The tomato as an endangered species.

AS THE Earth Summiteers were going on about biodiversity in Rio, an ominous story was surfacing here at home: the genetically engineered tomato.

Conventional plant scientists have been trying for decades to square the circle--to produce a tomato that could be picked and shipped efficiently and cheaply and that would be acceptable to potential buyers. (Some have even tried to cube the sphere--there was talk a few years ago of breeding a flatsided tomato that wouldn't roll off assembly lines.)

The problem is that tomatoes are relatively fragile; if they're ripe, or close enough to finish ripening on the window sill, they need to be handled carefully, which means more manpower and higher cost. The cheap way is to pick them hard green and then gas them to turn them artificially reddish. The new bio-engineered tomato would supposedly solve the problem in a different way: it would resist rotting even when ripe, and so could be picked later and still be shipped long distances.

The engineers admit the new tomato won't taste as if it had just come out of your garden, but say it will be much more like a real tomato than the gassed version. The danger is that the nearly good and sturdy would drive out the delicate but potentially superb, so that the next generation would not even know what a real tomato was like, or why aficionados await fully ripe tomatoes as eagerly as the first baby beets or strawberries or sweet corn.

What is a real tomato like? Start with the outside. A ripe tomato is not iridescent pink; it's a rich, warm red, on the yellowish rather than the bluish side of the range of reds. It is yielding to the touch, not hard like an apple; throwing a gassed tomato at a politician would amount to assault with a deadly weapon. And you can smell it even through the skin--indeed, on a hot August day at the greenmarket, the tomato-seller's tent is almost as intoxicating as the raspberry-seller's. When you cut into it, it will be that same warm color all the way through, not white in the middle (if it hasn't fully rounded into late-August form, there may be a bit of yellow around the stem, but that can easily be cut out). The flesh will be smooth, not mealy. It will breathe the warmth of the summer sun.

This paragon is not wasted even on dishes that can be made with inferior specimens. But for two months of the year (or three, or four, depending on where you live and what the weather is like that year) you can run in all those dishes that really depend on the best and the ripest. For example, the version of scallops provencale in which the barely heated chopped tomato needs to hold its own next to a pool of garlic butter. Or filetto di pomodoro--a quick-cooked tomato sauce for pasta in which the tomato is left rough-chopped instead of being pureed in a foodmill. Or salade nicoise. Or any other salad involving tomatoes--one of the best being also the simplest: rough-chopped tomatoes and basil, dressed with nothing more than olive oil and a little salt and pepper. (I first encountered this in the home of a friend who is an avid gardener as well as a fine cook. When I exclaimed over it, she said in her brisk New England way, "Why, it's just tomatoes and basil." Ah, but what basil, and what tomatoes!) Or, saving arguably the best till last, sliced tomatoes topped with sliced mozzarella and dressed with olive oil, the mozzarella made of the milk not of cows but of bufala, the water buffalo  of southern Italy.* There's only one drawback to preparing this dish as stated, and that is that you'll have to stop ordering it in restaurants. Almost none of them--even very good ones--will do it half as well as you will.

But there are still those eight or nine or ten months in which you must do without, or plan in advance. Marinara sauce freezes very well, and is worth making up in quantity when the tomatoes are plentiful and good. The restaurateur Tony Piovesan, in the Italian ski resort of Cortina d'Ampezzo, serves his guests wonderful, fresh-tasting tomato sauces all winter long, not by importing tomatoes from the southern hemisphere but by canning them himself in the summer. His have none of that stewed-tomato taste of commercial canning.

Notwithstanding that taste, most Italian cookbooks will counsel you to use canned tomatoes during the off-season. I prefer to take my chances on the best the greengrocer has to offer, sticking to dishes where the quality of the tomato is not crucial. It's useful to know that salt brings out whatever flavor these pink tennis balls may have, so dishes containing anchovies and olives are likeliest to turn out well.

In this year of Christopher Columbus, we should remember that tomatoes are among the many plants that originated in the western hemisphere, were taken to Europe as novelties in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and became an integral part of the cuisines of all the areas along the northern coast of the Mediterranean. Their emigrants brought the new dishes back to our shores, value added.

For the Mediterranean peoples discovered the affinity of the tomato for olive oil and basil; indeed, tomatoes and olive oil are to the South what dairy products are to the North. Think of all the pairs of dishes that are structurally very similar, but a world apart in taste: blanquette de veau and veal Marengo, chicken Vallee d'Auge and chicken provencale, scallops parisienne and scallops provencale. (Even in our country we see some of this: New England versus Manhattan clam chowder, shellfish with drawn butter in New England and in jambalaya in New Orleans.) This differentiation was probably a matter of taste as much as of necessity, though it's true that tomatoes will thrive where cows do not, and vice versa. But certainly it became an important part of regional traditions. It would be as hard to imagine Provence or the Amalfi Coast without tomatoes as to imagine Normandy without butter and cream.

* Several readers have justly taken me to task for referring ("On the Veldt," May 25) to the large, fierce beast found in South Africa as a water buffalo, when in fact it is the Cape buffalo. But this time I really mean it. See Giuliano Bugialli's Foods of Italy, p. 253, for an evocative picture.

Miss Bridges is NR's Managing Editor.