The First Summer Tomatoes (and the Long Wait Between)
There is a fortnight, somewhere around the end of June and the beginning of July, when the tomato question becomes briefly painful. The last jars of last year's passata, put up in the warm dusk of an August evening twelve months ago, are down to one or two on the back shelf — the ones that were pushed there because the seal looked slightly suspicious and which now, in the desperation of summer, look perfectly fine. The first tomatoes of the new year are in the shops, but they are not yet, in any honest sense, tomatoes. They are pale at the shoulders, hard in the hand, and they taste — when you finally cut into one — like the idea of a tomato written down by somebody who has never met one. You stand in the kitchen looking at the empty shelf and the unsatisfactory bowl, and you understand, perhaps for the first time, why Mediterranean cooking spent several thousand years before the discovery of the Americas working out what to do without tomatoes at all. It is a strange thing to be...
