Top tomatoes
Imagine Italy without tomatoes. It’s hard to picture, yet until the 1800s Italians suspected this fruit, brought over from the Americas via Spain in the sixteenth century, would poison and kill. In England, people wouldn’t touch it for hundreds of years, fearing that the ‘love apple’ would provoke excessive sexual appetite, gout and even cancer.
These days, the tomato has made a turnaround and is now lauded rather than dreaded. Not only is it a kitchen staple, it’s also believed that the tomato’s high levels of antioxidants and vitamin C may help protect against cancer.
And finally, after years of buying hard, tasteless imports, supermarkets have started stocking the tomato as it should be – ripened naturally on the vine to a glowing redness and bursting with flavour. Alongside shelves of regular yellow and orange, miniature plum and cherry tomatoes come some we haven’t met before: organic and hydroponic ones (where nutrients are fed to the tomato via fresh water only) without any metallic fertiliser aftertaste.
After you decide which tomatoes to buy, keep them out of the fridge – it’s too cold and their flavour will fade. They’ll get sweeter if you leave them out at room temperature. Rip off any plastic wrap at once, then line them up stalk-side down and not touching each other, along a windowsill. Use an empty egg carton to store small tomatoes that might roll away.
Tomatoes combined with pasta are a ‘feelgood’ food. The wheat’s carbohydrate added to tomatoes stimulates the production of serotonin, a hormone that makes us feel happy. And together they make that rare thing – a quick and easy meal that comforts and tastes of a celebration. Tomato sauces are so pretty and simply delicious, whether they’re warmed whole in oil with a handful of fresh herbs, or halved and enriched with ricotta. With all these glorious options, cream sauces aren’t even in the running.
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