(Tomatoes)
'Help,
tomatoes' was the name of a piece that I wrote more than ten years
ago, when I was discovering Greek food. It seemed that all you ate
was 'infected' with tomatoes. After all these years of eating Greek
food, I have to confess that I too have become a tomato-junkie. So
imagine when last week I went to the grocery store and I found only
empty boxes: “Where are the tomatoes?!”, I screamed in panic.
A
few weeks ago the Greeks had taken all the watermelons to the beach
and the mountains of juicy green whoppers had totally disappeared.
Then I congratulated the greengrocer for doing such good business.
Now that the piles of watermelons are back, the boxes with tomatoes
are empty. I threw the grocer an aghast look and said: “It's not
possible to have a grocery store without tomatoes!”
Tomatoes
rank 4th
on the list of most beloved vegetables in the world (although they
really are fruit). Mediterranean and Arabic countries eat the most,
Greeks and Libyans being the people eating the largest amount of
tomatoes. In Greece fish, meat, vegetables and pasta swim in tomato
sauce, and there is the famous village salad; you will find a
decorating slice here, another slice there, a vodka here, a glass of
juice there and before you know you it, you are at your limit: more
than 100 kg a year. While I would have thought that the pizza and
spaghetti country Italy would be at top: there will be no pizza nor
pasta without tomatoes.
It
is unbelievable that this pretty red fruit, within one and a half
centuries, has taken over a whole kitchen. Greeks were – and still
are – pretty conservative with what they throw in their cooking
pots. When at the beginning of the 19th
century the first elegant tomato plants were introduced to the Greek
gardens of monasteries and of wealthy people, no one dared to take
the fruit to his mouth, because the plant belonged to the lethal
belladonna family.
But
the first cookbook appearing in the Greek language (translated from
Italian and published in 1827 on the island Syros) already had two
recipes with tomatoes (then still called pomme
d'oro, golden
apple): fried and halved golden apples stuffed with pieces of liver
and a hand full of herbs (that really sounds yummy) and butter-baked
eggs in a sauce of golden apples, onions, sardines, basil, parsley
and fish sauce. But I guess in those times housewives, even if they
could read, didn't use cookbooks (rather they referred to their
mothers). It was only when in the South of Italy the tomato got
married to pasta - in the middle of the 19th
century - that tomato sauce slowly streamed into Greece, to really
settle here at the beginning of the 20th century.
It
is unbelievable that Holland dares to produce tomatoes: they are
round and red, yes, they even resemble the golden apples, but they
contain no sun, so no taste. Even though tomatoes consist for the
most part of water, it is the 5 to 7% solid meat that makes the taste
with more than 400 different aromatic materials, and all those love
the sun, that is why the mediterranean tomatoes taste so divine. A
tomato should taste sweet in the middle and a little sour near the
skin. In Peru, the cradle of the tomato, they even thought the fruit
had aphrodisiac powers. Maybe that is why those Greek summers are so
hot, slow and long. Because all their food is spiced not only with
salt, pepper and olive oil but also with this sexy fruit.
The
beginning of the season had a good start thanks to the warm spring:
so, excellent sweet tomatoes. Taking them in the hand you could feel
they were firm and not too hard. Cutting them the juice immediately
ran. A slice of such a tomato with just a bit of salt, pepper and
olive oil conjured up paradise: Eve must have picked a golden apple
from the tree. So I intended to make a winter stock for the freezer,
cooking pure tomato sauce without any herbs and I will also dry some
of them. But first I had to cook a great dinner for some friends.
With my head full of ideas for tomato dishes I arrived at the grocery
store. My plans evaporated as soon as I saw those empty boxes. I
mean, of course you can make one dish without tomatoes, but a whole
Greek dinner? Totally disillusioned I went home with an empty
shopping bag, thinking so frantically about Greek dishes without
those red rascals that a headache came up and I finally cancelled the
dinner without tomatoes.
The
next day there were just a few tomatoes in the still mostly empty
boxes. I bought them all because I had heard through the grapevine
that an illness had killed all the tomatoes on the island. There may
be just a few tourists, but when there are no tomatoes on the fields,
I will not be the only cook in trouble: how else can a Greek consume
his average of one and a half times his weight in tomatoes.
Now
the boxes are refilled with tomatoes. The rumour about this
tomato-illness has not been confirmed. People do say so many stupid
things. If you were to say that the refugees secretly come over at
night from Turkey to steal our tomatoes, all the villagers will
believe you. But it's really the tourists who have picked up the
tomato-battle with the Greeks: they try to eat twice as much as their
average weight. Because yes, there are 'some' tourists, and the happy
few who are here, fully enjoy the island, sun and sea and they eat
all our tomatoes!
(with
thanks to Mary Staples)
©
Smitaki 2016
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