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 reminded of, since tomatoes feel so structurally Italian, so structurally Spanish, so structurally Greek, that imagining the cuisines of those countries without them is roughly like imagining French cooking without butter or English cooking without complaint. But the tomato did not reach Europe until the sixteenth century, and was treated, for the first two hundred years it was here, as either a decorative plant or a slow poison. The Italians called it pomo d'oro, the golden apple, because the first varieties they saw were yellow. The French called it pomme d'amour, the love apple, for reasons that have been disputed ever since. The English, predictably, looked at it for two centuries and then put it in a sandwich.

For most of the period during which Italian, Spanish and Provençal cooking acquired their characters, then, the tomato was not in the kitchen. What was in the kitchen, instead, was a series of small clever workarounds for the gap that the tomato now fills — and the strange fortnight of late June, when the new tomatoes are not yet good and the old ones are gone, is the only time of year when those workarounds re-emerge into view.

The first of them is the bread

Panzanella, the Tuscan bread salad, is conventionally described as a tomato dish, but anyone who has actually made it knows that the tomato is roughly the third or fourth most important ingredient. The structural item is the stale bread — proper pane toscano, dense and unsalted and a few days old, torn into rough pieces and soaked briefly in cold water and then squeezed. You combine it with whatever vegetables are usable at this awkward hinge of the year: cucumber, red onion soaked in vinegar, basil that has just begun to be plentiful, the first under-ripe tomatoes that you have salted aggressively to draw the water out, and a great deal of olive oil. The salt and the vinegar and the oil do most of the work that a properly ripe tomato would have done.

What you have, in other words, is a dish that began life as a way of using up the bread, was elaborated as a way of using whatever vegetables were around, and only acquired its tomato in the nineteenth century. Panzanella is in some sense a fossil of pre-tomato Tuscan cooking, with a tomato carefully grafted on top. In late June, when the tomatoes are unwilling, you can hear the original dish underneath.

The second workaround is even older and even more clever, and it comes from Andalusia

Salmorejo is what happens when you take the basic ingredients of gazpacho — bread, oil, garlic, vinegar — and concentrate them into something with the consistency of a thick cold soup, somewhere between a sauce and a purée, topped with chopped boiled egg and jamón. Gazpacho, made with the same elements and more water, is the lighter version. Both dishes are nominally tomato soups. Both dishes are, in practice, bread-and-oil emulsions with tomato added.

The Andalusians, who developed this set of dishes over several centuries in a part of Spain where summer means six weeks of forty-degree heat, understood something important about the cold tomato soup. The tomato in it is not really a flavour. It is a texture and a colour and a small acidity. The actual flavour of a gazpacho, the thing that makes you put down the spoon and look at the bowl, is the olive oil and the garlic and the sherry vinegar. The tomato is the medium. So in late June, when the medium is unwilling, you can still make a respectable gazpacho if you compensate — a little more vinegar, a slightly heavier hand with the bread, the best olive oil you have, and a willingness to forgive.

The dish was, in any case, originally made without tomato at all. The first salmorejos in the medieval Andalusian cookbooks were almond-and-bread emulsions, much closer to the white gazpacho — ajo blanco — that still survives in Málaga and Córdoba as a parallel tradition. Ajo blanco is what gazpacho was before America was discovered: almonds, garlic, stale bread, olive oil, water, vinegar, served cold with white grapes floating in it. It is, if you have not eaten it, one of the most extraordinary cold dishes in European cooking, and the late-June fortnight when the tomatoes are sulking is exactly the time of year to make it.

The Greeks have their own version of the same problem and the same trick

Dakos — sometimes called koukouvágia in Crete — is built around a small flat barley rusk called paximadi, which is so hard when it leaves the bakery that it must be moistened with water and olive oil before you can put your teeth into it. On top of the softened rusk go grated tomato (so you only need a single ripe one), crumbled xinomyzithra cheese, oregano, more olive oil, and salt. It is the Greek answer to panzanella and salmorejo and pan con tomate, and it works on exactly the same principle: the bread does the structural work, the oil and the salt do the flavour work, and the tomato — minimal, grated, almost spread rather than chopped — is doing its small symbolic part rather than carrying the dish.

There is an equivalent in Catalonia, of course, in pa amb tomàquet — bread rubbed with the cut face of a tomato until the bread is faintly stained — which works for the same reason. The tomato is being used as if it were a paint rather than a vegetable. You do not need a great deal of it. You do not even need a particularly good one.

Attitude

All of these dishes share an attitude, and the attitude is what is worth borrowing in this fortnight of patience.

The attitude is: the tomato is not the point. The point is the oil, the salt, the bread, the patience. The tomato, when it arrives, will add something that nothing else can add, but the dish around it has to be good enough that the tomato is the final touch and not the whole foundation. Once you have understood this, you can make a serviceable salmorejo with the unsatisfactory June tomatoes, because you are not asking them to do very much. You can make a panzanella that is actually a celebration of bread. You can drink an ajo blanco and not miss the tomato at all.

And then, somewhere around the second week of July — earlier in Sicily, later in the Loire, almost imperceptibly between one Saturday market and the next — the tomatoes arrive.

You will know, because the smell will hit you before the sight. A ripe tomato off the vine smells very particular, very green, very slightly tarry, and entirely unlike anything you have smelt in nine months. The first one you eat that summer, sliced thickly on a plate with salt and a slick of olive oil and possibly a leaf of basil, will be enough to silence whichever conversation was happening in the kitchen. And then begins the long crescendo: the heaped market stalls, the gluts in the gardens of friends, the bags of misshapen ones given away by people who cannot keep up, the bottling weekends in August, the jars of passata lining up on the shelf for next year's late June.

Until then, though — for these few awkward weeks — the older European cuisines have a quiet lesson, which is that you do not really need very many tomatoes to make something taste of summer. You need bread. You need oil. You need salt. You need the willingness to wait.

The tomato, when it comes, will be all the better for the patience. And the bread salad you made while you were waiting may turn out, in retrospect, to have been one of the most honest dishes of the year.