Like a lot of fruits, vegetables and livestock, the modern tomato
looks very little like it did before agriculture. Before it was first
cultivated, wild tomatoes were much smaller, probably the size of cherries, and
were most likely yellow. No one knows for sure because in their native
Central America and western South America, no one bothered to keep records of
the gradual agricultural development of the tomato.
By the time the tomato made its way north to the Aztec Empire, it
started to take on the round, red appearance it has today. The word tomato
comes from tomatl ([to ˌmatɬ], or “toh MATS”), originating from Nahuatl,
the main language of the Aztecs. It means “fat water” or “fat thing”.
The Aztecs developed the fruit further, coming up with something they
called xitomatl ([ˌʃit o ˈmatɬ], or “SHEET oh MAHTS”). Xitomatl
translates roughly as “fat thing with navel”. When the Spanish arrived in
the New World, this is the version of the tomato that they encountered.
For whatever reason, they fell back on the previous version of the fruit
when looking for something to call it in Spanish: tomate.
Tomatoes probably looked more like this, originally.
Tomatoes probably looked more like this, originally.
The tomato was just one of the new delights exported to Europe
from the New World. Foods like chocolate and potatoes quicky enjoyed
great popularity among Europeans. Tomatoes, however, took a bit longer to
catch on. It had a couple of strikes against it when it came to Europe in
the early 16th century. For one, it was classified by Italian botanist
Pietro Andrae Matthioli as a mandrake, a plant related to the solanaceae
family. This was close, but not quite right: the tomato is of the
nightshade family. Being identified as a nightshade would have been
enough of a PR problem, since the nightshade family contains a number of
poisonous plants, like the belladonna, the rosary pea and the European yew.
While the mandrake family contains a number of poisonous plants itself,
one thing that made it worse in the eyes of many Europeans is that the mandrake
itself had a reputation as an aphrodisiac. That gave the tomato a touch
of immorality, unfair as it was. At the time, it was commonly believed
that the mysterious fruit given by Eve to Adam in the book of Genesis that
precipitated the loss of Paradise was a mandrake (though the book itself
doesn’t make clear what this fruit was supposed to be. Different
traditions hold that this fruit could have been many things, including grapes,
pomegranates, mushrooms, wheat and other things.) If this was true,
perhaps the tomato is this devious fruit? Perhaps. Whatever the
cause, that’s what gave the tomato another name: the love apple.
Matthioli’s drawing of a tomato
plant. He even gave instructions on how to cook and eat them (fry ‘em in
oil). He thought it was a mandrake, and wasn’t sure if it was a fruit or
a vegetable.
Love apple sounds a bit salacious, but it’s not such a bad nickname to have.
This isn’t to suggest anyone was confusing the tomato with the fruit we
know as the apple today. At the time, apple was a generic name for
any fruit that was not a berry (but including nuts). The nickname its
reputation suffered from the most was poison apple. This came from
a belief that tomatoes themselves were poisonous. Europeans got this
impression from the fact that people who ate tomatoes did in fact die from
poisoning. The tomatoes got the blame, but it wasn’t really their fault.
The problem came from the fact that those who could afford it bought
pewter dishes. Pewter is a metal that isn’t common today, but was very
popular in Europe, particularly for dishes, from Roman times until the 19th
century. Pewter is an alloy that’s mostly tin, but also includes copper,
bismuth, antimony and often lead. The poisonous quality of lead wasn’t
really understood (or at least accepted) at the time, so no one saw the problem
with making plates out of it. When tomatoes hit the pewter plates, the
highly acidic fruit rapidly absorbed the lead, thus delivering a potent poison.
This gave the tomato a bad reputation and kept it out of finer kitchens
for a long time. Still, people liked the look of tomatoes, so they were
often grown in gardens for ornamental purposes, and might even appear in a bowl
inside the house, just to look at.
Pewter dishware, circa 1800.
Not all pewter was made with lead, but it was common. Pewter dishes
are still manufactured and used today, but lead-free, of course.
If you weren’t rich enough to afford pewter, you might be more
inclined to eat tomatoes (and would certainly be more inclined to survive
eating them). Poorer Europeans gradually figured out that the tomato was
harmless, and tasted pretty good. The same thing happened in English-speaking
America. While people figured out tomatoes were okay to eat, no one
really had any ideas of how to prepare them. One early idea was ketchup,
which first appeared in a cookbook in Georgia in 1801, and the tomato took off
in America, replacing the more popular bases of ketchup (originally a Taiwanese
invention), which included mushrooms, walnuts and sardines. As pewter
disappeared from the world’s kitchens, tomatoes started landing in salads and
on plates. It was in Georgia and the Carolinas where the tomato was first
accepted as edible in the United States, but it took a while for its popularity
to spread north and west.
The lack of recipes using tomatoes delayed their acceptance, and
the old misunderstandings also held the tomato back. Besides lingering
fears of the tomato’s toxicity, there was also the green tomato worm, which
appeared in tomato patches and brought terror with it in the 1820s and 1830s.
The green tomato worm was a green worm about four inches long and with a
horn at its posterior. This worm was widely believed to be venomous
itself, worse than the tomatoes it lives on. A one Dr. Fuller of New York
claimed that the green tomato worm was “as venomous as a rattlesnake,” and
would spit venom at you. When its venom touched human skin, it would
immediately swell up, leading to the death of the victim within a couple of
hours. Entomologist Benjamin Walsh understood the tomato worm better, and
reported that it wasn’t toxic and it wasn’t coming to kill us all. All it
was interested in were the leaves of the tomato plant; it was harmless.
The green tomato worm. Ugly?
Maybe. But harmless to you. Maybe not to your tomato plants.
Parallel with its spread in the United States, the tomato started
to enjoy popularity in southern Italy in the late 18th century, which is when
the first records of tomato sauces and pastes date from. By the late 19th
century, southern Italian cuisine was dominated by the tomato. Italian
emigrants from this region brought their cuisine with them, and today, the
tomato is inseparable from Italian cuisine in many people’s minds. (The
tomato never caught on with the same zeal in northern Italy, which retained the
more traditional cream-based recipes favored throughout Italy for centuries.)
By 1900, Joseph Campbell was canning tomatoes, and soon after
that, tomato soup. The tomato really didn’t take off worldwide until the
late 19th century. Today there are many varieties of tomato, and they’re
consumed in nearly every country in the world. The myth of the poisonous
tomato does persist, in that some believe it’s dangerous to eat nightshade
plants, due to their association with the poisonous plants they’re related to.
But not everyone resembles their own relatives that closely. Mitt
Romney’s father supported labor unions; Al Capone’s brother was a Prohibition
agent; tomatoes are a nightshade.
Some of Joseph Campbell’s early
products. A canner with a thousand soups.
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