The Ever Loving Fruit
Summer is here.. a good moment to open a bottle of natural wine and read our previous edit on this fascinating topic by the natural wine man himself and Foodistory’s other half: Cesar. Summer is the ultimate playground for the bon vivant. Linen-wear is encouraged, al fresco dining is not even encouraged but mandatory. It is time to break out into the garden and enjoy the finest products the sun and the sea have produced. Freshly caught fish seared on the charcoal grill or simply raw sliced with the sharpest of knives.
The symbol of summer? More than an ingredient its a tool, the Swiss knife of every dish. Dear readers, I am talking about the humble tomato. It can be the product that can make a sober dish into a smiling dish. It can be the acid that can scrape the pan of its cooking juices, It can be the starter of any good sauce. It can be the starter of any good party, think Bloody Mary. But more importantly, It can be the star of the show by just being itself.
I always remember the time in Spain where I was in a bit of sleepy coast town. There was this farmer standing in the shade of tree. He had a few boxes with fruit and one of the boxes carried the oddest looking tomatoes I have ever seen. They looked more like grapes to me. Growing up in The Netherlands, our supermarkets always carry perfect looking fruit and vegetables. This is mostly thanks to our greenhouses that produce perfect looking products every time. Anyway, I tasted a few of his tomatoes and they were so sweet and umami. I was just gasping at the taste of these tomatoes. My Catalan friend was not that impressed as he was used to the “real” tomato taste. My tomato history was more watery than tasteful so these tomatoes were my entry into the world of real tomatoes
A Tomato’s Journey
The tomato has, like the potato, known a long road before arriving to contemporary diets. Many of today's most common and delicious dishes can be traced back to ancient times and to the exchange of food plants between the Old and New World. The tomato is a native of the lower Andes, cultivated by the Aztecs in Mexico. The Aztec word 'tomatl' meant simply "plump fruit" and the Spanish conquerors called it "tomate".
The tomato, along with maize, potatoes, chilli peppers and sweet potatoes was introduced to Spain in the early sixteenth century with the voyages of Columbus. The tomato probably arrived first in the city of oranges: Sevilla, a major centre of international trade especially with Italy.
The Danger Fruit
But before the tomato was delicious, it was dangerous. A lot of people were afraid of eating tomatoes. A nickname for the fruit was the “poison apple” because it was thought that aristocrats got sick and died after eating them, but the truth of the matter was that wealthy Europeans used pewter plates, which were high in lead content. Because tomatoes are so high in acidity, when placed on this particular tableware, the fruit would extract lead from the plate, resulting in many deaths from lead poisoning. No one made this connection between plate and poison at the time; the tomato was picked as the Jack The Ripper of the deed.
Andrew F. Smith details in his The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery. The tomato didn’t get blamed just for what was really lead poisoning. Before the fruit made its way to the table in North America, it was classified as a deadly nightshade a poisonous family of Solanaceae plants that contain toxins called tropane alkaloids.
In 1544, the Italian herbalist Mattioli referred to the yellow fruits of the tomato plant as “mala aurea”. And classified the fruit as a nightshade and a mandrake. Dodoens, a Dutch herbalist, gave a detailed description in 1554 and the fruit earned a reputation as an aphrodisiac. The mandrake has a history that dates back to the Old Testament; it is referenced twice as the Hebrew word dudaim, which roughly translates to “love apple.” (In Genesis, the mandrake is used as a love potion). Matthioli’s classification of the tomato as a mandrake had later ramifications. Like similar fruits and vegetables in the solanaceae family the eggplant for example, the tomato garnered a shady reputation for being both poisonous and a source of temptation
Therefore Europeans didn’t eat the tomato, they merely cultivated as ornament of beauty.
Danger Noodle
The growing popularity of eating tomatoes in Europe had also reached the United States. The fear of the tomato remained and with the cultivation came another fear namely otherworldly beasts like the Green Tomato Worm
*The Illustrated Annual Register of Rural Affairs and Cultivator Almanac* describes the green tomato worm as:
The tomato in all of our gardens is infested with a very large thick-bodied green worm, with oblique white sterols along its sides, and a curved thorn-like horn at the end of its back.
Ralph Waldo Emerson describes the worm in the almanac as follows:
an object of much terror, it being currently regarded as poisonous and imparting a poisonous quality to the fruit if it should chance to crawl upon it.
Around the same time period, a man by the name of Dr. Fuller in New York was quoted in The Syracuse Standard, saying he had found a five-inch tomato worm in his garden. He captured the worm in a bottle and said it was “poisonous as a rattlesnake” when it would throw spittle at its prey. According to Fuller’s account, once the skin came into contact with the spittle, it swelled immediately. A few hours later, the victim would seize up and die. It was a “new enemy to human existence,” he said. Luckily, an entomologist by the name of Benjamin Walsh argued that the dreaded tomato worm wouldn’t hurt a flea.
Now that we have become familiarized with it these fears have all vanished, and we have become quite indifferent towards this creature, knowing it to be merely an ugly-looking worm which eats some of the leaves of the tomato
The World’s Most Important Fruit
Today the tomato is one of the world’s most improtant crops. The fruit is used for its juice, flesh and seeds. You can find it anything from tomato juice, sundried tomatoes and fresh tomatoes. Nowadays the omato is essential in diets all over the world, luckily we stopped eating from pewter plates and can enjoy a tomato any second of the day.