A Tomato Summer Pudding

No, not pudding in the American sense, of sugared sludge with the texture and appeal of a vat of vanillin-flavored tile grout, nor in the British sense, of dessert in general. This "pudding" gets its pudding-ness from the fact that it's molded in a dish, and from its relationship to an old-fashioned British dish, Summer Pudding, which is a mélange of fresh berries and sugar poured into a bread-lined basin, weighted, and allowed to amalgamate into a succulent warm-weather treat. 

Jennifer Paterson

Since the original form of Summer Pudding is made from whatever berries are available, it seems reasonable to make it out of tomatoes, which in late summer are a plentiful berry (yes, tomatoes are berries), and therefore transform the old Summer Pudding into a savory dish. This is such a good idea, I wish I had thought of it, but credit for the original concept goes to the late, great Jennifer Paterson, a British cook and eccentric who is most well-known for her participation in the television cooking show Two Fat Ladies. Before her television career, Paterson had worked as a live-in personal cook and caterer. In 1978 she got a job as the house cook, and later the food writer, for the British conservative magazine The Spectator. In the late 1980s, she was fired from her job as The Spectator's cook after a temper tantrum during which Jennifer angrily hurled dirty crockery, which was sullying the tiny top-floor kitchen where she worked, out the window and into the backyard of the neighboring funeral parlor. Fortunately she kept her job as the magazine's food writer.

Paterson had conversational style of writing about food and cooking that would have been quite at home on a blog, and her recipes are an interesting mixture of (pre-WWII) British traditional cooking, with eclectic Mediterranean, Portuguese and Middle Eastern influences. Her food writing for The Spectator is collected in a very good little book called Jennifer Paterson's Feast Days. As the title of the collection suggests, Paterson, a devout Roman Catholic, makes frequent reference to the saints and liturgical celebrations of the Roman Catholic Church in her writing and recipes. Her advice for poached eggs involves first rolling the whole eggs around in a pan of simmering salted water "whilst intoning two Our Fathers and one Hail Mary" before cracking the shells and doing the actual poaching.

Paterson's receipt (as she referred to recipes) for her Tomato Summer Pudding is like many of her recipes, breezy and loose, so I've expanded it a bit here. This dish is a great use for all those delicious tomatoes that you (hopefully) have ripening in your garden right now. Like so many simple dishes, this pudding depends upon good ingredients for its success. Exact quantities of the ingredients you'll need depend upon the size of basin or bowl that you use to mold the dish. When I made the one you see in the accompanying photographs, I used a tall Pyrex bowl with a 6-cup capacity, which required about 10 medium-sized tomatoes to fill.

Ingredients Needed:

• ripe tomatoes, enough to fill your mold. Good tomatoes have a good tomato scent, even before they're sliced open. Tomatoes ripened in the sun are always better than hothouse tomatoes
• salt & fresh-ground black pepper
• about 1 teaspoon sugar
• tomato purée, called passata di pomodoro in Italy. This is puréed tomatoes, strained to remove the seeds and any lumps. You may make your own, or use the packaged stuff. This time I used this brand and it worked fine. You'll need about 2 or three cups.
• the juice of 1/2 a lemon
• Worcestershire sauce. If you like Worcestershire sauce (and who doesn't?) I highly recommend that you try a bottle of the British-made Lea & Perrins sauce. It has a far better and richer flavor than the American Lea & Perrins sauce, and it's made with cane sugar rather than high-fructose corn syrup. You can tell the British-made version at a glance because the bottle is not wrapped in paper and it bears an orange label rather than a beige one.
• Tabasco sauce
• about 1 loaf firm-textured white bread, crusts removed and cut lengthwise into slices about 3/4 inch thick. Slightly stale bread works much better than fresh.
• about 20 large fresh basil leaves
• 2 (or more) cloves of garlic, pushed through a garlic press or finely minced
• extra-virgin olive oil

Equipment Needed:

• a small or medium-size bowl (around 4-6 cup capacity is a good size), preferably slightly deep, with straight-ish sides. If you have a pudding basin, it's the ideal mold for this dish.
• a biscuit cutter or thin-walled glass about the same diameter as the bottom of the bowl or basin
• a saucer that is slightly smaller in diameter than the opening of the bowl or basin
• a weight, such as a heavy can of food
• a pie plate

Skin your tomatoes by dropping them in a pot of boiling water for about 30 seconds, then placing them in a bowl of cold water. The tomatoes should then slip easily out of their split skins. Remove the seeds and gelatinous pulp from the tomatoes (save this and add to a Bloody Mary), then dice the tomatoes finely. Place the diced tomatoes in a bowl, add the sugar, salt & fresh-ground black pepper and minced garlic, stir well and set aside.

Put the tomato purée or passata di pomodoro into the pie plate and season with salt & pepper, the lemon juice, a generous splash of Worcestershire sauce (about a tablespoon) and a few drops of Tabasco sauce. Stir well.

Using the biscuit cutter or thin-walled glass, cut a round of bread from one of the slices to fit in the bottom of your mold. Briefly dip the round (both sides) into the seasoned tomato purée (passata) and then put it in the bottom of the mold. Continue to cut the slices of bread, dip both sides in the purée and line the mold with them, being very careful not to leave any gaps or crannies. You may use little bits of passata-dipped bread to patch holes if needed.

Once the mold is completely lined, take the bowl of chopped tomatoes and tear the basil leaves into it. Pour in a quantity of extra-virgin olive oil; the exact amount is up to you, but at least 1/3 cup. Stir the mixture and then pack it into the lined mold. Cover the top with more pieces of passata-dipped bread then place the saucer on top. Weight the saucer with something, then set the whole contraption into the rinsed-out pie plate, as the pudding will exude some liquid while it rests. Place in the refrigerator for at least 12 hours.

The only good use for canned tomatoes in this recipe

After 12 hours, remove the weight and saucer from the pudding. Run a thin, sharp knife around the perimeter of the pudding, being careful not to cut into the bread. Place a nice serving plate upside down on top of the mold and then, while holding everything together, invert the whole lot. Carefully remove the mold from the pudding; this may require a little careful shaking and finessing.

Once the pudding is nicely un-molded, decorate it with things like basil leaves, capers, black olives, hard-cooked eggs, &c. Serve it along with some lovely homemade mayonnaise. It makes a great lunch or first course on a hot day, as summer begins to dwindle into autumn...

...And Sommers lease hath all too shorte a date: 

Sometime too hot the eye of heauen shines, 

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd, 

And euery faire from faire some-time declines, 

By chance,or natures changing course vntrim'd: 

But thy eternall Sommer shall not fade...