What the world needs is a scratch-and-sniff photo option. Imagine this tomato picture in the dead of winter when only your houseplants and a one dollar bill show you any green love. You might be killing time on a January day by organizing boxes of old pictures and you come to this one, run your fingernail across the fuzzy stem, or even a leaf and voila! Instant August! The first cookbook to come up with aromatic photos would be a sure bestseller because cooks would know right away whether or not a new recipe had possibilities.

Until scratch-and-sniff photos come to be, however, we settle for this one. While the great globe of gladness that is a tomato has a nice aroma of its own, it is the leaves and stems that really say "tomato" from day one on. Each leaf has a complex design of deep veins, a pleasingly lobed shape, and so many tiny little hairs. The stems are tough, fibrous--and hairy. Then we have the tomato itself: smooth, round--hairless--and not as aromatic as its vine. With the tomato, however, smell gives way to taste (and looks). Fruit of the vine, sweet summer wine, tomato mine. Maybe what the world really needs is a scratch-and-taste photo option?