Chapter 1: Tomatoes

The Ailsa Craigs, when they finally managed to muster a blush of ripeness, were majestic tomatoes. If they featured on the shelves of M&S these days, they’d probably be called a heritage variety.

This first, eponymous, chapter is free to read. The whole chapter. I’ve also posted chapters 2 and 3 (for paid subscribers). And, over the next several months, Tomatoes will build into a whole book-length of food-themed extended anecdotes. Upgrade to a paid plan if you’d like to read the whole caboodle.

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Think of those memories…the ones that you most want to keep.  The memories we savour most are the ones that taste and smell – one and the same. We can’t taste without smell.

My earliest memory is of standing in short trousers waiting for my Mum to take me somewhere.  I remember the smell of a straggly bush near the front door. My Mother called it a Sutherland bush, or something like that. When I see trees on walks in the countryside - wherever I happen to be - that have strange feathery foliage, like that bush, I must pluck a frond and squeeze it between my fingers to check if it’s the same. Who cares if it’s not called Sutherland? But I’ll know, if I ever find it, if it is that particular genus. That memory, that smell, will always be with me.

I, probably, was waiting for my mother. I meld another memory of a navy suit with funny round leather-covered buttons. I’m not sure if it was the suit she was wearing that day, but clothes were more formal then. My shorts were grey with a belt and turn-ups, probably, but I’m not that sure. If the shorts had turn-ups there may have been fluff in them and perhaps a sixpence. 

I think I had a sky-blue knitted jumper on. I was about six, I suppose.  The jumper was stingy. 

Even a cursory walk to town was a besuited opportunity for my mother – who always overdressed. Past the strange school, we went, where someone once died of a terrible disease from Germany. Past a nunnery where the nuns looked so old and very, very cross. Past the dentist place for kids where a Welsh bitch drilled me for no apparent reason and no jab to ease the pain. Mr Buzzer, she called her drill. Like I was supposed to like him. Was she Welsh?  Odd accent. Not sure though. 

But these are all mini-memories, little memories without real definition. Memories of food are bright, in Kodachrome colour. Because we keep being reminded of them every time we eat the thing we first ate. It’s why we lament a loss of taste in food. It’s why, when we visit Italy or Greece, we witter on like television chefs about how the food tastes, because, probably, we remember how that thing tasted when we first tasted it and how our lives changed a little because of the taste and the smell, that first time. And mostly the first time was in childhood. Although, as a working class boy, the food exotica tastes came much later for me. 

Near the place where the school child died because of the terrible German disease was a bread-shop. Not a bakery. It was a bread shop that had odd opening hours. It only opened when it had bread and it sold out quickly. The bread company must have been operating a hub and spoke supply chain arrangement – well ahead of its time, as it happens. And just-in-time delivery for the eager local fresh bread eaters. The bread was sliced and wrapped in greased paper. Getting that particular bread, fresh, was essential for chip nights. 

I often told my children, years later, and during the years when they listened to me and didn’t disagree, that if they always sat down to eat, made an occasion out of even the simplest meals, they’d probably stay slim and happy and healthy. It’s simplistic parenting guff but it has elements of truth. As young adults now they are still slim and healthy and take a dim view of fast food and pharmacology.  

My earliest, most robust and in-colour memories are memories of the dinner table – or, rather, kitchen table. My sister rocked on her stool beside it, and occasionally disappeared under it. My Dad would fill his mouth with food and then smile at us.  The cat, Daisy, would wander over the table and sprinkle it, and us, with hair. We’d sneeze…my dad, noisily. Arguments, anecdotes and arsing-about would start and finish at the table. My Dad would fill his mouth with food and grin, and we’d fall about in hysterics on cue. The same visual jokes were always hilarious then. Normal was the intensity of family and steaming potatoes and daftness and rolling down the garden into the apple trees with inedible but very pretty apples. 

I well remember my sister, Jo, eating tomatoes like apples: but armed with a canister of Saxa salt and muttering lots of “ums”. This approach never quite worked for me. The taste of a tomato was quite confusing to me prior to (say) age twelve or thirteen when I learned to appreciate them, reluctantly and falteringly at first.  Before then the taste was sweet, yes, but acidic and confusing and savoury, sort-of. Tomatoes were, I thought, bland but also hinting at unctuousness, but not quite: too watery. The pips confused me. Should I spit them out? What was that strange jelly texture from the middle bit near the pips? I’d also dissected a few. And I’d read about them in my World Book Encyclopaedia. It described their parts. The placenta, funiculus and seeds. Perhaps it was the fecundity of the tomato that disgusted me, more than even meat guts.  I’d heard a tall tale about a woman who died because a tomato seed germinated under her denture plate and grew into her brain. Unlikely, but disgusting all the same. 

But my romantic attachment to the tomato came when the greenhouse came. Except it wasn’t a greenhouse, more a contraption created by my father, Joe, out of various things he had procured from no-one-knew-where. The first greenhouse was made of odd bits of snaffled wood and multi-coloured rolls of material that looked like the stuff of plastic shower-curtains. The construction was nothing if not jaunty. The fact that the tomatoes grew and matured said something about his dedication. Although hundreds of little green, hard marbles at the end of the season indicated that perhaps blue (or pink) shower curtains were not the best aid to ripening. 

But the pink/blue tomato house was quickly replaced by a proper glass greenhouse that came flat-packed. He built a brick base on a trench he’d filled with concrete. Then a two-brick-high red-brick wall was erected. When the little wall hardened the aluminium sections were bolted on top and glass panels slid into place, held in place with lovely little clips, just made for the purpose. It was all shiny and dazzling in the back garden. Just ten feet long and six feet wide it became Joe’s crystal palace once filled with wooden edged grow trays filled with peat, and a big watering can and a stool that was permanently borrowed from the kitchen. 

The tomato plants were acquired from the local street market that came to town once a week. Joe’s preferred variety of tomato was Ailsa Craig. His mate, Blackie, a time-served tomato grower, told him they were the best. “There’s nothin’ ta touch an Ailsa Craig,” Joe said Blackie said, as he acquired the plants. Two dozen were bought from the market most Summers.  

The Ailsa Craig plant produced a tomato that had a little dark green cap where the stalk came out. The four-inch-high baby plants grew in individual peat pots that looked quite artisanal with frayed edges, like they were melded by hand. But they probably weren’t. The peat pot was a great labour-saving thing, my Dad told me, as he planted them – pot and all - into the prepared peat beds inside the greenhouse. There was something strangely nurturing and gentle and moving about the sight of the baby tomato plants resting in his big, long-fingered hands, all grubby from peat. 

But it was the smell of tomato plants that got me…that smell that’s utterly unique. Just run your fingers over the truss from a packet of vine-grown tomatoes and smell your fingers. The smell isn’t entirely pleasant. But there’s something elemental and chemistry-set about it. It’s evocative and routine at the same time. It’s the smell of the fundamentals of food. It’s the smell of cause and effect. Truss and fruit. Light and life.  That smell permeated the greenhouse after just a few growing weeks as the plants became established, and Joe fastened the sinewy tomato limbs onto bamboo canes. 

Quite what happened to the tomatoes, if they ever ripened in Northern Ireland’s indifferent summers, I can’t quite remember. Most, I’d imagine, ended-up in salads or sandwiches. They were rarely cooked, I know that. The use of tomatoes for cooking was an affectation I picked up a bit later in life once I started the process of travelling. But I quickly realised that there was little point continuing my confusion with the tomato’s role in life. It had to be a vegetable, fruit or funiculus or not. Salt was the thing. My sister Jo was right. Tomatoes and salt – that’s the proof that they are firmly savoury. She introduced me to the tomato sandwich. A slice of white fresh bread from a McKeown’s bakery near the place where the boy died of the German disease, sliced loaf, butter left out of the fridge so it could be spread, slathered over the thick slice, freshly cut and laid tomato slices, salt, lid of another slice of bread. Bob’s your uncle.  But this construction was made even better with the addition of a row of freshly made chips – chips freshly fried (typically on a Friday night) in an accident-waiting-to-happen stove-top chip pan.  Big fat salty chip and tomato sandwiches. Heaven.  But the potatoes had to be from Comber. Ideally new Comber potatoes. Comber is a town in Northern Ireland – a mill town – surrounded by potato fields. They are good potatoes, round and dirty. So Comber is the terroire, not the variety. 

Blackie was right. The Ailsa Craigs, when they finally managed to muster a blush of ripeness, were majestic tomatoes. If they featured on the shelves of M&S these days, they’d probably be called a heritage variety. They sometimes tended towards the hard. Even when ripe, when cut, they’d have a bi-coloured hue inside. They were hardy little tomato blighters, like the island after which they were named. They were nothing like the bland round Dutch things that by the mid-70s were flooding the supermarkets. 

The greenhouse spawned so many fruits. My Dad emerged from it all Summer with mounds of them in his cupped hands. Bowls filled with them in various sizes and states of ripeness were a feature of the Summers after the greenhouse came. Soon cucumbers and giant courgettes (that confused me) and peppers were added to the mix of Summer bounty. But the tomato always had pride of place.

And I suppose that’s why, more than any other reason, the tomato has a special place among vegetables produced by home gardeners. People strive to grow them in cold climes and frames because they are a homage to the sun. A home-grown tomato is a deferred pleasure. There’s the endless watering, the wrestling with pests, picking out rogue trusses that, unchecked, produce myriad marbles.  Then there’s the endless wait for the bloody things to ripen, and the admission that half-ripe will have to do - especially with a recipe for green tomato chutney to hand. 

Let’s go off on a tangent. Many years later my good friend, Larry, who’s half Mexican and lives in America, introduced me to the ultimate Huevos Rancheros – that bizarre breakfast concoction (that tastes utterly heavenly) of black beans, corn tortillas (and they must be corn), and fried eggs. The establishment he favoured was a hole-in-the wall hovel in a suburb of Washington DC where everything was served on paper plates. Admittedly, however, the ranch eggs were pretty good. But they were massively enhanced by the addition of green tomatillo sauce that was produced in-house by the establishment’s resident Madre. But it took me some time to realise why it was that I loved this addition of green sauce to fried eggs. It was because (it dawned on me several days later) that it reminded me of my Dad’s green tomato chutney. For weeks on end we’d douse the stuff all over everything. It was fabulous. Not quite as green as tamatillo sauce, or as runny. But it had that wonderful sweet tang that goes so brilliantly with a breakfast fry-up. And while we’re on the subject, I recently noticed that Irish potato farls (potato cakes) are uncannily like Corn Tortillas in terms of texture and blandness and work a treat in Huevos Rancheros when a bag of Masa flour is not to hand. 

Anyway, my familiarity with the Ailsa Craig instilled in me at a young age the importance of cutting out the wee woody bit at the top of a tomato. The pedicel, the bit of the tomato that is attached to the truss, is easy to remove, of course. But there’s the little, tough, fibrous bit at the top of the pedicarp where the fruit joins the plant. 

My preferred method for removing this is to cut a V-section at the top of the tomato. After preparing many millions of tomatoes over the years I now default to a mechanistic process (when making home-made Puttenesca or whatnot) of v-sectioning and having a chopping board strewn with crowds of v-sections ready for the bin. I’m not sure how natural this is or if anyone else does it. But it really upsets me when television chefs ignore the need to excise that bloody annoying and ugly bit from the tomato.  

The fact that these woody little bits are not removed from tomatoes in establishments that call themselves restaurants is an enduring mystery to me. Because, admit it, there’s nothing quite as annoying as getting a big woody bit of tomato in a café prepared salad sandwich.  And then there’s the disappointment, on being delivered a cooked breakfast, to find that both under-grilled tomato halves are truss-ends and have not been v-sectioned.  

And the myriad ways in which fresh tomatoes can be prepared – and called tomato salad – is astonishing. Over recent years the ‘heritage tomato salad’ has entered the fray.  Most people, I’d imagine, when pushed, could probably remember their worst and best tomato salads.  

My worst.  I was with my boss at the time who I think may now be dead (he was recovering from a massive cardiac arrest the last time I saw him about 15 years ago). We were meeting a client in a hotel in Drogheda, just over the border in the Irish Republic. This was many years ago and has stuck firmly in my head as a level 1 memory (the type of memory associated with trauma or wild ecstasy). 

We had agreed to meet the client for lunch. There was a set menu and one of the starter options was a tomato salad.  I ordered it. When it arrived, the conversation was in full flow. I wasn’t really involved in the business banter and, even if I had been, my attention was immediately drawn to what had been set in front of me. The small plate (starters were always, in those days, served on small plates) contained some slices of tomato that were obviously sliced several hours before and had dried-up.  The upper surface of the slices had taken on a white hue. I can’t remember what else was on the plate. Perhaps some boiled egg quarters and a few bedraggled capers. It was a thoroughly sorry sight. No sign of anything to squeeze, no dressing. My boss looked at it and winced and then we shared a sorrowful look. 

This is what a mis-treated tomato can do to a situation.  

And I also remember my best tomato salad. I was with my wife. She had been posted by her company to Paris for several months, literally weeks after we had married – this was back in the mid 1990s. I joined her most weekends in the city – flying over from London - and we enjoyed very long, leisurely meals as well as the use of a very sexy apartment just off the Avenue de la Grande Armée.  

The French aren’t especially good with tomatoes. The Spanish and Italians - and even the Greeks - do better things with them, typically. But we had, I think, a late lunch. I remember less about the circumstances than the salad. The restaurant wasn’t especially special, it may even have been a chain.  But they had a tomato salad on the menu. I ordered it. And it was a visual treat. The tomatoes had been sliced very thin, carpaccio style, and the slices layered 2 or 3 deep over the plate, right to the edge.  The thin slices had then been dressed with slivers of chopped fresh herbs: mint and basil. And the entire plate glistened with olive oil, freshly chopped garlic, red onion, lemon juice, and crunchy little cornichons. It was a veritable emperor of tomato salads. And while I’ve tried to recreate it, it’s very time-consuming. Try making 4 or 6 for a dinner party. It’s fiddly and stressful. The tomatoes get everywhere and attach themselves to work surfaces, welded for posterity.  

I may just have been lucky - perhaps the chef had been practising with his newly acquired Sabatier knife. I don’t know. It was a simple salad, yes. But it was intricate and slicing those tomatoes in that way and with that degree of attention to detail made it my most memorable tomato salad.  Admittedly the circumstances were right. It was Paris, after all. But that’s what makes Paris, well, Paris and Drogheda, Drogheda.  

My Dad occasionally had a go at using-up the tomato over-production during the Summer by throwing a few into ‘the stew’.  As a Northern Irish family stew featured heavily in the weekly meal repertoire. It was typically cooked in a pressure cooker – a device that was endlessly terrifying to me as a child. Ours featured a valve thing that rocked about, hissed and dribbled on the centre of the lid. Occasionally it would blow off and a giant fount of steam would hiss, ceiling high. Sometimes the valve blew right off and my mother, Peggy, could be found searching under the aged stove for the escaped valve – the kitchen filling with steam and pressure cooker spit.  

But it produced great stew. The stew of my formative years was typically composed mostly of potatoes, carrots and onions – with a few bits of cheap stewing steak that were rendered edible by pressure cooking. But, during the Summer, the stew featured more tomatoes. But it wasn’t right. Typically, only the skins – curled-up into elfin flutes - provided evidence that tomatoes had been added, plus the slightly orange-pink hue of the potatoes. Jo and I agreed that tomatoes had no real place in stew. 

Let’s face it. Tomatoes and potatoes have an uneasy relationship. Potatoes have that dense, starchy texture. Tomatoes are all watery, sweet and acid. They aren’t really meant for each other. As I write I am scanning my memory for a dish that features potatoes and tomato. Perhaps it’s a ratio thing. There needs to be a greater ratio of tomato to potato for them to work together. Although Bombay Potatoes rather disprove this theory. In fact, maybe it’s not a theory at all. A wobbly conjecture, more like. 

But in most cases, it’s just best not to bother with a tomato potato marriage. Except with the notable exception of the tomato and chip sandwich. In fact, with hindsight, I’m not even sure if that worked, really. 

That’s the thing. We get confused as we look back. Our memories are imperfect. We are served merely glimpses of our past. The detail goes just minutes after things happen. If the memory is good enough to form the basis of an anecdote over time it gets nuanced and permutated with each telling. With memory seeding memory. Sometimes (admit it) we even conflate memories and add baubles to them. It’s like the time I ‘met’ Mikhail Gorbachev.  Although that’s for a later chapter.  

After many years the source memory is a desiccated orange slice in the middle of the anecdote. It bears little resemblance to the big Tel Aviv orange that it started out as. Anecdotes become Christmas trees festooned with dried orange slices and various other food and non-food derived baubles.  

Food memories stay with us because we keep getting reminded, through food itself, of when we first tasted ingredients or where we were when we were served things a bit out of the ordinary: good or bad. It’s a bit like 9/11. We’ll never forget where we were when we heard. We’ll never forget when we first tasted avocado – probably because most of us won’t have liked it.  Food pulses through our lives and punches through our memories. For me salads were typically posh days when my Aunt Lily visited, and a special effort was made with rolled-up ham slices and lettuce leaves and cottage cheese. Coleslaw didn’t even feature, I seem to remember, until M&S started selling it.  When Joe introduced golden coloured tomatoes, it was a revelation and we weren’t sure about them, they seemed dodgy. They seemed downright wrong. Limes were impossibly exotic and impossible to find. I think I was about 16 before I saw a real one (although knew the taste through Roses’ Lime Cordial). 

Prawns were what other people ate and looked like pink grubs or baby penises. On Wednesdays my Dad bought cooked chicken. On Fridays we went for the big shop. And everything was fine and dandy. But that, of course, is never really the long game. Things, circumstances, chips on our shoulders, push through and interrupt what we think to be the norms of our lives. 

I, for example, was always, permanently, embarrassed about where I lived as a child, and the greenhouse was a salvation of sorts. It had a brick base. Meanwhile our house was made of tin. Or, rather, aluminium. It was a post-War prefab, designed to house the masses on a temporary basis but stayed for the duration. The greenhouse, when it arrived, gave our back garden an air of respectability, of arrival, of prosperity and permanence, with its brick base and shiny glass – even if, ironically, it too was made of aluminium. 

Perhaps that’s why Ailsa Craig tomatoes represented more than simply Joe’s horticultural experimentation. They were emblematic of joining the mainstream, a place where houses weren’t prefabs and had greenhouses and where people gardened as a hobby and watched Percy Thrower on Gardener’s World and wore green wellies instead of black ones from the Wednesday market. 

To add to my insecurities, and status anxiety, I passed my 11+ tests and was admitted to one of the two local grammar schools in town. My entry was assured as a result of my parents paying for the services of a tutor. They weren’t wealthy parents, so the cost of the tutor was probably quite a dent in their income. When my tutor was tutoring me he served rich tea biscuits during our ‘break’ with orange dilute cordial. That was wrong. Terribly wrong. Orange cordial and rich tea biscuits were never meant together, hence the name.  

But my arrival at Grammar school made me more aware of other people’s houses and our comparative wealth, or lack of it. 

The greenhouse arrived some time during that first year after I started at Grammar school. Our gardens, front and back, were meticulously tended by Joe, and I helped mow the lawns at the rear, with an ancient Atco mower, mowing round the apple trees with the inedible apples (they weren’t grafted, apparently and were grown from seed, hence the terrible taste – according to Joe). But they were decorative. In my later years at school, I’d walk around them in circles to help me learn my Latin conjugations, Shakespeare quotes or algebra solutions.  And the greenhouse was the jewel. The tomato plants stood tall, burdened with green fruit ready to be turned into green tomato chutney.