The Heirloom Tomato Cookbook
Cultivating
and Cooking a Rainbow of Fruit
by Mimi Luebbermann
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.
Reviewed
by Rachel Levin
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