Tomato

Don’t let the lengthy ingredient list scare you away. It’s really not as bad as it looks. Even my brother, Bubba, can make it. On a cold winter’s day it will make your tongue want to slap your brains out! This recipe serves two or three dozen people, but can easily be cut in half. It keeps for up to five days in the refrigerator or two months in the freezer.

An intensely flavored, full-bodied sauce that’s good on a variety of dishes, this one will keep for up to one week in the refrigerator. Use ripe local tomatoes and basil for best results.

This classic sandwich relies on good ripe tomatoes, thickly sliced bacon, and top-quality crusty bread. Although you might normally shun iceberg lettuce, this is one instance where its crunchiness is welcome. Feel free, of course, to substitute another lettuce such as romaine.

Made in summer at the height of tomato season, this scramble is wonderful with fresh mozzarella or burrata, a delicious, buttery-textured Italian cheese. It’s important not to overcook the tomatoes or the basil, which will keep its bright green color when added toward the end.

This late-summer indulgence showcases a harvest of vegetables abundant from August until the end of September. Although you can buy these ingredients year-round, this frittata is at its best when made with ripe in-season produce. This recipe can be doubled, but don’t try to make more than two frittatas at a time or you’ll end up with runny, undercooked eggs. This is delicious accompanied by garlic toast. Serve with Potato Pancakes (page 213).

A marrow for supper will generally coincide with the leaves turning on the trees, the first early morning mists, new school uniform. Their bulk and their bargain-basement price ensure that they will make a cheap supper. For this, we love them. This filling—earthy, sloppy, and much nicer than ground meat—is good for pumpkin too.

2008 saw not only my usual terra-cotta pots of Striato d’Italia on the back steps but also a trailing variety known as Caserta, a pale fruit the color of mint ice cream, with darker stripes. The light-skinned varieties such as Clarion, Di Faenza, and the almost ivory Lebanese White Bush look particularly delicate and summery when sautéed in butter and olive oil with a handful of herbs thrown in at the last moment, the scent of late summer hitting you as you spoon over the pan juices. Perhaps that should be swoon. Squashes of every variety love a tomato. Occasionally you could argue they need it too. Late last summer, just as the beans were forming on the poles in the vegetable beds, I made a last-minute, rough-edged supper with little more than a few zucchini and a couple of tomatoes. It was done in fifteen minutes flat. There are many who would insist on skinning and seeding the tomatoes for this, but not only do I think it unnecessary here, it also means missing out on all their rich juices and scrunchy seeds.

There is a small but distinguished group of seafood and tomato dishes, from the Provençal soups with their croûtes and brick-red rouille to Portuguese soup-stews reeking of garlic. With those dishes as a starting point, I spent some time working on a soup of tomato and crab. After making several versions that were too thick and rich, I took the step of bringing chile and lemongrass into the proceedings to add a breath of freshness and vitality. This is a bright-tasting soup that sings with the sweet heat of chile and crustacean. To add enough substance to treat it as a main dish (when this recipe will serve 3 or 4), I introduce a last-minute addition of bean shoots or maybe some shredded, very lightly cooked snow peas.

This colorful, big-flavored tomato salad is something you could eat alongside rose-pink cold roast beef, but it could easily make a more substantial candidate for a main course with the addition of a few croutons or some slices of olive oil–drenched toast. The colors are important here if the salad is to look lively—I usually use a mixture of tomatoes, including little peardrop ones and yellow cherry tomatoes. I think it is worth adding that this is also good with cilantro instead of basil.

How a dish smells is important. It whets the appetite, brings us to the table, and opens up a host of pleasures. With coconut, cardamom, and coriander, this simple dish of baked tomatoes is heady and aromatic. It curdles a bit, but no matter. You will need some rice or bread to go with it. Creamed coconut, a block of pure dried coconut, is available at Asian markets and online.

Most Asian markets carry Japanese nanami togarashi seasoning. It is a mixture of ground chile, orange peel, spices, and sesame seeds. For this beef salad, it is simply a question of rolling the beef in the seasoning and searing it quickly in a heavy pan. The beef is barely cooked and is eaten thinly sliced, like carpaccio. There will be some left over for tomorrow. I cannot think of a better accompaniment for it than a simple tomato salad.

A good savory little number this, fantastic with all manner of roasts and grilled foods but equally worth making as a side dish for cool, almost liquid mozzarella or a bowl of basmati rice flecked with torn herbs.

Beef and tomatoes have enjoyed a long history together. Whether it’s tomato ketchup on your burger or tomato paste in your beef casserole, the two have an established friendship. Winter tomatoes—why do we buy them?—can add a surprising depth to gravy if they are roasted alongside the Sunday beef. I chuck them in with the onions and bay leaves that provide the background music for the gravy. The tomatoes sharpen up in the searing heat, their skin catches and burns, and they add a certain piquancy to the sweet onion and caked-on roasting juices. The winter tomato has at last found a point. You may well want some roast potatoes to go with this. I usually boil them first for ten minutes, then drain and add to the roasting tin.