One hot tomato!

Tomato lovers, rejoice: The divine fruit everyone thinks is a vegetable, painfully absent last summer, has come back with a sweet vengeance.

Last year, the dreaded airborne fungus phytophthora infestants, or “late blight,” came early. First detected in June 2009, and propelled by torrential rain, it wiped out most of the tomato crop all over the Northeast.

It was particularly severe in the Hudson Valley, where small farms produce many of the organic tomatoes that make their way to the city’s markets and restaurants.

The Attack of the Tomato Killers was an equal-opportunity plague. The fungus ruined the crops at organic farms unable to use chemicals that might have arrested it, and the rain finished off most non-organic tomatoes as well.

Most of last summer’s tomatoes were soggy “heirlooms” or specimens shipped in from far beyond the blight zone that were picked insufficiently ripe to withstand transport and storage.

A garden specimen not only tastes much better — it tastes completely different, possessed of a singular, mineral-rich constellation of vegetable and fruit essences. ABC Kitchen executive chef Dan Kluger describes the prematurely picked product as “mealy and dry” compared with locally grown ones that are “juicy, slightly sweet, with perfect acidity and tartness.”

No one suffered more last summer than those who grow tomatoes for a living. On a stroll through Blue Hill restaurateur Dan Barber’s upstate Stone Barns farm last August, I recall his response to my asking whether he was still trying: “We’re done.”

Three years ago, Keith Stewart, owner of Keith’s Farm in Orange County, wrote a book, “It’s a Long Road to a Tomato,” about the art and discipline of the agrarian life. Just out in an expanded edition illustrated by Stewart’s wife, my cousin Flavia Bacarella, it includes a new essay that chronicles what Stewart and others through: “With grim resolve [we] pulled several hundred dying tomato plants from the field . . . we threw them into the hole and covered them with a layer of soil. It was a painful thing to do.”

But nature has returned to its more benign ways. The weather’s been dry and only a few isolated cases of blight have been noticed.

“This year, it’s hot, and they’re thriving,” says Bill Telepan, chef/owner of the Upper West Side’s Telepan.

ABC Kitchen’s Kluger said he’s put local tomatoes on his menu earlier than usual — for example, what he calls “amazing” heirlooms from Eckerton Hill Farm on bruschetta-style toast.

Stewart said, “We have a very good season on tap.”

For me, last summer’s dearth was a loss to the heart as well as to the palate. Plump, juicy garden tomatoes evoke my childhood as no other food can.

I never tasted a fresh tomato growing up in Brooklyn. But on Long Island, where my family moved in 1955, tomatoes we planted in our garden flourished and filled me with joy from July through September. I’ve sought out their elusive richness every summer since — until 2009.

Laurie Colwin wrote, “A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.” Last summer was silent, but Mother Earth’s music is once again ours.

scuozzo@nypost.com