sun gold tomatoes

The sun gold tomato has been a favorite in my garden for a few years now. I first planted them from seed. The next few years I ate from the volunteers that would pop up in the walkways. This year I grew two plants from the original seeds. If you haven’t grown them yet, I highly recommend them. These large cherry tomatoes are always my first tomatoes of the season, they are extremely prolific, and they are also always the last tomatoes in the garden (they last well past the frost date if I cover them with old sheets during the coldest nights).

They make a delicious gazpacho (with a beautiful color, to boot), but I love to just snack on them during the day or when I’m out in the garden. I also use them in couscous, as they hold their shape better than larger tomatoes which can sometimes get mushy when chopped.

When I eat them I like to imagine that I am tasting something close to the first tomatoes (small and golden) to leave South America for their journey to distant parts of the globe. Eating one of these tiny tomatoes is like consuming a miniature sun.

From an interesting article on the history of the tomato:

The earliest mention of the tomato in European literature is found in an herbal written by Matthiolus in 1544 [3]. He described tomatoes, or as they were called in Italy, pomi d’oro (golden apple), and wrote that they were “eaten in Italy with oil, salt and pepper”. This provides evidence that the first tomatoes to reach the Old World were a yellow variety, and that they were introduced via the Mediterranean. Red tomatoes were said to be introduced to Italy by two Catholic priests many years later [9]. Although not specifically documented, early tomatoes were probably small fruited, since they most likely were of the small-fruited cerasiforme variety cultivated by the Aztecs.

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