Some people think that the only tomato worth eating is the one you’ve grown yourself but this isn’t actually true. I can think of loads of tomatoes – eg the cherry ones grown at the foot of Mt Etna and sold at I Camisa in Old Compton Street, Soho – that are much nicer than most people’s rubbishy, watery, tasteless home grown ones. With home grown tomatoes there’s only one thing that really matters: they have to be the yellow-skinned cherry type called Sungold. Every other variety sucks.
Gardeners Delight? Sucks. Moneymaker? Sucks. That authentic Italian-style, mutant-shaped gigantic tomato variety you bought in order to recreate the ones you buy at the market every day near that wonderful estate you and your mates rent in Tuscany every year for only £14,000 a week? It sucks too because it needs Italian sun to grow into something that tastes of anything, not watery English sun. Not even post-global-warming English sun because it still isn’t warm enough.
Why am I ranting in this vein? Because I’ve just tried all the garden centres in my neighbourhood and not one of them stocked Sungold plants. (And obviously it’s too late for me to grow them from seed now) “Fungal tomato plants?” said one. “Never heard of them,” said another. This is why I so loathe garden centres – as opposed to proper nurseries. There’s no real love or understanding for horticulture there. They’re just ruddy supermarkets. But I also think it reflects badly on the British public. It’s not, after all, as if it’s some amazingly recherche connoisseur’s secret that Sungold taste better than any other variety. Could it be that, despite the gastronomic revolution which has supposedly rocked our nation in the last two decades, watery, mildly acidic, cotton-woolly, 1970s-village-greengrocer-style blandness remains the quality that the British consumer still most craves in his tomato?
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