A ripe tomato

October 3, 2010 - 7:53 PM by Jessica

Could it be? A non leaky tomato? One whose seeds you don’t have to squeeze out for various recipes, or the occasional diner who doesn’t like tomato seeds in his/her salad.

The story’s like this: Called ‘intense tomatoes’, the first crop of this Israeli crop is to be harvested about a month from now, according to Rami Trabelsi, a farmer from Moshav Tekuma in the western Negev. Here’s the whole story that was in today’s Jerusalem Post, as told by Mr. Trabelsi, the son of the farmer who developed this particular strain of the red fruit.

He’s not the first Israeli to create a delectable tomato. Two Israeli scientists, Prof. Haim Rabinowitch, former rector of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Prof. Nachum Kedar, developed the cherry tomato in 1973. They were looking for a way to slow down the rapid ripening of ordinary tomatoes in a hot climate, and along the way “identified the genetic combination to slow down maturation and also a way to exploit the genes to produce cherry tomatoes”, according to Wikipedia.

And then, this past summer, Hazera Genetics, another Israeli company that breeds and markets hybrid plant varieties, announced another new tomato that doesn’t need to be refrigerated. Named Antonella, this tomato retains its firmness, flavor and aroma, even after a week at room temperature.

Wherefore this obsession with tomatoes? There doesn’t seem to be one answer out there. Clearly, Israel didn’t develop the tomato. That credit goes to South America, and tomatoes didn’t reach Middle Eastern shores until the early 1800s.

But when they did arrive here, way before the First Aliyah, they quickly became popular, particularly in the kibbutzim who loved dicing them with cucumbers and sprinkling the combo with lemon juice and olive oil. That’s how the Israeli salad came to be, although, yes, there are those who say it was originally a Palestinian salad:

Joseph Massad, a professor of Arab Politics at Columbia University, cites the renaming of, “Palestinian rural salad (now known in New York delis as Israeli salad),” as one example of the appropriation of Palestinian and pan-Syrian foods by Israel.
Israeli food editor Gil Hovav has stated that: “this salad that we call an Israeli Salad, actually it’s an Arab salad, Palestinian salad….”

Bottom line, the locals like it, whether finely chopped, or, as I was taught by my gardener friend way back in the day, eaten like an apple. In that situation, however, it’s much better if it’s an Intense Tomato, the better to resist drippage…