Time to Talk Tomato Tarts

Have we discussed tomatoes yet? What? We haven’t?

Well.

One summer many years ago, I stumbled upon a recipe for an heirloom tomato tart. I’d never attempted a tomato tart before, and at that time heirloom tomatoes weren’t nearly as plentiful and/or popular as they are now, but I knew I wanted to try it because I saw that the recipe called for cornmeal in the crust.  Though I’d never been told or taught that tomatoes and cornmeal are an excellent combination, I remembered (still remember, in fact) a salad I’d had at a restaurant long ago that consisted of balsamic-dressed greens topped with cornmeal crusted roasted tomatoes and a bit of goat cheese. Of all the restaurant meals I’ve had, that one stands out as one of the simplest and best flavor combinations. So when I saw the recipe for the tomato tart, I thought I might be able to reimagine that long-ago salad. It was still early days for me, baking-wise, and I was so nervous around pastry dough that I followed recipes to the letter. I spent a small fortune on heirloom tomatoes (see: they weren’t yet popular) and got to work.

The crust (containing flour, cornmeal, olive oil, butter, and salt) was quite sturdy (probably sturdier than it needed to be because I’d made it a bit thick), but it needed some heft to stand up to the sweet delicious juiciness of the tomatoes. As for the other ingredients? Fresh thyme, black olives, and, yes, goat cheese to finish. Very simple, fairly rustic, and…really delicious.

It was August and quite warm. My kitchen and dining room are west-facing so suppertime can get quite hot. Despite the salad (dressed with balsamic, naturally) and the cool drinks, that tart was hot. It goes in and out of the oven a few times, heating up the kitchen even more, and seems to retain its warmth for quite a while after it’s done.

Actually, I might be wrong about that. As I think back on it now, we may have gotten so heated up because we ate the thing so fast. G—my enabler and cake/tart muse—loved it. He loved it so much he ate most of it and then bought me a bigger tart pan so that the next time I made it, there would be more and maybe even leftovers for lunch the next day. He asked me to make it again the following weekend. So I did. And then again the weekend after that. And then…well, you get the picture. I made that tart every week for eight weeks—as long as the heirloom tomatoes lasted. Each time I made it, G (who happily volunteered to be sous chef and salt the tomatoes and do the arduous work of picking a tablespoon of thyme leaves off the sticks) would wonder; Can it be as good as it was the last time?

“I admit,” he said, “I get a little scared. What if it’s not like I remember it? What if the thrill is gone? And it never is.”

But after eight weeks running, the thrill was kind of gone for me. I think I’ve mentioned that I have something of an allergy to routine and doing the same thing twice and as good as this tart was, I was dead bored with it. Not so poor G.

So I began experimenting with other tomato tarts. I tried a rustic cherry tomato tart with bocconcini and ricotta, a truly excellent slow roasted tomato tart also with ricotta and parmesan, and another cherry tomato and goat cheese tart on puff pastry. These were all good in different ways—the bocconcini/cherry tomato tart was very hearty, the slow roasted tomato tart had a depth and richness of flavor that was hypnotically good, and the puff pastry tart was easy and fairly light. But as delicious as they were, none of these tomato tarts could hold up to the original in G’s eyes.

“Mm, good, honey,” he’d say. “But, you know, it’s not… We haven’t had that one for a while. When might it be coming back?”

I’d really burned out on the original, I have to say so it seemed as if we were at an impasse until I discovered a variation on that original that was, truly, just as good. Slightly easier to make, this heirloom tomato tart is loaded with Parmesan cheese, both in the crust and under the tomatoes. Combined with the butter and cornmeal in the crust, this gives the tart a crispy, cheesy, deliriously tasty flavor. Instead of thyme, this tart uses julienned fresh basil and that’s it—just tomatoes, basil, and that fabulous crust. Even G, as attached as he was to The Original, had to admit that this tomato tart was just as good. So good, in fact, that it was the go-to tomato tart for years to come.

Recently, for old times’ sake, I made G the original tart he’d loved so much. Again, he was nervous. And again he was relieved. He ate two-thirds of it by himself.

The heirloom tomatoes were looking pretty good at Trader Joe’s yesterday so I bought a few pounds and will be putting them to use tomorrow. I’m going to make the Parmesan tomato tart this time, though, because I am also making that Orange Creamsicle cake and it’s quicker and easier than the other. I’ll also be making a balsamic reduction to drizzle over the tart because…if you’ve ever had it I don’t have to tell you, and if you haven’t, it is sublime. If you’re thinking—hey, that sounds good, I wonder how she makes it, here’s a video, made by my insanely talented friend Matt Giraud as an addition to the book trailer he made for my novel, The Neighbors Are Watching.

The Neighbors Are Baking; Tomato Tart Tutorial

(My hair is different now but the rest is much the same.)

I’ll also leave you with the recipe because why not—you know you want it. 

Enjoy. 

The Original Tomato Tart

Heirloom Tomato Tart

(serves one 9-inch tart; for a 13-inch tart, increase ingredients by 1/2)

Ingredients

Crust:

1/2 cup flour

1/2 cup cornmeal

1/2 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/4 teaspoon fresh ground pepper

1/2 cup cold butter, cut into cubes

2-4 tablespoons ice water 

Filling:

1 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

1 1/2 - 2 lbs.  heirloom tomatoes (sliced 1/4 inch thick)

salt

extra virgin olive oil to drizzle

fresh ground pepper

5-6 fresh basil leaves, julienned

Directions:

1. Combine flour, cornmeal, Parmesan, salt, and pepper in a bowl and whisk to blend

2. Cut in butter, using fork, fingers, or pastry blender until the flour forms small pea-sized pieces

3. Add 2 tablespoons ice water and mix gently. Add more water, 1 tablespoon at a time, until the dough just holds together. Do not overwork the dough.

4. Form the dough into a flat disk, wrap in plastic, and let chill in the fridge for at least 1 hour and up to 24 hours

5. Roll the chilled dough between two sheets of plastic wrap or wax paper to make a 10-11 inch circle. Carefully ease dough into tart pan, pushing up the sides and trimming excess dough from the sides. Chill in the fridge for another 30 minutes

6. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees

7. Blind bake the crust: Line chilled tart with parchment paper (do not use foil) and pie weights or beans and bake for 20 minutes

8. Prepare the filling: Line a baking sheet or other clean surface with paper towels. Place tomatoes on the towels and sprinkle liberally with salt. Turn the tomatoes over and repeat on the other side. Let tomatoes drain for 20 minutes

9. When the crust is finished blind baking, remove parchment paper and weights and sprinkle the warm crust with Parmesan cheese

10. Arrange tomatoes in a pretty pattern over the top

11. Drizzle with olive oil

12. Sprinkle with julienned basil leaves and fresh ground pepper

13. Return to the oven and bake for another 20-25 minutes; until the crust is golden brown and tomatoes are soft

14. Serve warm or at room temperature

A Few Words About a Few Words

Please note: I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because even the grammar police need oversight.

Caution: This post will not be about cake.

I’ll be back to cake soon enough (tomorrow’s the summer solstice so I may bring back the Stonehenge cake and then there’s Sunday when, for no reason at all, I plan to make an Orange Creamsicle cake or maybe a cherry pie, we’ll see; it’s been an entire week without cake here), but today I want to offer a writing tip or two of the nuts-and-bolts variety, which is to say things like grammar, spelling, punctuation…

I know what you’re thinking…why? Well, because it matters.

I’ve been doing a great deal of editing lately and am gearing up for much more. It’s going to be a busy summer, which is always good news when one wants to continue eating (foodstuffs other than cake). But it also means that I have been noticing the same kinds of common…well, let’s not call them errors, let’s call them writing tics. Many of these can be corrected with judicious copyediting (and I am here to tell you that everyone needs a copyeditor—one can learn a great deal about oneself this way; for example, that one relies too much on em dashes, commas, and parenthetical statements), but some are a bit more subtle, which is to say they straddle the line between form and style. In other words, it may not be technically wrong but it just doesn’t read well. One of the most pernicious of these tics is dialogue attribution. In other words, how you say someone says something. (Yes, I am aware that this is a horrible sentence.)

My feeling is that many bad writing habits were formed in school (I can’t tell you how long I quaked in fear every time I began a sentence with a conjunction, ended one with a preposition, or split an infinitive) and once they settle in, it really is difficult to shed them. Notice I used “difficult” in the previous sentence, not “hard.” Why? Because I had an English teacher long ago who was obsessed with my never using the word “hard” when I meant “difficult.” Why? Who knows? But it took decades for me to get over this mandate.  We are also taught to try to make sentences interesting by putting lots of vocabulary words in them and, for some reason still unknown to me, to attribute dialogue with as many different verbs as possible.

Which is why we end up with sentences like this:

“I would rather not go to the movies,” she shared.

“That’s fine,” he exhorted, “we can stay home.”

“Okay,” she guffawed, “I appreciate that.”

What?

Please, no.

If there is one piece of advice I can give you—from the standpoint of writer, editor, and especially reader, it is this: Just say “said.”

I know it feels weird, especially if you are using a lot of dialogue in your writing (I also had a writing teacher tell me never to use “a lot,” by the way and I’ll be honest, it hurt a little bit just now to use it), to write “he said,” “she said,” over and over again, but it really is the best way to go about attributing dialogue. The beauty of “said” is that it just disappears after a while. Rather than getting stuck on how characters are saying things, the reader will focus on what the character is saying, which is what you want when you’re writing dialogue. If you want to describe how a character is saying something, do it. But not with the dialogue attribution. In between your lines of dialogue, mention that the characters are getting angry or calming down or looking shifty or lowering their voices or enunciating their words very carefully. This gives the reader a much better insight into the character than trying to work out how s/he is exhorting something. There are a few exceptions, of course. Sometimes characters shout, sometimes they answer, and sometimes they ask. But mostly they say things. And if they don’t, they should.

Right. Back to cake. And, next time perhaps, fragments.

She said.

Alice's Cake

Soon her eye fell on a little glass box that was lying under the table; she opened it, and found in it a very small cake, on which the words “EAT ME” were beautifully marked in currants. “Well, I’ll eat it,” said Alice, “and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if it makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I’ll get into the garden, and I don’t care which happens!”

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself “Which way? Which way?” holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing; and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size. To be sure, this is what generally happens when one eats cake; but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

So she set to work, and very soon finished off the cake.

—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

I recently finished a wonderful book; Cake: A Global History by Nicola Humble. It’s way too short and I finished it way too quickly, even with stopping to study every beautiful illustration and reading e x t r a  s l o w l y. I’m a fast reader anyway and when it’s a book I’m really enjoying or a guilty pleasure (hello, rock and roll bios) I have to force myself from devouring the thing in a single sitting. I’ve been like this since I started reading (not that I remember a time when I couldn’t) and freely admit I have no self-control when it comes to those extra-delicious and inviting books. It was a habit that especially annoyed my mother when I was a teenager. I have not been blessed with the ability to sleep anywhere (airplanes, for example) but I can read anywhere, provided the book is good enough, and completely drown out the world around me. This used to irritate my mother no end when we were supposed to be having “family time.” For instance, when we took a five-day train trip across the country (much luggage and five of us kids, one of whom was barely a year old at the time) and I fell into whatever paperback it was I was fascinated with at the time and ignored everything else. At the end of some rope or other, my mother finally just snatched the book out of my hands and tore it in half, Incredible Hulk-style. Luckily, I had a back-up. Those get-lost-in-another-world books are farther and fewer between for me these days, unfortunately. On the other hand, reading is also my job now so some of the blush is off the rose.

But I digress.

What I was getting to was the chapter in Cake titled “Literary Cakes.” The choices here were interesting, I thought, and not necessarily ones I’d have chosen. She started of course with Proust’s eternal madeleines (even though madeleines aren’t really cakes and in any case he was talking about dissolved crumbs) and moved on to Miss Havisham’s petrified, moldy wedding cake in Great Expectations. (The quick bit of analysis there was consumed vs. not consumed, by the way.) To be honest, I’ve never liked Dickens (a sentiment that did not go over well in any of the English classes I’ve ever taken and I was an English major so that accounted for quite a few) though I really have tried. The only Dickens I have ever enjoyed, in fact, was Great Expectations and I never read it. Rather, it was read to me. I was in sixth or seventh grade (my family moved often and usually in the middle of the school year so some of the exact dates are lost to me now), in school in upstate New York and we got a long-term substitute to replace our regular teacher. The substitute was small, blonde, pretty, and from Georgia. She made a point, in fact, of telling us she was from Georgia and she had the slow, soft, honey buttered accent to prove it. She was mesmerizing. Miss Georgia decided to read Great Expectations to us out loud every day. No teacher before or after ever did such a thing. In my memory, she turned the classroom into a hot Southern afternoon just by reading. I was fascinated by the story but it was because of her delivery that it really captivated me. Miss Havisham’s dress, for example, was “yella” with age. Really, it was Dickens meets Margaret Mitchell. So that grotesque uneaten “weddin’ cake” really stuck in my imagination.

Humble runs through many other literary confections, covering Cranford, Emma, and Madame Bovary to name just a few, but the most compelling for me was her discussion of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This was the first real chapter book I ever read all the way through (somewhere between the ages of five and six) and, along with Through the Looking Glass, may still be my favorite. There is so much wonderful in these books that it is difficult to know where to begin or end—so I’ll just discuss the cake.

The little cake that Alice finds when she’s very small—the one that demands to be eaten—has always had a special place in my memory. When I was young, the story had a very vivid and literal appeal. I was, myself, very small and the thought of eating something that would make me grow to a reasonable size was very appealing. I’d not yet learned that cake could make you “pudgy,” so there was still delight and guiltlessness in eating sweet things. Alice was trying to get into the garden—and I loved to play in the garden. As a proper English girl, I had all sorts of mossy, fairy-inhabited gardens at my disposal. But it didn’t take long for the story to take on all kinds of metaphoric significance. The traditional Jefferson Airplane tripped-out-go-ask-Alice interpretation prevailed for a long time (I mean, please, she ate magic mushrooms!), but gradually something else crept in. Over the last few years—and maybe the baking has something to do with this—I’ve come to see this passage and the eating of the cake as symbolic of my approach to writing. I’ll eat it—the idea, the concept, the process—and see what happens. Because something will happen, and whether I become small or large, I’ll get into that garden (*real toads to be discussed at a later date). 

Alice's Cake