I Say Tomato

The natural season is still a few weeks away but tomatoes, the little red fruits that are commodified as a vegetable have been cropping (too obvious?) these last few weeks.

The plants genetic epicenter is on the coastal planes of Andes mountains in present day Peru. Of all the South and Meso-American, Pre-Columbian cultures to choose from it was the Aztecs who loved their red fruit/veg, breeding countess varieties. For what they lacked in the whole guns, germs and steel department, the Aztecs were amazing agriculturalists – all indications are they knew the science of what would be known as Mendelian heredity. 

The tomanamacac, the tomato seller might have xitomtal – large tomato; coaxitomatl – serpent shaped tomatoes; the fun sounding nipple-shaped tomatoes - chichioalxitomatl or the seller might be a spurious malcontent selling tomapalaxtli –spoiled tomatoes. The overlords of the empire even had a special tomato based sauce to serve with sacrificed slaves – and despite it looking like a logical contraction; salsa is not the diminutive of slave sauce. 

From the new world, the tomato moved to the old: probably from Mexico, although maybe the plant arrived in Spain via the Caribbean or less likely, it was imported from Peru. By 1529, the word tomatoe was being used in writing, implying the plant was well enough to known to be used without footnotes. In 1692, the tomato appeared in a cookbook for the first time: Cookbooks weren’t cookbooks like we think of the them today, no pictures, no measurements, the concept microwavable hadn’t been invented – these collections are part household management, part instruction manual, it is more of a 30 Servant Meal, than how to fry an egg.

By the late 18^th century our little red veg were being called for in Italian cookbooks – again these are cookbooks in the sense they contain recipes but not in the sense they were used by people in largely illiterate societies – these cooking manuals document what the court was eating. Outside of the aristocracy, at least in the south of the land now know as Italy, a region controlled by the Spanish crown, the tomato seemed to be a mainstay.

Pellegrino Artusi, who wrote the most popular and influential cookbook in Italian history, purposefully wrote his recipes "to make Italians understand one another at the table". His book published in 1891, revised 14 times until his death in 1910, included a half-dozen recipes for the tomato and tomato sauce. And this was big to treat the foods of Southern Italy on par with the cuisine of Rome, Tuscan and Venice. 

In the States, the tomato was probably introduced in the Carolinas from the Caribbean. Academics are able to surmise this, not from some fancy CSI ethno-micro-spectra-analysis test but through linguistics – apparently in the places where oldest seeds have been found – local populations pronounce the plant as ‘to-mat-A’ instead of to-may-toe, as seems to be the custom in Caribbean languages – how cool is that?

Now that the tomato has migrated from Peru to Europe and landed back in the Americas; we will pick the tomato thread up next week with tomato fun facts.  

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