In case you weren’t aware, it’s tomato season. Every single person in my life knows this, because each year when the clock strikes midnight on August 1, I essentially turn into a giant tomato like some kind of strange Cinderella story. I have a playlist on my Spotify called “tomato szn.” I spend every late-summer Saturday at the farmers market, picking up blushed fruits and deciding whether or not they have enough heft to slip into my tote bag. I even have a tiny little tomato tattooed on my wrist.
This slice of the year is my favorite time—not just because I like eating tomato toast and making pomodoro, but because of what it symbolizes. Tomato season always returns. It serves as a respite. And honestly, the real magic of the season is that it only comes once a year, and briefly. Like everything that makes life better, it wouldn’t be as good if it existed all the time. But still, every year in August, I find myself wishing that there was some way for me to catch tomato season in a bottle and save it for later—for any moment when I really needed it. Now, a new collaboration between Malin+Goetz and Carbone Fine Food is getting me a little closer to that dream.
Malin+Goetz has a tomato candle that I’ve long loved—it’s an herbaceous spin on the fruit, like a whiff of the vine rather than the flesh. It’s laced with fresh basil, green ivy, lavender, mint, mandarin, petitgrain, cedarwood, and green pepper. It comes in a classic clear vessel and has white wax. It’s a fantastic scent, and one I treasured lighting last winter as a sort of shrine to the summer heat. But the brand’s new Carbone Fine Food collaboration, the tomato supercandle, is something special. It’s like the difference between a July tomato (very good) and an August one (truly great), or perhaps the difference between a regular old plate of pasta with vodka sauce and Carbone’s signature spicy rigatoni.
This limited-edition candle is a work of art. It’s small-batch, and the wax is a deep red color, like a tomato falling off the vine. It’s housed in burgundy glass that resembles a pasta bowl. And its extra scent notes—black currant, pink pepper, and galbanum—add a new layer of depth, like a sauce that’s been simmered just an hour or two longer to get a more intense flavor.
I am someone who wholeheartedly believes in using your good things. Wear the nice clothes. Spritz the expensive perfume. Eat the good olive oil. But for this candle, I’m going to break my own philosophy and stow it away for later. I’ll light it whenever I need a jolt of summer or a memory of a juicy, peak-August tomato in the dead of winter. And I know that it will help get me through any dark days ahead.
