Restaurants

Tomato tales

Posted at July 14, 2008 11:10

Vegetable to fruit and everthing in between

By Nina Furstenau

 

The 1978 movie Attack of the Killer Tomatoes begins with a tomato rising out of a woman’s garbage can in a parody of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds. They find the woman later, and it isn’t pretty.

The movie ends ominously for the tomatoes. They are cornered in a stadium and then stomped and squashed by humans. All except one, who survives when the hero sings to the gigantic tomato girl the love song “Puberty Love.”

You have to understand that there were three, yes three, sequels to Attack. The movie is a pop culture icon.

Since love of tomatoes wins the day in Attack, I will begin there.

George Washington Carver, who grew up at Diamond, courted public favor for the tomato back in 1918 when we were still reluctant to eat them, publishing How to Grow a Tomato—115 Ways to Prepare It for the Table. Carver considered tomatoes the oranges of the Missouri garden and thought tomatoes were a good addition to the table and to the nutrient-poor diets of his neighbors. He was right. Just one medium-sized tomato provides about half of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. Plus, there’s the taste.

No coaxing is needed today. In an informal survey (taken while walking around during my day), the tomato was the unanimous pick for favorite garden vegetable. Americans eat an average of about one hundred pounds of medium-sized tomatoes per year, almost half of them fresh and the rest canned, according to Robert Hendrickson in American Tomato. The best of those come right out of our Missouri gardens, and most are never vengeful. Nor do we typically stomp them.

In fact, my vote for best tomato moment is when I’m waist-high in sticky leaves, out amongst them in their element, if you will. Try it: Gently clasp the fruit of this vine, notice how the pluck of harvest resounds along both the stem of the tomato plant and your arm; sink your teeth through ripe pulp, thrust out your chin and—wait for it—catch the dribbles.

The tasty burst upon the tongue has an additional advantage: With focus, it can stay with you throughout every bite of a summertime meal.

Despite amazing flavor, the tomato began humbly. It first grew in the Andes and is still found there, throughout Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador, growing wild like shriveled grape clusters on a vine. It became a cultivated crop in Central America and then Mexico after Mayan seafaring traders brought the seed to the Yucatan, Hendrickson says. The traders called the fruit tomatl, or xtomatl, and so prized it that tomato images are traced on heritage pottery from the region.

The tomato began its circuitous journey back to the New World by first joining up with Cortez. In 1521, after battling Aztec uprisings, Cortez and his group took tomatl seeds from the Chichen Itza market back to Europe, Hendrickson says. The seeds, jostled by an ocean voyage, took root first in Spain, where the new fruit was hailed as a rare new food.

Its lush color and plumpness gave it an allure it never acquired in the Americas. It began to be called the “love apple” and gained a reputation of being an aphrodisiac. And truly, the inside of a tomato looks a bit like a human heart—the very seat of love—with its four chambers.

A Spanish chef is said to have combined the fruit with olive oil, spices, and onions to create the first tomato sauce. People living on the perimeter of the Mediterranean adored the new food, perhaps in part because of its aura of mystery, and a developing cuisine flourished around the tomate. The Spaniards took the seeds into Asia, and the tomato continued to become a major player in the diets of many nationalities.

Semantics, however, played a role in the tomato’s slightly sinful new image. “All Spaniards at the time were called Moors, and one story has it that an Italian gentleman told a visiting Frenchman that the tomatoes he had been served were ‘Pomi del Moro’ (Moor’s apples), which to his guest sounded like ‘pommes d’amour,’ or ‘apples of love,’” Hendrickson wrote. Hendrickson also cites another version, which claims that the phrase “apples of love” derives from the Italian pomo d’oro (golden apple), identical to today’s Italian name for the tomato, pomodoro. In fact, yellow tomatoes were among the first varieties to be introduced to Europe.

That tomatoes were titillating, perhaps as oysters are today, made way for a darker image. Membership in the nightshade family didn’t help. The tomato’s first botanical name, Lycopersicon, which means “wolf peach” in Greek, is close to Lycopersicon esculentum, a reputedly deadly aphrodisiac. German tales give tomatoes a sinister aura, linking them with werewolves and the witches needed to evoke them, a practice known as lycanthropy (hence, wolf peach). By 1544, the plant was aligned with mandrake, henbane, and belladonna, all extremely poisonous plants, by Italian herbalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, in his Commentaries on the Six Books of Dioscorides.

The unbecoming image was actually true—for the leafy parts of the plant. In fact, all parts of the tomato plant except the fruits are toxic and cause severe digestive upset. Though fully ripe tomatoes have virtually no alkaloid toxin, a Cornell University study says less than two ounces of tomato leaves are likely lethal for an adult.

So, let’s not graze on tomato leaves in the garden.

One folk story has it that an English host served the talked-about tomato to a grand gathering after which all in attendance became ill. The cook apparently diced up the leaves of the plant as well as the fruit. After this, the English opted for safety and relegated the tomato to the greenhouse for floral ornamentation, not consumption. An English traveler wrote in 1596, “these love apples are eaten abroad,” but went on to describe them “of rank and stinking savour.”
Northern European countries regarded the tomato as a mere curiosity for over a century.

Stateside, the lush, scarlet image of the tomato was too much for our Puritan forefathers. A little resistance was in order, and we took our cue from the British and Germans. At first, Missourians used tomatoes primarily as a remedy for not-so-appetizing pustules.

Tomato suspicion lingered until 1820, or possibly 1830, when Col. Robert Gibbon Johnson of Salem, New Jersey, declared he would eat a bushel on the courthouse steps. In this possibly tall tale, his doctor predicted frothing at the mouth and tortured death. Two thousand people came to watch. Though Thomas Jefferson grew the plant at Monticello in 1781, not until Johnson ate the tomatoes publicly without dying did people believe.

Talk about Show-Me philosophy in play.

By 1835, the editor of the Maine Farmer wrote that tomatoes were safe to eat, and seed catalog listings for tomatoes grew exponentially throughout the next century. In 1863, a popular seed catalog listed twenty-three cultivars, and among them was Trophy, the first modern-looking large, red, smooth-skinned variety, which fetched five dollars for a packet of twenty seeds. Today, Heirloom Tomatoes of Hilliard, Ohio, currently offers more than four hundred varieties of heirloom tomatoes, typically for $2.95 per seed packet. Popular varieties of tomatoes that grow well in Missouri are Beefmaster, Better Boy, Big Beef, Celebrity, Jet Star, Lemon Boy, Pik Rite, Pink Girl, and the Missouri Pink Love Apple, according to the University of Missouri Extension web site.

Botanically, tomatoes are giant berries, yes, berries, or fruits belonging to the potato family, but legally the tomato is generally a vegetable. To counter a case brought by John Nix, a tomato importer, the U.S. Supreme Court held in 1893 that the tomato and all plants “grown in kitchen gardens, including potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, cauliflower, cabbage, celery, and lettuce” had to be considered a vegetable when it was served in soup or with the main course of a meal, although it could be considered a fruit when eaten as dessert. Thus, Nix and others had to continue to pay a 10 percent tariff on imported tomato vegetables.

Regardless, we’re a tomato-loving lot. In addition to the fresh tomatoes we each eat each year, nearly six million tons of tomatoes grown in the United States are processed annually into canned goods. No matter how you slice it, the cautious Puritans were overruled.

With so many Missourians with backyard gardens, it’s hard to tolerate less-than-fresh tomatoes at restaurants in the summertime. Some chefs are nimble enough to create dishes based on regional food freshness (See Missouri Life June 2008 “The New Organic” for more on Community Supported Agriculture farms). Sycamore restaurant at Columbia takes this step with delicious results.

Ordering Sycamore’s fresh tomato salad is to look onto a plate of orange, yellow, or tangerine tomatoes; red, pink, or blue tomatoes; white, green, striped, or oddly shaped, sweetly-husked tomatoes—in a word: heirloom. Chef and co-owner Mike Odette makes the effort to acquire unusual tomato varieties through his contacts with local farmers. The riot of color and flavor in Odette’s tomato dishes will put you in the fresh-tomato camp for life. Gazpacho at Sycamore is chunky and savory with pieces of colorful tomatoes in the mix. Sycamore’s intriguing tomato sorbet is sweet and cooling with just the right zing.

Mike believes in developing dishes based on what is freshly available. “There’s always certain ingredients that you understand will work well together,” he says of his rotating menu. “Having a mental library of those kinds of ideas gets me about halfway there.”

The restaurant itself has a slightly urban ambience, with high ceilings sporting rotating fans, mosaic tile along with hardwood floors, white tablecloths, and a long dark bar. Odette and his wife, Amy, and partners Sanford and Jill Speake wanted an open kitchen design, and in the refurbishment of Sycamore, they created it overlooking the diners from the rear of the building.

Of course, you don’t have to go out for a fine tomato. Missouri is not one of the top commercial producing states in the United States, which are Florida, California, and Georgia, perhaps because tomatoes never make it past our backyards and kitchens. I choose to think that we tend to choose flavor, too, over the hybrid qualities of tough skin for shipping and uniform ripening times.

Like Gershwin’s 1937 song, tomato, tomäto, it’s all the same to me. The tale of the tomato comes down to this: eating.

 

 

Heirloom or not?

What makes an heirloom tomato? Some are shaped like peppers or cherries or weigh in at two pounds. They are purple, black, striped, green, orange, yellow, and pink. Indeed, some are red. Seeds of a tomato do not easily crossbreed and will produce plants resembling the parents. Early cultivars did not change much because of this property and were kept in a family or community for long periods of time, thus earning the name heirlooms. Some varieties available today have been passed on for more than one hundred years.

Names of heirloom cultivars often read like hints to a deeper tale: Black Krim (Russia), Bloody Butcher (unknown), Tommy Toe (Ozarks), Mortgage Lifter (U.S.), plus the Missouri Pink Love Apple. Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds at Mansfield lists this cultivar as big, pink, and very rich-tasting: “It was grown since the Civil War by the Barnes family, who grew it as an ornamental, believing (as many people did at the time) that tomatoes or ‘love apples’ were poisonous.”

Heirlooms carry unique genetics and often a history. For instance, Polish is a cultivar said to have been smuggled into the United States on the back of a postage stamp in the late 1800s. Mortgage Lifter is said to have been developed during the Depression by a farmer who claimed one plant would feed a family of six. He sold the plants for one dollar each until he paid off his mortgage.

The tomato: heroic and tasty.

Nutritional value

A single medium-sized tomato:

• Provides about half of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin C. If the tomato is homegrown and ripened-on-the-vine, it may contain up to a third more vitamin C than a commercial, gas-ripened fruit.

• Contains vitamin A, some of which is in the form of beta carotene, thought to reduce the risk of certain cancers.

• Is a good source of potassium and contains B1 and B2 vitamins, iron, and phosphorus.

• Is fiber-rich, low in sodium and calories (only about four calories per ounce), and is cholesterol-free.

• Provides lycopene, the major carotenoid contained in tomatoes that is responsible for the deep red color. Similar to beta carotene, lycopene has been touted as a potent anti-oxidant, a molecule that snuffs out cancer-causing free radicals.

Sources: Dr. Sanjun Gu, Lincoln University vegetable specialist at Jefferson City; Michigan State University Department of Food Science study and Elaine Landau, author of Tomatoes



– MissouriLife Recipes –
Courtesy of Sycamore Restaurant at Columbia

Heirloom Tomato Bruschetta

Ingredients:
1½ pounds heirloom tomatoes, diced
2 tablespoons basil pesto
¼ teaspoon olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions:
Combine ingredients and season to taste.

Serve at room temperature atop bread, preferably homemade, that has been brushed with oil, grilled, and rubbed with a garlic clove. This is also good as a pasta sauce or side dish.
Serves 6 to 8 as an appetizer.

Heirloom Tomato Gazpacho

Ingredients:
3 pounds heirloom tomatoes, diced (about 2
   quarts)
1 cucumber, peeled, seeded, and diced small
   (about 2 cups)
½ medium onion, diced small (about 1 cup)
2 ribs celery, diced small (about 1 cup)
1 quart bottled tomato juice
¼ cup red wine vinegar
1 teaspoon celery salt
1 teaspoon Tabasco
1 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons cilantro, chopped

Directions:

Combine all ingredients in a one-gallon, non-reactive (plastic, glass, or stainless) container, such as a pitcher. Using an immersion blender, zap the gazpacho a few times until desired consistency is reached. Gazpacho may be served smooth, like a beverage, or chunky.

Heirloom Tomato Sorbet

Ingredients:
2 cups water
¾ cup sugar
¼ cup sherry vinegar
¼ cup vodka
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon cracked pepper
4 pounds heirloom tomatoes, peeled

Directions:
In a small saucepan, combine all ingredients except for the tomatoes. Stir over medium heat until sugar and salt are dissolved. Set aside to cool.

Process the tomatoes in a food mill to purée and seed them. Combine the tomato purée with the water-and-sugar mixture and freeze in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s directions.
Serves 12.

Note: Flavored or infused vodka, such as lemon or pepper, may be used. The vodka is optional, but since this recipe doesn’t use much sugar, the alcohol helps keep the sorbet from freezing rock-hard.

 

August 2008

 

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