Who, after reading Pablo Neruda’s Ode to Tomatoes, would not want to fill their kitchen with this exuberant, scarlet fruit, bursting with sweet, fresh juice, and marry it with basil, mint, onions, bread, and with the filial essence of the olive tree in impromptu salads and sandwiches?
And who, too, would not want to capture its essence of summer, to carry us through winter months of prim hothouse tomatoes?
Cooked or uncooked, the tomato is a treasured and indispensable ingredient for the cook – in polpa and kunserva, sun-dried and puréed.
Today’s recipes meet both needs with some preserves and some salad ideas. But first, tomato croquettes, based on one of the several delicious mezes I have eaten at Meze Meze in Għajnsielem, the authentic Greek restaurant on the main road from Mġarr to Victoria.
The recipe uses nothing more than the sweetest, juiciest tomatoes, some fresh mint and flour. At home I cook them in a frying pan in a little olive oil; at the restaurant they are deep-fried, so there is naturally a different taste and texture. I highly recommend them, either as a first course, or in miniature as snacks to accompany an aperitif.
Bread and tomatoes is a perfect combination, especially when flavoured with olive oil, and three of my recipes make the most of this trio of ingredients, in simple and refreshing summer dishes with Italian, Spanish and English overtones.
And then there are the preserves, the chutneys and salsas. But my favourite tomato preserve is the sun-dried tomato. Coming to Gozo for the first time in the early 1980s I was thrilled with my first batch which we made with my father’s tomatoes; this was long before sun-dried tomatoes had become a fashionable ingredient, but was simply what one did with an abundant tomato crop. I remember arranging the halved tomatoes in shallow wooden fruit trays, sprinkling them with Gozo salt and leaving them in the sun all day, covered with netting to protect them from insects.
At sundown, we brought them indoors, otherwise the dew would have undone all the sun’s drying.
As we put them out in the sun again the following morning, we pressed each tomato lightly, with two fingers, bringing more moisture to the surface, which would evaporate by the end of the day. After six days of August sun, the tomatoes were dry enough for me to pack, lightly-oiled, in jars, to the delight of my friends in London.
Of course, you can use a dehydrator, or even the oven, to produce the same results, but the mystique and ritual is sadly lacking.