Garden tomatoes, elderflower, buttermilk
On the menu for eleven weeks a year and not one day longer. When the tomatoes stop, the dish stops.
There are nine varieties in the beds and we do not sort them by looks. A tomato that split on the vine goes into the dish alongside one that did not; the split one is usually sweeter. They are cut on the day, salted lightly, and left for twenty minutes so they release a little of their own liquid, which becomes part of the dressing.
Elderflower vinegar is the second half of the dish. The flowers come off the hedge along the sea wall in the first fortnight of June, go into cider vinegar with nothing else, and sit until August. It smells like the beginning of summer and tastes like the end of it, which is roughly the argument the dish is making.
The buttermilk is what is left over from churning Saturday's butter. It is cold, sour and thin, and it stops the whole plate being merely sweet. Nothing is cooked. Nothing needs to be.
On the plate
- Tomatoes
- Nine varieties from the granary beds, cut to order and salted twenty minutes ahead.
- Elderflower vinegar
- June flowers steeped in cider vinegar for eight weeks.
- Buttermilk
- The by-product of the week's butter churn, seasoned and chilled hard.
- Finish
- Garden basil oil, and the tomato water drawn off during salting.
To drink
Podere Stellino Ribolla Gialla — skin-contact, faintly tannic, and not frightened of vinegar.
The cellar listThe granary beds
Behind the kitchen
Twenty raised beds worked by the kitchen team on their afternoons. Whoever picks it usually gets to plate it.
