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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.