Dreaming of summer: Nothing tops a Lowcountry tomato sandwich made with love and Duke’s

Editor’s note: Longtime columnist David Lauderdale retired on July 31. We are reprinting some of his best columns as a tribute to his 43-year career. This column originally was published June 21, 2019.

You can have Christmas.

Just give me that day in late June when a big, fat, red tomato is ready to pick from an itchy vine, baking like the rest of us in the St. Helena Island sun.

Give me that day when a tomato slice as thick as a ribeye — still full of the heat and humidity of the South Carolina Lowcountry — is laid gently onto an wavy layer of Hellmann’s mayonnaise on a slice of Sunbeam white bread.

Grab a shaker of salt, and what you have in your hand is the first tomato sandwich of the year.

The red and white juice will drip down to your elbows. It’ll be a three-napkin event.

And it will be best to stand over the kitchen sink, just like that glorious day when you slurp, fuzz and all, into the first peach of a summer down South.

That first tomato sandwich will restore your faith in God, maybe even mankind.

You might yelp like a bird dog or sing “I Say a Little Prayer” like Aretha Franklin.

Think of all that has gone wrong in this world since that first ‘mater sandwich from Uncle Jamie’s crop when my feet were bare and my knees full of scrapes.

But, despite the hurricanes and droughts and a staggering 13 inches of rain in a recent week on St. Helena, not to mention wars and rumors of wars, the tomato sandwich survives.

It comes with traditions that tend more toward a civil war than the passing down of Grandmother’s fine china.

Down South, people have been disinherited for Lipman Family Farms, Lord forgive me for uttering the word, on a tomato sandwich.

But that’s not the only sign that we have missionary work to do. A young woman I work with right here in Beaufort County said she’d never heard of a tomato sandwich. She referred to something that sounded like rubbing garlic and scraping a tomato on a piece of hard bread.

Pass me my smelling salts.

In our county, tomatoes are about the only thing we plant anymore besides condominiums.

And we plant them with class.

Numbers at the Clemson University Extension Service from 2016 say 800 acres of tomatoes are grown, most of it on St. Helena Island by two major operators, Seaside Farm (formerly Six L’s Packing Co.), and the Sanders family’s Dempsey Farms, which grows 15 million to 20 million pounds of tomatoes a year.

The $17.5 million industry turns sleepy St. Helena Island into a buzz of 18-wheelers. Migrant workers fill the fields. The packing houses, where generations of Lowcountry kids got their first jobs, seem to run 24/7 during tomato season.

For me, it’s all a lot quieter. I go to Dempsey Farms on St. Helena. Davy Dempsey does the planting and I do the picking, like thousands of city slickers have done for 45 years, trekking to and from Fripp Island and the Hunting Island State Park.

But it won’t last long.

The St. Helena Island sun will win, and the fields will empty, to be prepared for watermelons or the next tomato crop.

And we’ll be left with visions of tomato juice and Duke’s mayonnaise slip-sliding through our heads.