The Heirloom Tomato Cookbook
Cultivating and Cooking a Rainbow of Fruit
by Mimi Luebbermann

Reviewed by Rachel Levin

Heirloom tomatoes are almost immoderate in their beauty. Like carnival queens, they flaunt bold colors—green, rust, tangerine, purple and pink—and wild shapes. Compared to the fragrant, juicy heirlooms, commercial hybrid tomatoes (your ordinary red grocery store variety) are only one step above wax fruit in flavor and texture. The Heirloom Tomato Cookbook introduces readers to heirlooms not just as colorful cooking novelties, but as representatives of tomato history. In the race to cultivate disease-resistant tomatoes, American farmers nearly lost a slice of the past. Only twenty years ago did they begin to search for European varieties and old-fashioned American varieties from hidden-away home gardens. The book includes a primer on choosing and cultivating notable discoveries such as Green Zebra, Cherokee Purple, Black Brandywine and yellow Pineapple.

More than a thousand heirloom varieties are grown in the gardens of the Kendall-Jackson Wine Center in Santa Rosa, Calif., the site of the annual Heirloom Tomato Festival held every September. The fall harvest inspires Northern California’s top chefs and food artisans to pay tribute to the fruit with inventive preparations, which are in turn reproduced and adapted for this book. For starters, there are recipes for bruschetta five ways, BLT salad with buttermilk dressing and cold golden tomato soup with Sharlyn melon and basil essence. Savory dishes include heirloom tomato bread pudding and ricotta gnocchi with heirloom tomatoes and basil. The sweet recipes, though, are the most unusual: think heirloom tomato sorbet or roasted cherry tomato and cinnamon-basil ice cream. Each dish is also accompanied by a recommended wine pairing. No matter which preparations you choose, when you invite heirlooms into your recipes, get ready for a carnival on your palate.

Visit our Bookstore
Visit the Cookbook Corner for additional reviews