Being more dreamer than planner, I was proud of myself when, a few years ago, I managed to put together an overnight getaway with my husband, Michael, to the Normandy town of Giverny, where the Impressionist artist Claude Monet had lived and worked. As a child, I’d seen Monet’s enormous paintings of water lilies at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Later, on my first trip to Paris, I saw others in the series at the Orangerie, where I sat in the center of an oval room, surrounded by the smudged beauty of Monet’s panels, imagining myself in a small boat, finding a place for my oars between the lilies’ broad leaves. Now I was going to stand on the pond’s famous Japanese bridge and see everything as he did.
We left our Paris apartment early and arrived in Giverny with plenty of time before our 2 p.m. visit to the artist’s house. We walked around the town and went to the centuries-old church where Monet and his family are buried, and then we ditched the thought of grabbing a quick bite and decided to have a real lunch at Le Jardin des Plumes. We sat at a table outside. We opted for wine. And we lingered over dessert. For too long. It was only as we were leaving the restaurant that we realized it was past our entry time.
We raced to the Monet house, Michael certain that they would turn us away, me practicing what I would tell the guard in our defense. As soon as he started to scold us, I said: “The tomato! It was the tomato’s fault. It was trop bonne,” using the French expression for “too good” to convey the understanding that the tomato was both delicious and impossible to resist. The guard smiled with amusement and also, it seemed, recognition — he’d had things that were trop bonne, too.
I rarely met a French person who wouldn’t stop everything to talk about food, and the guard was no exception. He asked if the tomato had been cooked; was it served hot or cold; was it seasoned in a special way? I described the dish, and when I told him what else we’d had, he called me gourmande, the word for greedy, and pointed the way to the entrance.
I’ve returned to the gardens twice since then, but I’ve made my version of that tomato dish countless times, and each time I’m startled by how beautiful it is. Everything you do to make the dish, which isn’t much, seems to brighten what is basic and beloved about a tomato: its form, flavor, texture and hue.
The dish is simply a tomato, peeled and roasted at a very low temperature for a few hours in a pan with an ample amount of olive oil, enough to baste the tomato regularly. Even before it’s ready, it’s lovely: Each new application of oil is like a fresh coat of glossy polish. When it’s cooked through to tender, it holds its shape, its color too, but it seems almost translucent — you see a tracery of ribs and veins along its contours. But you can’t know the true brilliance of the dish until you taste it: The tomato is vegetal and rich, as you would expect, but it’s also a bit sweet and a touch citrusy. The surprise is at the core. At the start, you peel the tomato, then cut a small, conical wedge out of the top, a hollow to fill with sugar and lime zest. During the hours in the oven, basting with that blend of oil and sugar and zest, the ingredients find their way into every fiber of the tomato, technically making it a kind of confit, a dish cooked in fat (like duck confit) or sugar (like candied cherries).
The original Giverny tomato was listed on the menu as tomate confite. I think it was served warm, and I remember that there was a little salad with it. At home, I like the tomato as much at room temperature as I do warm, and I also like it cold. I like it with great tomatoes, of course, but it’s better than I would have imagined with tomatoes that have either not reached their peak or have passed it. Gentle heat and the mix of oil and sugar smooth over shortcomings.
I’m not sure why it took me this long, but it was the sugar in this recipe that made me finally and fully accept that a tomato is, as I’d been taught, a fruit. And so, although I like the dish’s sweetness (which is not overly pronounced) at the start of a meal, just as I had it in Giverny and as I serve it most often, every once in a while I tip toward the tomato’s fruitiness and serve the dish for dessert, chilled, topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, drizzled with olive oil and finished with a pinch of flaky sea salt. I have no idea if the chef who created this dish would approve of my culinary shenanigans; I like to think he would. But the museum guard, I wonder about him. Would he find it trop bonne? Or at least good enough to let us into the garden? I like to think yes.
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Everything You Love About Tomatoes, Amplified - The New York Times
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