The perfume of tomatoes
"The smell of the tomato leaf is precise and yet is impossible to nail down with any accuracy" Susanna - Bois de Jasmin
I bought some truss tomatoes in Coles yesterday - they were on a special. And as I picked them up I actually got that distinctive whiff of tomato. People have been banging on for a long time about the tastelessness of supermarket tomatoes, but these definitely at least smelt of real tomato and they tasted quite good too. Maybe not quite as good as the tomatoes I once was able to grow, or the tomatoes you get in France and Italy, but almost. And I do think the quality and variety of the tomatoes we buy today is steadily improving. The one thing I find interesting about the supply is that the Adelaide or Murray Bridge tomatoes that you can buy in the market are never seen in the supermarkets. Well not ours anyway. And they do taste better. Apparently they are actually the KY1 hybrid which you can buy as plants.
I used to grow tomatoes - never amazingly successfully but successfully enough. And then for some reason I never seemed to get very many tomatoes from my plants at all - and moreover what did appear got eaten by something - birds, possums, dog? So I gave up, because it coincided with the massive growth in the varieties and quality of the tomatoes you can buy in the market - which is where I mostly buy them. But I miss the smell you get as you pass between the plants. For the smell comes, apparently from the leaves and the stalks, not the tomatoes.
"The raw tomato, devoured in the garden when freshly picked, is a horn of abundance of simple sensations, a radiating rush in one's mouth that brings with it every pleasure. . . . a tomato, an adventure." Muriel Barbery
And when I fed perfume of tomatoes into the web up came my favourite perfume of all time - Sisley's Eau de Campagne. This plain looking but expensive bottle is just a wow thing for me. Now I do not spend any money at all on cosmetics or expensive clothes so perfume is my only indulgence. And whenever we are in France I buy some of this. You can get it online sometimes of course, and also in David Jones. So if I never go to France again, this is what I should have to do. I say it's expensive and it is, but when you think about it a bottle lasts for a long time, so it's not really that expensive.
Actually I was introduced to it in France. We were visiting one of their wonderful perfume shops and I was looking for my second favourite perfume, then my favourite, Vent Vert by Balmain but they didn't have any. (It is very difficult to find.) So I asked what they had that was similar and they offered me this. I confess initially that I was mildly intrigued - enough to buy some on a special that they had going - but not overwhelmed. But once I got back home and started using it - and maybe particularly the shower get, I was hooked. I have never been so addicted to a smell, but since it is so expensive I do limit my use of it. Anyway apparently it's top note is tomatoes - with other things that include geranium leaves - also love that smell - and citrus - ditto.
And it seems that there are a whole lot of other perfumes out there using tomato - though my Eau de Campagne and an American one simply called Tomato from Demeter were the ones most quoted and they do seem to be quite distinctive. The following quote sums up my feeling when I use the Eau de Campagne shower gel. The perfume not quite as much - but then I often do not smell the perfume I am wearing unless I take a close up sniff of my arm or wrist.
"Applying a fragrance with a prominent tomato leaf note always seems to me to be a jolt to the senses. No matter how often you wear a fragrance with the note, it always comes as a bit of a surprise. Its verisimilitude to the plant from which it is derived is so accurate that it stands in stark opposition to a long list of notes that smell almost—but not quite—like the fruits, woods, flowers, and animal essences from which they allegedly derive. There is no abstract of a tomato leaf. It is one of the most remarkable notes in perfumery, in my opinion, due to its unexpectedness and its complete lack of gender reference." Susanna - Bois de Jasmin
We visited some perfume factories in and near Grasse on one trip to France and saw how they distilled scents from all manner of plants. But some of those scents are also synthetic. It's all very scientific.
"Like all of our scents, it’s a mix of hard science and delicate art. We capture the air around our object of desire, analyze the molecules present — the scientific smell, if you will — and then pick out the compounds that are safe for use on the skin. We then give it to our perfumers, and they apply their art. The end product is a wearable, compelling and recognizable version of the original scent" Mark Crames - CEO Demeter
Going back to Coles though - I also picked up their current magazine which had a lot on tomatoes (and school lunches). Hidden in amongst it all was one of their regular little plugs for their suppliers which help them to seem environmentally friendly. The supplier is from SA - from Port Augusta and is called Sundrop.
Their website is quite inspiring really. At least I think so. Have a look. No doubt a real greenie will find something awful about it. But it seems me to be completely sustainable and environmentally sound. Yes it's all grown in greenhouses, but nothing wrong in that. No soil - they use coconut husks. No insecticides - they use other bugs for that. Solar power (that's a massive solar farm in the front half), sea water which is desalinated on site (behind the greenhouses) and reused, or rainwater collected from the vast roofs. Crops picked and weeded by hand. As they say all they need is a large amount of flat land. It doesn't have to be productive soil, but they do need the sun. So near Port Augusta is ideal - and they are apparently thinking of expanding into Portugal and the USA. Coles claim they produce exclusively for them - well the tomatoes anyway. Maybe they provided some finance - they are certainly listed as one of their partners. Anyway to me it seems to be an exciting way of feeding the world. Yes it's pretty huge, but look at all that other land you could use in the same way.
You could feed an awful lot of people like this. I don't actually know whether the tomatoes I bought are from there, but they very well could be.
And finally - another brief aside that demonstrates how checking out the internet can lead you in all sorts of directions. Whilst I was looking for suitable quotes I came across this one.
"When I eat a tomato I look at it the way anyone else would. But when I paint a tomato, then I see it differently." Henri Matisse
So I couldn't resist looking for Matisse tomato paintings. I could only really find two and yes the one on the left is certainly not quite what one expects of a tomato. It's called Two Masks (Tomato).
All that from a whiff of 'real' tomato in the supermarket!
"boxes filled with tomatoes still clinging to their vines. The ripe tomato smell was almost sexual. It filled my nostrils as I lifted the box. There were some slightly rotten ones near the bottom of the box, but the rest were just perfect, thick with the perfume of their green vines, fat and red.” Hannah Tunnicliffe
