Love apple of despair

A recipe for Chilled Roast Tomato Soup with Herb Mousse

Find more newsletters with opinions and recipes here. If you want to take issue, please Comment.

If one single vegetable demonstrates the difference between supermarket produce and home-grown, it is surely the tomato. Whatever its size, small as a cherry or as large as a pumping heart, a tomato plucked off the vine after basking in the sun is a completely different entity from those red balls confined under fish-strangling plastic at the local supermarket.

Photo Klaus Einwanger: The Bruno Cookbook, Martin Walker & Julia Watson

You don’t need a garden to grow them. Tomatoes flourish in flowerpots. There are even varieties that actively benefit from the hanging baskets for which they have been developed.

We tend to assume the tomato is a Mediterranean staple, linked as it is with so much of the food eaten round that basin. Where would pasta be without tomatoes? Or bouillabaisse, unctuous fish soup of Provence? Yet they originated in the Andes where they grew wild. They were then cultivated by the Aztecs and Incas of Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador, as far back as 700 AD.

In Britain they were barely seen before the First World War, being believed variously to bring a chill to the stomach, cause gout and cancer, or - horror of British horrors - excessive sexual appetite. That alone would cause an Anglo-Saxon to reject it.

Americans were less reticent. French immigrants were the initial market, buying seeds from Landreths in Philadelphia, the oldest seed company in the US. From the 1820s on, tomatoes began to appear in US gardens, restaurants and recipes. Then, in 1834, an article by a Dr. John Bennett attributed numerous health benefits (not all of them correct) to the tomato, and the tomato was fully launched. 

Today, it’s the nation’s most grown vegetable, domestically and commercially. 20 US states are engaged in commercial tomato production, led by Florida. Despite this, the world’s largest producer, accounting for nearly half the output, is the Asia Pacific, with China driving the global market of 43.8 million tons in 2020. (Don’t say you’re surprised.)

The US is the largest processor of tomatoes. Of their 14 million tons grown, over 12 million are processed - into sauces, paste, soups, juice, and ketchup. Dieticians will tell you processed tomatoes are an excellent way to absorb the lycopene they contain, specifically in the consumption of tomato paste. Lycopene is a powerful antioxidant that acts as an anticarcinogen. Our bodies absorb it four times better in paste than from fresh tomatoes. The Bloody Mary as medicine?

There are miles in taste and distance between the tomato sold in supermarket chains grown year round in poly-tunnels and even between those expensive out-of-season heirlooms sold in high-end produce stores and the tomato thriving outdoors in summer, in your garden or a local farmer’s. It’s not surprising that in the US more tomatoes are sold in cans than fresh. 

‘Love apple’ the mass-grown tomato is not.

The French are responsible for that particular designation, being prime among those believing the pomme d’amour had aphrodisiac powers. The Italian word pomodoro, meaning golden apple, probably refers to the early tomato introduced into Europe in the mid-1500s being yellow. Tomatl is the Mexican word English speakers rushed with relief to ascribe to it.

Along with so much else we should be fighting for in our supermarkets, we should fight for the love apple grown in the sun. It’s an altogether different fruit.

You may be enjoying a secret smirk that you already know it to be a fruit. But it’s not a fruit like an apple or an orange. It’s a berry. This does not make it related to the strawberry because the strawberry is not a berry. A strawberry is an ‘aggregate fruit’, so we shan’t be going there. The tomato-as-berry is a subset of fruit and member of the Solanaceae nightshade family that includes peppers, eggplants, and potatoes. And tobacco. And belladonna, which is probably another reason tomatoes were treated with such suspicion.

If you only have access to hard red supermarket golf balls or canned tomatoes, you can still make a wonderful gazpacho, since the recipe calls for tomato paste and plenty of other flavouring vegetables.

But if you have a supply of sun-ripened tomatoes, make this soup, a real celebration of them I brag to say I invented to use up a summer glut.

Photo Klaus Einwanger: The Bruno Cookbook, Martin Walker & Julia Watson

1.5kg/3 ⅓ lbs ripe tomatoes + 2 large red tomatoes + 2 large yellow tomatoes 
Olive oil
1 teaspoon sugar
200ml/7 fl oz light chicken or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste
200g/7oz Greek yogurt
1 egg white
Small bunch basil, finely chopped
Small bunch chives, finely chopped

Preheat oven 200C/400F.

Slice 1.5 kg/3 ⅓ lbs tomatoes across, de-seed them, then lay them cut side up in a roasting pan. Pour over a generous wineglass of olive oil and roast till they begin to caramelize, 30-40 minutes. When cool, blitz in a blender, adding enough stock to make a pureed soup the density of single/table cream. Press through a sieve to remove any unprocessed seeds or skin. Season to taste and chill.

Blanch and peel the large tomatoes. De-seed and cut into small dice. Reserve.

Drain the yogurt in a sieve lined with a sheet of paper kitchen towel, 45 minutes. Decant it into a small mixing bowl, season lightly and beat in the chopped herbs. Not more than an hour before serving, whip the egg white stiff and fold thoroughly into the yogurt.

To serve, mound a dessert spoon of diced tomatoes in the centre of each soup bowl. Carefully pour the chilled soup round it and add a heaped teaspoonful of the Herb Mousse alongside the diced tomatoes.