The key ingredient: Tomatoes

Early in our rural life, it became apparent that a veggie patch would require bird-, kudu-, and porcupine-proofing, and would need to include sufficient support on the top to double as a baboon trampoline. A few thousand rand later, my husband still describes whatever I harvest as “The most expensive… [lettuce, dill, tarragon, whatever] on the planet.” He’s probably right. Don’t tell him I said so.

But thanks to my spendthrift nature, I now know what it’s like to spy a tiny courgette growing from its blossom one day, only to find that two days later it is related to The Hulk and now weighs three kilograms and none of your neighbours want it because they, too, are overwhelmed. Or to happily find that first cucumber peeking out from under its leaf – and then realising quickly that the pantry doesn’t have sufficient jars in which to pickle all its cousins.

Tomatoes, however, are by far the richest reward and complete justification for the garden’s expense. Vine-ripened and red all-the-way-through, I love them from my head tomatoes, as the seriously unforgivable pun goes.

One of my earliest memories is my grandfather picking me a ripe yellow tomato the size of a mango with a red starburst in its centre, coring a hole in it with his pocketknife and shaking in salt from a little cardboard cylinder he kept in his pocket just for this purpose. I can still feel the warm juices running down my small arm.

The smell of a tomato vine (which some enterprising perfumeries are now bottling and you can buy in South Africa as a delicious handwash ) instantly conjures hot sun and soil. The sweet tang of its fruit and the colours and varieties the heirloom craze has brought allow us to instantly put together what British restaurateur Yotam Ottolenghi calls a “Tomato Party in a Bowl”.

Tomatoes can pair with an astonishing variety of flavours. Some we know well like their life-partner basil or mistress garlic. Other ingredients they flirt with include anchovies, cucumbers, ginger, onions, fennel (try this salad of tomatoes and pickled fennel), and cheeses. But they also veer towards the experimental: Mexicans, who should know (the Aztecs called them tomatl and so gave us our English name for them), add vanilla or chocolate; tomatoes with watermelon make excellent salads or cold soups; and cinnamon adds a warm base note to the shrill taste of those that have been tinned.

Tomatoes are a fruit (seeds make it so) but an ambitious fruit, deserving of our encouragement and respect. When they’re not successfully mimicking a vegetable, you may be surprised to know that they share many flavour compounds with strawberries. Try tossing strawberries with tomatoes, avocados and fresh mozzarella for another wild party.

A member of the nightshade family, its siblings include brinjals, potatoes, chilies and the black sheep of the family, tobacco. If you speak Latin, according to Wikipedia, you’ll know them as lycopersicum, or “wolf peach”. And as they made their way to the Old World, they were described in Italy as pomi d’oro, or “golden apples”.

Whatever you call them, tomatoes brim with savoury umami, confirmed merely by combining them with anchovies – on pizza, in puttanesca sauce, or slow-roasted at 120 degrees, draped with an oily fillet of those tiny fish and some black pepper for a couple of hours. Pass these around on crostini at a cocktail party or toss them with cannellini beans for a perfect lunch. Punch the wall.

(This act of violence is prompted, according to Francis Lam, by the flavour teased out of a pot filled with tomatoes, anchovies, onions, garlic, salt and many, many glugs of olive oil as preparation for his ‘Weapons-grade Ratatouille’, which takes the better part of a morning, but is worth every minute.) And of course this also helps diminish the pile of courgettes and brinjals.

And at the risk of causing you to want your money back because this is actually a column about tomatoes, not anchovies, I highly recommend Alison Roman’s simple salad of tomatoes dressed in anchovy-fennel seed oil. You will thank me.

Tomatoes, many ways

Tomatoes also like to pal around with various pestos. Make a garlicky basil pesto the way Samin Nosrat does, wilt some spinach and toss in the cooked noodles with halved raw cherry tomatoes for sweet freshness, topping with pine nuts toasted until (as Nigella once decreed) their cheeks blush. The Tuscans use sage with tomatoes and beans; the Zuni Café in San Francisco takes the obvious leap, making a sage pesto to toss with grilled or roasted tomatoes, giving the herb a short bath in warmed olive oil before pounding it with more oil, garlic, walnuts and Parmigianino Reggiano. Coriander pesto is tomato’s dancing partner in a salsa and a pizza using it with tomatoes and Havarti cheese is a threat to basil’s lock on the relationship.

For a good Mexican salsa ranchera, cover a baking sheet with foil, quarter an onion or two, add cloves of garlic still in their paper jackets, as many chillies as you like and at least a couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes (without crowding the pan) and roast, hot, tossing them around from time to time until the vegetables begin to char and blister. Remove the garlic skins and the chili stems then whiz it all briefly (you still want some chunks) in the blender, adding salt and pepper, fresh coriander, and a squeeze of lime or lemon juice. Grill some corn chips with melty cheese on top, mix up a batch of guacamole, and it makes an easy snack or, if you add some kidney or pinto beans, a light summer meal.

For this key ingredient, there are rules. Never put them in the fridge. It ruins their texture, making them ‘mealy’ and dampens their flavour. Never cook them (or anything acidic) in an aluminium pot. Never remove their seeds since Heston Blumenthal, working with university scientists, confirmed they are not only rich in fibre, but in glutamic acids boosting their own flavour and that of neighbouring ingredients.

You’ll probably need a Bloody Mary after all of this or, as Kingsley Amis suggests, whenever you have a vacant afternoon.

Here’s the wonderful Rural Cook on cherries and lettuce too…

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