This is an opinion column

When the power went off after the storms blew in last week, people worried about how long their refrigerated food would be good. There’s something about a big storm that makes people think of food, and scarcity, and what to have for dinner, which will be eaten in the dark.

Cold soup out of a can? Brittle pasta that can’t be cooked if the stove’s dead? Peanut butter and crackers? A tin of tuna with a glass of wine while it’s still refrigerator-cold?

Or, if you visited one of the farmers’ markets in your area, you can have a simple supper of tomato sandwiches and potato chips. This may not be a balanced meal, but it’s a tasty one. And the time is right since the fruit is ripe.

I don’t know if tomato sandwiches are just a southern thing, but the south is where I learned to eat them. When my father’s backyard garden gave up all its bounty, there they were: globes of red hanging heavy on the vine, some tied up with strips of cloth so they wouldn’t topple over and rot in the damp garden dirt.

The tomatoes all seemed to come in at once, and people on our street gave baskets of them to other people who had their own tomatoes and were wondering what to do with all that abundance. One thing to do was simple and required no recipe, no stirring, no sampling.

Make a tomato sandwich or two. Back in the days of my childhood, people chose that flabby white bread called Wonder, and I loved it like everybody else did. When I got older, and the shelves of the grocery store were lined with other choices, I wondered how anybody could eat Wonder Bread, but it was the most popular brand in the country for awhile.

In those days, before anyone had heard of wholewheat or sourdough, we slathered the flabby bread with as much mayonnaise as we could, put two just-sliced tomatoes on one side, added the top, and cut the whole thing in two so it was shaped like a triangle. There. Now we had lunch. Every now and then, my mother added bacon and iceberg lettuce to form a classic BLT.

We did that for as long as the summer tomatoes glowed with that red hue that announced they were in their prime. After that, they lost their glow like every living thing does eventually, and we ate the canned version our neighbor gave us, but it wasn’t close to the taste of summer.

My father’s garden died when he did in his seventies, but neighbors still brought tomatoes to my mother each summer. After she had a stroke, she lay in a Birmingham rehab center working hard to get stronger and trying hard to like hospital food. It was bland, institutional, but met the nutrition guidelines the hospital had to follow. Lumpy mashed potatoes swam in the juice from canned green beans. The rolls were hard. But she was not one to make a fuss so she didn’t.

What she really wanted, she told my husband on one of his visits, was a tomato sandwich, the kind made with just-off-the-vine tomatoes and lots of mayonnaise—any kind would do. Like a courier on a special mission, he came back the next day and the day after that with contraband sandwiches which he assembled in the car so they wouldn’t get soggy.

She joked that those secret sandwiches kept her alive. And maybe they did. She had ten more years of good health after that, and hundreds of tomato sandwiches.

Contact Beth Thames at [email protected]