The day I visit my friend Lynette she’s preparing a second round of snacks for her boys, not
long returned from the farmers’ market where she’d picked up bread and tomatoes. On top
of hunks of Crabbes Creek Khorazan she is laying thin slices of tomatoes, firm-fleshed and
seedless, meaty and vibrantly red. ‘My kids don’t like tomatoes and won’t eat them usually,’
she tells me, ‘but they’ll eat these ones!’
These ones are, of course, the famous Coopers Shoot tomatoes – specifically red beefsteaks
– back for some weeks now at the markets to an almost audible blast of trumpets.
Everyone loves Coopers Shoot tomatoes, and those months they are absent are keenly felt.
There’s Heather up front, apron on, weighing out the fruit, patiently moving from one
customer to another in a line which never seems to diminish. Before her, baskets and trays
of tomatoes, fiercely red, pale pink, pleated and ridged and smooth and glossy, big and
bulbous, small and perfectly formed. If we can’t get to Italy to experience the flavour of a
real tomato, not some watery, insipid, storage-cold pretender, then at least we have these.
For dinner I thinly slice a ridged, pink beauty, a Bulgarian beefsteak, slicing myself in the
process with my small serrated Victorinox, except a brisk band-aid later I am dressing the
tomato slices with my best extra virgin olive oil and aged balsamic, seasoning them and
serving them alongside some lovely local lamb sausages, the tomatoes a triumph, the only
sauce I need. And with the cherry tomatoes I plan to make Peter Gordon’s gorgeous pasta
sauce.
CHERRY TOMATO, FETA AND BASIL SAUCE
In a saucepan heat 200ml EV olive oil and 15 cloves of garlic, peeled and halved. Fry for
about 6 mins or until the garlic is golden and soft, then tumble in 500g cherry tomatoes and
1 cup loosely packed basil leaves. Stir well, keep cooking till the tomatoes start to split then
gently fold through 250g crumbled feta before spooning over cooked pasta.

Coopers Shoot Tomatoes are at New Brighton every Tuesday from 8 – 11am and
Mullumbimby every Friday from 7 – 11am

Victoria Cosford