Tomatoes

The big round tomatoes and plum tomatoes have slipped into the cuisines of Turkey and the Mediterranean as if they had always been there. Another gem of the New World, they arrived in the seventeenth century in Istanbul, from where they spread across the Ottoman Empire and along the Mediterranean. Tomatoes are now one of Turkey’s biggest food exports tinned whole or chopped, dried and pressed into a thick paste or purée, or transformed into tasty keçup, which is similar to, and can be replaced with, a commercial ketchup. Plump and juicy, tasting like tomatoes should and polished and piled up into pyramids in the markets, they are used endlessly in salads and sauces. When cooking with tomatoes it is best to substitute tinned chopped tomatoes if the only alternative is pale and tasteless ones.