This is a repeat of a piece I blogged about four years ago.

Something to Declare

This is the title of one of my favourite books.
It is written by Julian Barnes, possibly an even more obsessed Francophile than I, and consists of a series of short pieces about France.
One of these pieces, called ; The Land Without Brussels Sprouts” is about Barnes’ attempt to cook a tomato soup from Elizabeth David’s’s Italian Food.
Her instructions read that he should peel the tomatoes, cube them, and then “melt them in olive oil”
Here is Barnes reaction;
Melt? Melt a tomato ? Even a chopped one? The implausibility of the verb froze me. Perhaps if you are south of Naples, and beneath the intense noonday sun your fingers have just at that moment eased from the plant something that is less a tomato than a warm scarlet deliquescence waiting to happen; then, perhaps the thing might melt under your spatula. But would these muscular cubettes I was now easing into the oil ever do such a thing? I found myself, as the anxious pedant frequently does, caught between two incompatibilities. On the one hand, I believed, or wanted to believe, that with a few encouraging prods the tomatoes would, by a culinary process hitherto unknown to me but promised by my trustworthy tutress, suddenly melt; at the same time I was pursued by the sane fear that cooking the surly chunks any longer in the oil and thus adding to the over-all ten- minute time limit would make them lose their freshness and vitiate the whole point of the recipe.
For several stressful minutes I waited for the miracle “melt”.
Then with a cookish oath I seized the potato masher and mashed the shit out of them…