Marinated + confit tomatoes 🍅

An ode to the last of the summer sweetness

There’s a farm shop just past Perranuthnoe on the road towards Helston. I’ve driven this road back and forth countless times and only half noticed the sign that reads Trevalyan on the left hand side as you’re driving out of Penzance. My friend Sarah asked if I’d been and I said no (sometimes newness scares me, or I’m worried I’ll say something wrong) but it was on the way to a dinner I was cooking for 10 friends last Friday and so I pulled into the lay-by. I parked next to a reddish-brown shack not too dissimilar to the state of The Shed, and a well worn sign telling me what to expect.

A glut of produce lay under low lighting as you walk onto the deck. The undulating curves of broad beans and bunches of rainbow-stemmed chard; soil-tipped carrots and voluptuous bulbs of fennel. And when you walk into the warm glow of the shop, big sacks of potatoes to your left and crates of sunset-hued tomatoes to your right. I hadn’t planned on cooking tomatoes that night. But the colours were so inviting: little cherry ones in pale yellow, orange and purple-tinged red. Big heirloom ones with gentle ridges and long-drop ones that looked perfect for a sauce. I grabbed them by the handful, some of the juice spilling onto my fingers. Soon two bags were full. Confit tomatoes. With ripe nectarines added in once cooled, and a whole block of crumbled feta and lots of fresh herbs. I came back a few days later and the same woman at the counter asked how my dinner went and I said, great, the potatoes you told me to get (rusty dusty red aloutte ones) were perfect, and those tomatoes tasted like nectar. I grabbed another bag because there were two pasta sauces to be made and a marinated tomato dish that I didn’t yet know I wanted, which would go perfectly with the figs that I had squished with pleasure and placed in my basket a few moments before.

Grown right there on the farm, these tomatoes tasted like the end of summer. As if all the good parts and feeling of fleeting hot flashes were captured inside their delicate skins. I can’t think of tomatoes without thinking of this quote from Sweetbitter. It reminds me to appreciate when we’re given the exact right thing at the exact right time.

“So – some tomatoes tasted like water, and some tasted like summer lightning.”

Confit-ish Tomatoes