Back to
#27 The Culture of Listening
2009

The chef who talked to tomatoes

by Roberta Corradin

0 Faves
Vote!
1 Star2 Stars3 Stars4 Stars5 Stars
Loading ... Loading ...

“Listening patiently to the other’s dream in exchange for the luxury of recounting their own”.
Ian McEwan, The comfort of strangers.

Once upon a time there was a talkative tomato. It had studied all the works of Brillat-Savarin and knew the abyss that separated it from the firm and flavourful oyster, the woody texture of the porcini mushroom, or the compact flesh of the aubergine. Even though it realised that it was very different from the rest of the world, it thought that with a bit of education even a humble tomato could make a comeback and lead a dish into the history books. It saw itself in a painting by Delacroix, leaves blowing in the wind, leading an uprising of a troupe of tomatoes.
It preached wherever the wind took its voice, willing to sacrifice its seeds as long as its message did not go unheard. When it was picked, it continued its indoctrinations in the eleventh crate stacked in the back of the articulated lorry that took it to Northern Europe. On reaching the fruit and vegetable market, undaunted, it held forth to all and sundry explaining the characteristics that made it a costoluto tomato, explaining exactly what made a costoluto variety different from the camone, the cherry tomato, the perino, the datterino and the many other members of the international tomato community. Different from the rest, and also different from the others of its own kind.
When a plump hand protruding from an arm clad in white cotton leant over it and picked it up, its neighbours in the crate breathed a sigh of relief – actually two. First, because they hadn’t been selected. Second, because they would finally have a bit of peace and quiet.

The chef was deeply satisfied. There are times when the season smiles on you, when you can find a tomato sauce worthy of the name even in Stockholm. As he sliced it, he began talking to the tomato, as he often did with ingredients that inspired him. “You come from Vittoria, in Sicily” he told it. “I know that in Vittoria the farmers work hard to grow tomatoes even tastier than the Pachino variety. So, to reward the efforts of those tenacious tomato growers, I’m going to stuff you”. Stuff me with what? objected the tomato. With ricotta and marjoram, said the chef, who could not fail to appreciate the eloquence of this tomato, transmitted on another wavelength but which still conveyed the vivid memory of a holiday in south-eastern Sicily taken several years early. In particular, the tomato reminded him of a delicious dish of ravioli served with ricotta and marjoram made by a housewife from Modica. “I’ll stuff you in the same way they do down your way, but the ricotta and marjoram will be inside you instead of a raviolo. I won’t smother you in sauce, I’ll make you the star, your shape will show off the filling to perfection. By the way, try not to leak too much water, otherwise you’ll make the ricotta all mushy”.

The tomato shrieked to make its voice heard, but to no avail. It was too tired from the journey to play the role of a stuffed tomato, it was like asking it to sit still. Impossible: it would have wilted, and the mere thought of wearing its top and stalk for a hat gave it a headache. In vain, it repeated to itself, why not cut him into nice firm slices to make a raw tomato sauce with all the heat of summer, and liven it up with slivers of orange peel. But there is none so deaf as he who will not hear. The chef gave orders to his kitchen crew, and left. A trainee chef approached. He came from Vittoria. The chattering coming from the tomato amazed him. He bent closer to the tomato and the chattering became a plaintive SOS. The trainee chef went to speak to the sous-chef, who called the head chef on his mobile. Upset, the chef returned on his scooter. He went up to the tomato and asked the trainee to translate what it was saying.
“Feel how firm my flesh is, compare it to an oyster, for example”.
The chef listened with interest, and tried, with some satisfaction.
“See? I’m the oyster of the vegetable patch” said the tomato, pleased that he had finally found ears capable of listening. The oyster, for its part, just nodded (it’s a well-known fact that North Europeans are less talkative than their Southern European counterparts).

“You’re right” said the chef. “Sorry for not listening to you, I think you tried to tell me several times. But I was too busy imagining my dream to hear yours”.

That evening, the customers applauded the amuse-bouche served at table: “Oyster of the vegetable garden with tomato of the sea”, a minor miracle of osmosis and simplicity, inspired by texture, similarity and difference. Before each mouthful, the tomato, ever-present in each slice, looked into the eyes of each diner, declaring with extreme satisfaction those fateful words: “I told you so”.

The moral of the story is that every humble tomato has so many things to say that before cooking, you need to be humble enough to listen.

Roberta Corradin
Bookmark and Share

Write a comment

Click here to login
Comment required
First name required
Last name required

Nickname required
Email required
Captcha required
Captcha Code required

Information on protection of privacy I agree I don't agree
  • Follow illywords
  • Follow on Facebook
  • Follow on Flickr
  • Follow on Youtube
  • Follow on Rss Feed

Images

  • ISIA – Higher Institute for Artistic Industries - Urbino

  • ISIA – Higher Institute for Artistic Industries - Urbino

  • Kurt Schwitters, 1927

    NEUE PLASTISCHE SYSTEMSCHRIFT. Like many new experimental types to arise from the early twentieth century avant-garde in Europe, Schwitters’ type is an attempt to remake the Western writing system through reduction, and the abandonment of idiosyncrasies. Schwitters proposed a monocase system, adopting a rectilinear interpretation of roman capitals, and contrasting these with six vowel alternate characters, A, E, I, O, Ü, and Y scaled to the same height but based upon Carolingian lowercase. The vowel alternates, though primarily used for the short sound, are used somewhat indiscriminately in his print work. Unlike his contemporaries, Herbert Bayer, Theo Van Doesburg and Jan Tschichold all who produced experimental universal alphabets that rejected uppercase, Schwitters retained the form of roman capitals.

  • George Bernard Shaw, 1912

    SHAVIAN ALPHABET. The Shavian alphabet is conceived as a way to provide simple, phonetic orthography for the English language to replace the difficulties of the conventional spelling. Shaw set a criteria for the new alphabet: it should be as phonetic as possible. The Shavian alphabet consists of three types of letters: tall, deep and short. Short letters are vowels, liquids and nasals; tall letters are unvoiced consonants. A tall letter rotated 180°, with the tall part now extending below the baseline, becomes a deep letter, representing equivalent voiced consonant.

  • Herbet Bayer, 1959

    FONETIK ALFABET. In 1959, he designed his fonetik alfabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the suffixes “ed” “-ory”, “-ing”, and “-ion”, as well as the digraphs “ch”, “sh”, and “ng”. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.

  • Alexander Melville Bell, 1867

    VISIBLE SPEECH. In 1867, Alexander Melville Bell published the book Visible Speech: The Science of Universal Alphabetics. The book contains information about the system of symbols created by him that indicates the pronunciation of words so accurately that it represents even regional accents. Melville Bell’s intention was to create a script in which the characters actually look like the position of the mouth when they are being pronounced. The system is useful not only because its visual representation mimics the physical act of speaking, but because it does so, these symbols may be used to write words in any language, hence the name: Universal Alphabetics.

  • Microphone

    MICROPHONE is an experimental typeface designed by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones for the periodical Fuse #15 cities, in 1995. “There are six million stories on the naked city”. The idea was to take fragments of conversations from people which where then used as a character set in the Microphone typeface. One single character in Microphone represents a phrase with an individual style, size and spacing that reflects the voices heard on the street. Microphone is different from the rest of the typefaces because it consists of text that is read more like a short story.

  • Jan Tschichold, 1926 /29

    UNIVERSAL ALPHABET. This alphabet has been designed to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. He devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs “ch” and “sch”. His intentions were to change the spelling by replacing systematically “eu” with “oi”, “w” with “v”, and “z” with “ts”. Long vowels were indicated by a macron below them, though the Umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.

  • DSC_0016 - DSC_0012

    Citofono di una via di Urbino, nel luglio 2009.

  • DSC_0037 - DSC_0038

    Confessionale nella chiesa della Maddalena in Piazza della Maddalena a Roma, nel luglio 2009.

  • IMG_3062

    Telefono pubblico in Borgo Mercatale a Urbino, nel luglio 2009.

  • IMG_3091 - IMG_3092

    Call center in via Emanuele Filiberti a Roma, nel luglio 2009.

  • DSC_0077 - DSC_0088

    Confessionale nella chiesa di San Macuto, in piazza di San Macuto a Roma, nel luglio 2009.

  • Karlheinz Stockhausen, 1928-2007

    Hello! Repeat please. Hello! Is changed, of course. I’m always right. Mr. Stockhausen? Yes I am. Can I… No you can’t. Try to say “hello” more quiet, pretend to have a little pillow in your mouth. Hello. AH! Perfect. Wait, I’ve to record it. Wait wait wait.

  • John Cage, 1912-1992

    Who is there? Hi, this is John Cage! I’m here in the 6th Avenue and there’s a good traffic today. What? I said there’s a good traffic today! And I want to advise you! Stop listening music and come down! You don’t need music! You don’t need someone talking! The activity of sound is enough. We don’t need sound to talk to us. And today the traffic sound is awesome! Ok John I’m coming!

  • Arrigo Lora Totino, 1928

    Hello. Good morning Miss. I’m Arrigo Lora Totino and I would like to invite you to my next performance of liquid poetry. Uh, poetry you said... I am not used to read poetry. You don’t have to read, it’s a kind of sound poetry Miss. The phonetic aspects are foregrounded and the performance becomes the thing in itself. You will feel the poetry, the real poetry, with the ears and with the eyes. Sounds interesting. And what means “liquid”? I’ll explain it: with a hydromegaphone, built by my friend Piero Fogliati, I’ll try to declaim the language of fishes and other sea stuff, speaking through the water inside the hydromegaphone. Mmm... sounds funny. It is funny... It’s like a cabaret. I love cabaret. I will be there! Ah, Mister Totano* (* Squid)? Do I need an umbrella?

  • Robert Schneider, 1961

    Hello. Mr. Schneider? Yes? Oh hi! I’m Elias, the character of your new novel. Hi Elias, everything ok? Yes! Finally it happened. I see the air condensing and then expanding with incessant rhythm. I see the sound valleys and their giant mountains! Perfect! Congratulations Elias, thank you for calling.

  • La Monte Young, 1935

    Hey La Monte, can I ask you something? Of course... How can you stand the wind sound during the storms? At night I can’t sleep!! It’s easy, you can’t turn off the wind like you would turn off the radio. When the wind comes it goes on as long as it is going to last. You would find it to be very profond and very awesome.

  • Philip Glass, 1937

    Who is there? I’m Philip, your neighbour, I just want to thank you. Thank you for what? For the noises coming from your apartment, the washing machine, the dishwasher, the mixer... Oh I’m sorry Phil, I didn’t want to disturb you! Disturb me? Not at all! Your noises revealed me the use of rhythm in developing an overall structure in music!!! What? I don’t understand... Of course you don’t understand, you are accostumed to the use of rhythm in western music, where the time is divided, but if you were interested in the indian music you would have a very different conception, and you would appreciate the beats coming out from your apartment, that string together make up larger time values! Do you understand now?

  • Luigi Russolo, 1885-1947

    Hello? Bzt... bzzz... It’s me, Luigi What? I don’t understand anything! I’m Luigi... bzzz... Luigi Russolo Who? Who is there? Bzzz... bzt I can’t hear anything, there is a disturbing noise in the entry phone. Bzzz... Disturbing noise? You really believe that noise is disturbing? Our entire life is accompanied by noise! What do you mean? The noise is familiar to our ear, the sound instead, this occasional and unnecessary element, is alien to our life, but we forgot it a long time ago. Bzzz… The irregular confusion of our life create the noise which reaches us in a confused and irregular way. So we have to select, coordinate and dominate all the noise to increase our sensual pleasure... bzt

Related posts

  • No Related Posts

  • "Where I am, makes me what I am"

    Anonymous at Galleria illy London

  • “The time is always right to do the right thing”

    Martin Luther King

  • "Liberty is about our rights to question everything".

    Ai Wei Wei

Headline & Editorial

Headline & Editorial

Last Issue: #31 The Journey

Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne (1825-1905). This book is the answer to my thoughts on travel. It certainly anticipated the saga...
Read more
People

People

For several years, the magazine has published dialogues, opinions and points of view on themes dear to a company living in the contemporary world.  Topics have covered space, courage, dreams,...
Read more
Schools

Schools

On the pages of illywords, the works of writers, artists and established professionals are the inspiration for the ideas and images of emerging artists, photographers and...
Read more

Contacts

You can leave your comment on the blog pages, asking everything you want to know.
Read more

Where to find

illywords is distributed at the most important cultural events of design and art supported by illy, and it is also available at leading bookshops the world over.
Read more