You say tomato: this July, Carouge will host its 13th Fete de la Tomate, celebrating the height of the tomato season with a market, live music, and plenty of food and drink. People will descend on the town from across the region and beyond: all paying homage to the vegetable that's actually a fruit--Lycopersicon esculentum.
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"One in five Swiss tomatoes is from Geneva," proclaims the Union Maraichere de Geneve (UMG) website. The UMG is the Carouge-based cooperative of market gardeners, which wholesales Geneva's vegetables and petits fruits (berries) to distribution outlets across the canton and beyond. It also organises the town's annual Fete de la Tomate, which takes place this year on July 15 and 16. Carouge is known mainly for its artsy, historic Old Town--so close to Geneva City that people often refer to it as Geneva's Soho or Greenwich Village--but it is also home to Geneva's wholesale fruit and vegetable market.
The Fete hints at how important produce is for the region. It is a little-known fact that 46 per cent of Canton Geneva is actually agricultural land. The canton is Switzerland's largest producer of eggplant (aubergine), Mara des Bois strawberries, lentils--and one of its major producers of tomatoes (indeed, there have been years when it's topped the list).
Tomatoes at the Fete market
When people think of a ripe tomato, they generally picture a deep red, spherical vegetable. So it may come as a surprise to learn that this typecast just doesn't ring true. In addition to being botanically classed as a fruit, but as a vegetable in culinary circles (although some contemporary chefs are challenging that idea by playing up the tomato's fruity sweetness to create desserts), tomatoes harbour additional surprises as regards shapes, sizes, textures, taste and colours.
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In addition to red, there are also orange, yellow, green and black tomatoes. Sizes range from cherry, ovoid tomate bonbon and grape tomatoes sold on deliciously fragrant bits of vine, right up to huge oxheart tomatoes that look as if they have segments (think citrus fruit). The difference with these giants is that once you get beyond their remarkable appearance on the outside, the juicy flesh within--while it has its own typical texture and taste--is otherwise no different from any other tomato.
The texture and taste of some varieties make them better suited to sauces: take, for example, the oblong San Marzano tomato, which has been dubbed "the world's sauciest" because its flesh is thicker, it has fewer seeds and a pronounced slightly sweet taste.
Fete goers will have the opportunity to examine 50 varieties of what are known in English as "heirloom" varieties (a term that is easier to understand in French, which refers simply to varietes anciennes...
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