. . and strawberry tomatoes, and camparis, brown tomatoes, heritage tomatoes and many more. The cherry tomato, however, is much less seen today than it was. It was once heralded as the savior of flavor in tomatoes, but the growers quickly learned to make flavorless cherry tomatoes.

The grape and strawberry tomatoes are smaller and very good eating, not too sweet at all, but you wouldn't make sauce from them, too much skin to deal with.

In general, market tomatoes, even with a few days of countertop ripening, are not very good for sauce - you're usually better off with canned tomatoes. I did, however, make a very fine sauce a couple of months ago from a pile of large cluster tomatoes that were getting a little over-ripe on the counter.

. . which is rare in many regions. Their primacy for sauces is based on the ratio of flesh to seed mass - they are very fleshy.

To quote one of the largest tomato barons (and political contributors) in Florida, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal some years ago, "Who cares what a tomato tastes like, they're always served with something else".

Incidentally, one effect of his political contributions was a law passed by the Florida legislature to require a particular type of packaging for tomatoes - a packaging that guaranteed actually ripe tomatoes from Mexico would be destroyed in transit.

. . that was before I was involved with food except for supper, probably 8 years ago, maybe more.