lineage.

But if all that is available are beef tomatoes from the shop on the corner, They'll do just fine.

Slice them lengthways as if you're carving a roast ham.

This will be easier with sharp Japanese knives.

Did you sharpen the knives? Ask your partner to sharpen the Japanese knives you brought them back from Japan.

If you want to, you can follow this up by asking them if they even used the knives you brought them back from Japan, why they wanted knives if they didn't intend to use them, or even a general investigation into whether they know that Japanese kitchen knives and samurai swords are different items.

But the first question should suffice.

You want slim but still meaty, robust slices that display the seeds of the fruit like a Rorschach test.