Tomato leaves, baked beans, Joel Fleishman and a seriously good tomatoes on toast

Abundance: Wednesday 28 August 2024

Of the many impossibilities of life, as unfathomable to me as any is that all the architecture of growth, the instruction of form and colour and flavour and scent can all be held in a single tiny tomato seed. In that tiny nugget - a 4B full stop - lies everything I see before me, including the scent that will cling to my fingers for the afternoon.

My senses never tire of the scent of tomato leaves. I might, might, just grow tomatoes for that smell even if they didn’t fruit. It is one of the sweetest rewards - one of the great incentives - for growing some of what you eat. It occurs to me that the majority of people on this island have no idea what tomato leaves smell like. Why would they. It is up there with never having seen Northern Exposure, read Hamnet or eaten Honey&Co’s incredible cheesecake for breakfast pudding.

If you are similarly deprived, the almost impossible task of orientating to the tomato leaf smell from other scents reads something like: bright, herbaceous and ‘green’ - there’s something of the smell of fresh cut grass about it - with a hint of hay’s muskiness, freshly cut hardwood, a touch of cucumber skin, the interior of green apple, and - perhaps most weirdly - quite a bit of baked bean juice about it.

I wondered if that tomato leaf scent might be captured for a little longer than on my fingers. I have a few side branches sat in a bottle of vodka, the logic being that perhaps a Bloody Mary of sorts or a heresy of a martini might result. I shall report back if it’s good; you’ll never hear of this again if not.

Pesto is the elephant in the room. I would not be the only numpty to unimaginatively throw garlic, good oil, lemon juice, Parmesan and nuts at a green leaf in the hope of civilising it into something bearable. Carrot top pesto¹ is the very definition of the crucial line between edible and delicious.

So I took an incremental approach, making and tasting the pesto in stages. It led me to three very distinct, very delicious winners.

Let me say straight up, as flavoursome as the sauces are, the scent of the leaves doesn’t quite translate wholly, but it is there like a favourite song leaking out of the small window of a neighbour’s house, bringing pleasure. In the sauce it gives the impression of exaggerating the olive oil’s flavour, in the pistou it makes the tomatoes taste even more of themselves, and in the pesto - against the blandness of pasta - you pick it up as if you’d scratched your nose four hours after rubbing the leaves.

Below, more words and a recipe for Tomato leaf sauce, pistou and pesto