Mallory's Camera

The classic Mexican salsa verde is made from tomatillos. Not jalapenos. Tomatillos. Jalapenos are frequently added to up the incendiary factor (though serrano chiles have a hotter, cleaner kick) but they add nothing to a good green sauce's flavor or consistency.

What does a tomatillo taste like?

Tomatillo tastes like the Garcia Lorca poem:

Green, I want you green
Green wind, green trees…

Tomatillo tastes like a spermatophyte hiding deep in the rainforest, tangy, tart, acrid with a whiff of bitter and smoke.

Tomatillo tastes like something you could easily imagine sprouting up out of a Mesozoic swamp alongside a cycad or a horsetail. It kind of looks like that too with its strange, paper-thin husk, the mummified remnant of the flower's calyx which forms a caul around the developing fruit, hiding it entirely from view.

You’ll find fresh tomatillos in any supermarket that caters to a community with a large Hispanic population. (This used to exclude places like Nebraska. But not any more.) They’re off to the side with the Daikon radishes, shiitake mushrooms and other exotic produce beloved of those who lull themselves to sleep with the Food Network instead of Leno. Supermarket tomatillos are okay in a pinch, I suppose. Personally, I try to avoid them. For one thing many of them have husks that are shriveled and dry. When you take them home and cut into them, their flesh may be yellow or purple. This is a clue that the fruit is over-ripe, too sweet. It gives the salsa you make from it a soapy taste, rather like that of a persimmon. Supermarket chains buy produce on the basis of visual appeal; they prefer tomatillo husks that are shriveled and brown because when the tomatillo husk is shriveled and brown, the fruit bursts forth from it, you can actually see the fruit.

But the perfect tomatillo is completely enclosed by its husk. Buying it is therefore an act of perfect culinary faith.

Once upon a time I had a garden and I grew tomatillos. They're a wild plant, they sprawl, they take over, and no one has yet succeeded in hybridizing them. So the tomatillo I picked that lazy afternoon I first prepared a meal for my future husband was practically a genetic twin of the tomatillo that whet the cannibal appetites of an Aztec warrior some nine hundred years before.

I looked the name up in a dictionary once. It derives from the Aztec word for the fruit: miltomatl. Literally "plump and round with paper." (But how can this be? The Egyptians invented paper, didn't they? Is this the proof historians have been searching for that Egyptians in their high-prowed ships discovered the New World long before the birth of Christ?)

Tomatillo husks, by the way, are poisonous. As are tomatillo leaves and tomatillo vines. The operative poison here is a glycoalkaloid molecule called solanine, found naturally in all members of the nightshade family, for the tomatillo is a close cousin of the tomato, the potato, the eggplant, sundry and assorted peppers, as well as the infamous Jimson weed. Symptoms manifest as severe digestive upset, trembling, weakness, difficulty in breathing, paralysis and hallucinations. Jimson weed was originally "Jamestown weed;" English soldiers in the early American settlement began behaving oddly after eating a salad made with native greens. They snorted, they pawed the ground and air, they made incomprehensible noises. When they came to after several days, they had no memory whatsoever of their unsettling behavior.

While Jimson weed is sometimes – rarely – used as a party drug, to the best of my knowledge no one has ever used tomatillo recreationally except in salsa. Here's how you do it:

Peel the husks off half a dozen tomatillos. Scrub them carefully – the sticky resinous stuff underneath the husk tastes awful. So does the skin. It's just as hard to peel a tomatillo as it is to peel a tomato, which is why a lot of tomatillo salsa recipes call for broiling or microwaving. That's one way to do it. Me, I just blanche the suckers in a pot of boiling water: skin slips right off.

Dice the tomatillos. Then dice half a white onion and throw it in with the tomatillos. Grab a couple of handfuls of cilantro for good measure, mince it very fine, throw it into the mix. Garlic? Sure. Lime juice? Why not? Maybe a little salt.

Mix.

The resulting salsa will not be very hot so at this point you start throwing in the chile peppers. Some people use jalapenos; I like to use serranos. I've also tasted good results from chile de arbol.

Mix more. Mix a lot.

Crisp a couple of tortillas so you have something that resembles a tostada shell. Open a can of salmon – nobody can afford fresh wild salmon anymore and nobody should eat the farmed stuff with that awful pink dye. Break it up in a bowl, squeeze a couple of limes on it. Pour it into the tortilla shells and drown it with the tomatillo salsa.

Heaven on earth. Healthy heaven on earth.

It was partly because I knew things like this and other people didn’t that I opened my Little Store. But it was mostly because I couldn’t find another job.