Cradock - Tomato. It’s as essential to the kitchen as air to the body.
If there were no tomatoes, our lives would be different and Italians would not have the cuisine they have today. Would the pizza even have been invented if there had been no tomato with which to anoint it? Would a childhood be the same without tomato sauce?
It would be like there being no movies or television, like having roads with no cars, hotels with no rooms. If there had been no tomato, we would have had to invent it.
It’s one of those ubiquitous things we know as well as we know our mothers, our siblings, our faces in the mirror, our friends, the way to work, the way home. Tomatoes are as commonplace as cars, pavements, windows and doors. In the kitchen you can be sure that there will be salt, pepper, bread, onions, carrots, eggs and tomatoes.
And not just whole, fresh tomatoes. There’ll probably be some little Roma ones, and a squeezy bottle of tomato sauce in the cupboard. If you pass them in the supermarket, you fling some in the trolley because you always need them. Even in the canned food section, the one thing people will still buy in a can is the chopped, peeled tomatoes.
Yet a tomato is different things contained in one fruit. Always uncomfortable to write, that word… fruit, when describing a tomato. Sure, it is, strictly speaking, but come on, we think of it and use it as a vegetable. Maybe it’s time it was reclassified.
Yet it can be sweet, and it can be tart. It is malleable as putty and you can turn it into almost anything you want in the kitchen. Tomato bread, tomato tart, a tomato-based pasta sauce or pizza topping, tomatoes in a Spanish chicken casserole with olives, or an old-fashioned bredie. Tomatoes in savoury mince, in a toasted cheese sandwich, in a meat sauce, to give it a little zing and depth. A hot, creamy broth or an iced summer soup. Whole baked stuffed tomatoes as a main vegetarian course, or cut in two and stuffed inside a chicken before roasting it, to give it some moisture and flavour it from within.
I draw the line, speaking for myself, at tomato jam, but if that’s your plak, who am I to knock it? Another dish I am ambivalent about when it comes to the tomato is breakfast. I love fried tomato, yet for a reason I cannot explain I almost invariably leave the tomato on the plate after a breakfast fry-up.
Being a fruit, I guess, is what makes it edible even raw, although the flavour is so different from the cooked tomato that it might just as well be a different fruit altogether. A lemon, hot or cold, tastes the same.
The same can be said for any of the sweet fruits, within degrees. The essential flavour of most of them may alter a little with the application of heat, but when that happens to a tomato, the change is much more marked.
Roast a tomato, with olive oil and a little garlic, and you have a superbly intense flavour hit, as long as the tomato is ripe. Cook down its pulp and you have an equally strongly flavoured puree. Add tomato to a stock and it makes it much more interesting.
Tomato soup is something my generation grew up with.
You’d have it as an hors-d’oeuvre in a hotel dining room, billed as “cream of tomato soup” and, since you knew that your mother “made” the same thing at home, you knew it came out of a tin. That never bothered me and it sill doesn’t today. It’s hard, frankly, to mess up a tomato soup. But it doesn’t have to be a hot soup, and these days when the weather gets hot I make a chilled one, adapting it one way or another each time.
This week I rang the changes by making a chilled tomato and red pepper soup, which makes a perky supper with some crusty bread. You can approach it in two ways – take it slowly, roasting the peppers and whole tomatoes in olive oil with the garlic and the onion first, before transferring to a pot, or take the quick root for a no-fuss after-work supper. This is the quick version.
Chilled Tomato and Red Pepper Soup
1 large onion, chopped finely
2 cloves garlic, crushed
2 red peppers, seeded and chopped
2 baby fennel stems, chopped
3 large tomatoes, chopped
1 410g can chopped tomatoes
250g tomato purée
2 tbs hot chilli sauce
3 tbs Worcestershire sauce
Cold water
Salt and pepper to taste
Sauté the chopped onion with the garlic in olive oil until softened, then add the chopped fennel and peppers and sauté for five minutes or so. (If you want to take it slowly, just roast the tomatoes, peppers and onion first, then de-skin the peppers and chop the cooked onion, tomatoes and peppers and add to the pot at this point). Add the chopped tomatoes and cook for three minutes, stirring, then add the purée, can of chopped tomatoes, chilli sauce and Worcestershire sauce. Use the empty tomato can to add another roughly can-and-a-half of cold water. Bring to a simmer, season with salt and pepper to taste (it needs a good whack of salt), and simmer gently, covered, for 20 minutes.
Remove from the stove and leave to cool to room temperature, then blend thoroughly and chill. Serve with a swirl of plain yoghurt and a mint or basil garnish.
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