Tomato is not just a tomato. According to estimates, there are around 10,000 tomato varieties in the world. Large and small, round and ovoid, yellow, red, striped. Roma tomatoes. beefsteak tomatoes. cherry tomatoes. Tomatoes are diverse and are therefore part of the basic equipment of a well-stocked kitchen – fresh, canned or as tomato paste. For the British chef and best-selling author Claire Thomson, the all-rounders are among the top 3 ingredients alongside olive oil and lemons. Without them, she writes, she cannot live. With “To Mate: 80 recipes celebrate the tomato” she presents a love letter to the tomato.
She worked on the recipes for her book for six months. It was a tomato-rich time. She has “a whopping 75kg of fresh tomatoes from the Isle of Wight (where I am in contact with tomato growers) plus tomatoes from my local greengrocer plus those from my stepfather’s greenhouse plus almost 100 canned tomatoes and a crate of tomato paste ( that’s 25 tubes used up”. She is not alone with her tomato love. 27 kilograms of tomatoes are consumed per capita in Germany every year, far more than is produced in the country. In the entire EU, just 103,000 tons were produced in 2018. For comparison: the main tomato producer China came up with 62 million tons.
Tomatoes: an unexpected success story
In recent centuries, the tomato has written a success story that was initially unexpected. The fruit originally comes from South and Central America, where advanced cultures such as the Maya and the Aztecs cultivated it. The fact that she made the leap across the sea to Europe is attributed to the discoverer Christopher Columbus and the conqueror Hernán Cortés. They are said to have brought tomato plants to Europe in the 16th century, where they were initially only cultivated as an ornamental plant and not as a crop. They were thought to be poisonous. Today, the apples of paradise, as tomatoes are also called, are very popular all over the world.
“Only a handful of products offer four of the five flavor profiles at once—sweet, sour, bitter, and umami—and tomatoes are one of them,” Thomson writes in her book. The fifth component is salt, which tomatoes are known to “carry” wonderfully. “Tomatoes add depth to cooked dishes. They complement sauces, breaking down and thickening liquids, making them creamy and velvety,” she says. In her 80 easy-to-follow recipes, Thomson shows that tomatoes can be used for much more than salads or pasta sauces.
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