At Hil, Southern pickings include tomato sandwiches

At the Hil restaurant in the Serenbe community, chef Hillary White serves a tomato sandwich on white bread with mayonnaise.

For many, the tomato sandwich means a ripe summer tomato, palate-sticking Sunbeam white bread, a jar of Duke's, and a steady drip of milky pink juices into the sink. It is the polar opposite of restaurant food.

But at the Hil, White makes everything from scratch to complement the tomatoes picked just outside her kitchen door.

"We make these mini-loaves of white bread with a dark, buttery crust," White says. "We slather the slices with our airy homemade mayonnaise, add a sprinkling of crunchy sea salt and slices of red tomato. We cut the sandwiches, stack them up and serve them with our homemade bread-and-butter pickles. There are all these contrasting and complementary flavors. It's a very well balanced dish."

"With a glass of Macon-Fuissé [white wine], you're set for life," she laughed.

As White describes the dish, I can practically feel the neurons in my mind salivate. I don't think I can rest until I try her tomato sandwich.

Only recently I realized that I had never once, in the dozen years I have lived in the South, eaten such a tomato sandwich. I'm sorry to report the notion of juicy tomatoes mixing with mayo grossed me out. And white bread? Seriously? That seemed an amusing Facebook update, so I posted it one evening.

Despite the advanced hour of the posting, I quickly racked up more than 40 responses. "What's wrong with you?" asked the aghast. "It's a prerequisite for citizenship," they huffed.

Though I've been growing backyard tomatoes for the past several years, I default to an olive oil dressing, often with chopped shallots and a splash of vinegar, but sometimes I add basil and a mozzarella worthy of the tomatoes. For a sandwich, we pack these ingredients into a split baguette with a little prosciutto thrown in for good measure.

Of course, I grew up before the Age of Caprese. Olive oil was something I saw in the gourmet foods aisle next to the tinned octopus, but not something my folks kept in the kitchen. Nor did we have a vegetable garden. Instead, we bought our summer tomatoes from roadside farm stands on the way to the Jersey shore. Once we got to the beach house, we made BLTs with toasted white bread, Hellman's mayo, iceberg lettuce and Oscar Meyer's finest. "There's nothing like a Jersey tomato," my mother would sigh.

The next day after my posting, I went out to the garden and found one perfectly ripe Cherokee Purple tomato.

Back in the kitchen, our bread choices consisted of English muffins or a multigrain loaf that promised enough fiber in each serving to last through the recession. We didn't even have prepared mayonnaise. So I made a run to the market.

Most of my Facebook friends recommended Duke's mayonnaise. One said Kraft had a preferable "lemony" flavor. North Carolina chef and author Bill Smith had written a great piece about the tomato sandwich and admitted, with perhaps a touch of contrition, he preferred Hellman's.

"Duke's seems too sweet to me," Smith writes, "but I refuse to get really worked up about this. People should suit themselves. We're talking about lunch, not a historical re-enactment."

So I went with Hellman's, hoping I'd tap into a vein of flavor nostalgia that would explain the tomato sandwich to my tastebuds. I almost bought Sara Lee white bread, but couldn't go through with it. I haven't had a piece of squishy white bread stick to the roof of my mouth for years, and couldn't see going back. Pepperidge Farm white would be plenty soft.

And so I made my sandwich: a thick-but-not-too smear of mayo on each slice of bread, two juicy rounds of my prize tomato, salt and plenty of freshly ground black pepper.

Holy. Freaking. Face-stuffingness.

I've been missing this all my life?

How do you describe a taste that your soul already knows but your tongue says is a novel thrill?

I get it.

The mayo and the anodyne bread put the sweetness and acid of the tomato in high relief with their richness and ballast.

That tomato — rich in natural glutamates that make the mouth water and the tongue tingle with the sensation of umami — belongs as much between two pieces of bread as a juicy burger or a mound of warm corned beef.

I felt stunned by the yearning receptiveness of my tastebuds to this flavor, but not too stunned to eat a second sandwich.

The thought of those sandwiches was going through my mind as I chatted with White on the phone. As much as I loved eating standing over the sink, I yearned to sit at that restaurant table, sipping white wine.

» The Hil, 9110 Selborne Lane, Palmetto. 770-463-6040.