Paint it Red

If a meal listed in a cookbook or menu is prepared in the Spanish/espana style, it contains tomatoes. Yet it is across the Mediterranean in Italy, a country that can boast 400 different kinds of pasta, 370 different types of cheese, that the tomato is so closely identified with the national cuisine, the nation seems to be awash in marinara.  How is it that a plant from Peru, used extensively in Pre-Columbian, Meso-America, introduced to Italy in the 16th century, grow to become synonymous with Italian cuisine (at least from a US perspective)?

The answer has to do with Espana. The Spanish crown and their scions controlled Southern Italy from the post-Columbian epoch until Garibaldi’s forces swept them out in the mid 18th Century. In the 16th Century Spain was a Super-power, Empire-committed, the Spanish had a papacy grateful for their new world riches and an armada that had just help repulse the Ottomans (Warning: Invite a navy to repel your enemy and they never leave). That along with a/the 30 Year War, French ambitions for the boot shaped peninsula, Protestant/Germanic threat from the north and the fact that every pope, King and pretender to a throne were cousins – ceding the Kingdom of Two Sicilies, both the island of Sicily and the terra firma (the toe, heel and arch of the Italian boot northward to Naples) to the loyally Catholic Spanish seemed like the least the Church could do.

The first mention of the plant in Italy comes from Petrus Matthiolus in 1544 – the reference comes from his botanical book. Cherry tomatoes are captured in a painting by Arcimboldo at the end of the century. By 1692 the first reference to a tomato sauce appears - one with chili peppers in a preparation considered ‘Spanish’ style. In 1778 the first published recipe for a ragu or Bolognese sauce is printed. In 1839, Ippolito Cavalcanti wrote about pasta and tomato sauce. But it was my new culinary hero, Pellegrino Artusi catapulted the tomato to fame by including 6 recipes for tomatoes in his first edition of Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well in 1891.

While Cavalcanti wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, as noble as it is to write in a language of the people, an estimated 90% of the population of Southern Italy was illiterate. Artusi wrote in a Florentine dialect, a particular subset of Italian that was the language of arts, letters and commerce. His choice of language coupled to the fact that his book was very popular and well read north of Naples meant his book had a greater impact on popularizing the tomato than a regional book written for people who largely couldn’t read or afford books.

Around the time Artusi’s book was popularizing the tomato within a unified Italy, 25% of the Italian population was emigrating. 80% of these immigrants came from southern Italy or Sicily and most would land in the US or Argentina. Where, in a strange land, they hungered for their traditional foodways, sending back to the ‘old country’ for olive oil and canned tomatoes. The tomato, tomato sauce became an important link to their heritage – had the Italian Diaspora not occurred, or people left from the north of the country we might think of Italy as the land of cream sauces, hard cheeses and risotto.


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