This has not been a good summer for tomatoes. At least not here in northern Mississippi. Maybe it's the drought. Maybe it's the hinges-of-hell heat. Maybe it's the irrigation employed to counteract the drought and the heat. No matter. They're watery. Lacking in sugar. Deficient in acid. Same deal with other summer fruits. (Yes, I'm being geeky and calling tomatoes fruits, because, as any geek knows, that's what they are.) Take cantaloupes, which, as a boy, I knew as muskmelons—a reference, I guess, to their almost randy scent. This year's cantaloupes have been comparatively anemic. As in sweet but not musty, sugary but not funky. Recently, however, my wife, Blair, hit upon a solution. Last month, she began abusing our melons. Beating them, really. As a result, we have tasted marked improvement. Blair calls them trunk melons. She starts with a grocery-store cantaloupe, the kind trucked in from God-knows-where. Instead of removing it from the trunk upon returning home from the store, she leaves it behind, where—in the triple-digit heat of the Mississippi summer—it bounces and thumps about. Blair has a twisted sense of humor. Ask her what a melon sounds like as it ricochets off the walls of the trunk, and she mentions, in roundabout fashion, decapitation. Blair is serious, though, about the technique. She swears that a couple of days of heat curing and trunk rolling will turn a bad melon into a good melon, a good melon into a great one. She says it won't really bruise. Or if it does, it'll be no worse for the bludgeoning. She has also developed a means of determining how much abuse is enough. "When I can sit in the front seat, take a deep breath, and catch a whiff of the melon in the trunk," she says, "its ready."
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