Tomatoes, happy heartbreak, Bowie and tomato and rosemary soup
Abundance: Monday 9 September 2024
Everything is still. There will be no Paper Machete cutting through the morning, no Dreams filling the air ahead of a cloud of perfume following her down the stairs and out to wherever.
The first day of nursery, it hit me that we are always letting them go, in mostly invisible increments, and I imagined today. No-one writes songs about your child flying the nest1 but they should. It is perfectly brilliant and entirely awful. I couldn’t be more happily heartbroken.
We return to an empty house and all I can think is that there is no point cooking; that I can’t imagine just us being worth the effort of cooking again. In a wave like hangover guilts, I resent every single moment of these last 18 years, 10 months and 26 days where I have been elsewhere. In the rain, I fold away her sun lounger into the garage and wonder how my autumnal self will get by without her daily summer.
We get up and walk, despite the rain. We walk up the hill, through woods, out on to the cliff where the view is almost too short to see the sea in the rain and mist. One of us stops to cry invisible tears.
Along the seafront we stop for coffee and yoghurt-frosted flapjack like it’s 1998. The sea is completely in and almost completely still, like grey/green linen. The lack of swish on the stones, never mind crash on the rocks, is eerie: it reminds me of that first football match, on the terraces at Turf Moor - 10 years old and colder than I’ve ever been - taking 15 minutes to realise that the unsettling feeling is the lack of commentary I’d become so used to from the telly. I hadn’t realised there are no replays.
We follow the river towards its source and talk about everything and nothing. The last of the Costoluto fiorentino tomatoes need picking, my wife says, maybe I’ll make soup. Somehow I make the soup: I think she knows what I don’t, that something slow to do is exactly what I need.
She picks the tomatoes that she’s cared for all year; I turn the oven on. A random prickly wave rises, the air is too much in my chest, my eyelids too heavy, the kitchen top takes my weight and everything stops for a minute. And then it carries on. As luck would have it, there are just the right number of tomatoes for the roasting tray.
A text: it is all amazing. Everything lifts. This morning, the sun is out, house martins draw erratic lines across the sky ahead of their migration.
In three weeks, five weeks, two months or 3 days she will be back with her appetite and trail of detritus. Clothes will once again litter the floor as if shot from the sky. There will be a new rhythm, a new season. It might take a day or two to get used to the absence of her constant sunshine, to not pick her up a takeaway brownie from the cafe we love most, but it’s time to turn and face the strange. It is all absolutely as it should be, and there is soup for lunch.
Tomato and rosemary soup
If ever two people made a soup, this is it, and if ever a soup sang loud of the end of summer, here it is.
Not only does it taste so completely of the essence of tomatoes - like childhood sickbed Heinz Cream of Tomato Soup (with its tomato soup moustache) does in your memory rather than how it does in reality - it is also the easiest, with everything cooked in the oven. I used ginger rosemary, but regular rosemary will be differently excellent.
For something more of a main course, warm the soup with a few spoonfuls of butter beans or white beans, add croutons, and Parmesan is most definitely your friend here.
Makes 2 litres - serves 6-8
1.8kg largish tomatoes
4 cloves garlic, cut into the same number of slices as there are tomatoes
8” rosemary, leaves shredded from the stem
2 leeks
Salt
Pepper
Olive oil
Double cream
Basil, thinly shredded
Wrap the leeks in foil and place them in the top of the oven set to 190°C.
Core the tomatoes with a short-bladed knife, using the thumb of your knife hand to prevent you cutting (the tomatoes or yourself) too deeply. Place them in a roasting tray, push in a sliver of garlic, a clutch of rosemary leaves and half fill each core hole with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and place in the middle of the oven.
Check the tomatoes after 30 minutes or so: you want them softened but not collapsing, and before the skin has blackened. Allow to cool a little. Remove and discard the rosemary leaves.
Check the leeks - they are done when they take a sharp blade with no resistance: they may need longer depending on their size. Tip the leeks into a colander and allow cold water to run over them just enough to cool them to handle. Strip off the outer layer and the base.
Place a leek plus however much of the tomatoes your blender can comfortably take. Blend on high until smooth, repeating in batches until all is blended. Taste and season well.
Pour into a pan and bring slowly to a hint of a simmer, then ladle into bowls, swirl with a little double cream and olive oil and sprinkle with basil.
other than in unhappy circumstances, like She’s Leaving Home
It's going to turn out fine, Mark. We've sent five kids out into the world and it's wonderful to see how they grow into this new stage of adulthood. I love having adult kids; it's the best stage imo.
I used to wonder if there was something wrong with me because I wasn't sad to see them leave home; I found it exciting. But I understand why a lot of parents find it so hard.
Beautifully said. But trust me in a few days when you have a hankering for that little bit of leftover soup you will be happily surprised it’s still in the fridge, as with so many other goodies that would normally go mia. Or maybe that’s only with teenaged boys??🍅