There are few good reasons to fire up one’s oven during the summer months, but one of the surest, for me, is cake with fruit in it—not fruitcake (the brick-like, spiced, Christmas kind), but just plain cake studded with hunks of juicy, fresh, seasonal fruit. Marian Burros’s legendary plum torte is perhaps the most famous variation, and arguably the single most famous recipe to ever run in the pages of the Times. A straightforward batter studded with fresh plums, which gently sink into the cake as it rises in the oven, it is a flawless creation, worthy of every iota of its celebrity—it’s easy, it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it always gets raves.
Despite the fanciness of the name “torte,” Burros’s recipe is essentially a variant on a pound cake, which might be the key to its popularity. In the finicky, ultra-precise world of cake-making, where a baker can be entirely undone by a misstep as minor as introducing her eggs to a batter at the wrong temperature, pound cake is virtually foolproof. The entire recipe is right there in the name, as simple as can be: a pound of flour, a pound of butter, a pound of sugar, a pound of eggs. It’s dense, rich, and wonderfully forgiving.
Recently, I was singing the praises of Burros’s recipe to a friend, explaining how you could swap in basically any fruit at all (cherries! apricots! pears!), when my inner know-it-all second grader chimed in to note that, actually, tomatoes are a fruit. If we want to get technical, so are cucumbers, avocados, and bell peppers, but tomatoes are the most fruitlike of these fruits: sweet, acidic, and fleshy in a way that’s comparable to the other kinds of produce that shine in Burros’s torte. Was it possible, I wondered, to make a savory, tomatoey version of a summer pound cake?
Savory cakes are not unheard of, but the record is notably slim. There’s the very French, very posh-home-cook cake salé, for instance, a dry cake made with cubed ham, cheese, and olives and baked in a loaf pan. There are numerous eggy cakes (such as Yotam Ottolenghi's exquisite spiced cauliflower cake) that veer ontologically toward quiche. After a few less-than-magnificent attempts substituting Burros’s plums for tomatoes, and eliminating the sugar, I wondered if maybe it’s no accident that all the best-known cakes tend to be sweet. Sugar not only lends flavor (both sweetness and, as a cake bakes, a caramelized depth) but is a great influencer of texture: it bonds with water molecules, making a cake moister, with a lighter, more tender crumb. My first experiments with the tomato cake came out flat and dense, tasting oily and undercooked, even though the top was nearly scorched—an insipid waste of good ingredients.
I was ready to give up after a second, barely better attempt, but a third try (replacing half the sugar, by weight, with cheese) had promise, and looked genuinely lovely. I posted a snap of it to Instagram, and within an hour received a comment from René Redzepi, the chef-proprietor of Noma, in Copenhagen, and one of the most wondrously creative cooks on the planet: “good
