​

First Thoughts
One of the highlights of our gardening season is harvesting tomatoes.

​

All the care, attention and hope invested in nurturing tomato seedlings from seeds, surrounding them with companion plants, mulching them, pinching off suckers and trimming off the bottom-most branches are paid back a hundredfold when we taste our first ripe fruit picked off the vine that very day. 

​

A freshly-picked tomato comes with its own exclamation marks. The colour! The taste! The texture!

​

Some History
But it wasn’t always like this. The tomato’s had a long journey from its bumpy, runty past in the pre-Columbian Americas to its varietal plenty in the 21st century.

 

The tomato, originally cultivated in South and Central America in pre-Columbian times, was known by the Aztecs as ‘xitomatl’, roughly translated as “plump thing with a navel”. Many  etymologies have a shadowy past, so we suspect that the word ‘xitomatl’ may have also originally referred to the people who first picked the fruit.

​

After spreading mayhem and smallpox throughout the Americas and being blasted in return with Montezuma’s revenge and syphilis, the Spanish brought tomato plants back to Europe in the 16th century.

​

For decades, the little red and yellow original tomatoes were treated as a curiosity and grown as ornamentals in gardens, right next to the baroque garden gnomes.

 

Most people back then thought the tomato plants’ pretty fruits were poisonous. And understandably so, considering their association in peoples’ minds with with some of the other New World ‘gifts’ contracted by the Spanish in their colonization of the Americas.

​

The tomato’s botanical place as a member of the deadly nightshade family certainly didn’t help either. In fact, although the tomato’s fruits are good for us, the leaves and stems contain enough of a substance called tomatine to be mildly toxic.      

​

Some More History
The first tomatoes that migrated to Europe in the 16th century with the Spanish were small, yellow and lumpy, like miniature Brandywines.

​

They were called pomi d’oro (golden apples) by the Italians and pommes d’amour (love apples) by the French. Ah, the French: why does Nature conspire to help them love one another even more and ever better? The English, on the other hand, were quick to brand the fruit as fit only for foreigners, whose amorously affected taste buds were numb to the tomato’s true “rank and stinking” nature. Ah, les anglais....

​

Tomatoes gradually overcame their poisonous rep, and by the late 17th Century, the people of Naples began making tomato recipes in earnest. Around 50 years later, the English got on the tomato bandwagon (applecart?), and in 1758, Hanna Glasse included a tomato catsup recipe in her book The Art of Cookery. According to Mrs. Glasse (recently hailed as "the Mother of the Modern Dinner Party" by the BBC), you could keep this catsup for 20 years! Our guess is that it lasted this long because people hadn’t yet learned to slop it all over everything they ate.

​

After all, the English didn’t start eating chips (fries) until the 1850’s: “Husky chips of potatoes, fried with some reluctant drops of oil" says Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities. We're guessing that by 1851 or so, Mrs. Glasse's catsup wouldn’t have lasted too long, what with those19th century chips being so husky and all.

​

​The End of History
Well, you know the rest. Tomato sauce, a Neapolitan invention, and Salsa, an Aztec invention, are everywhere— as is tomato soup.

​

Tomato soup was first made famous by Joseph Campbell (not the mythical one) and made famous again by Andy Warhol. Apparently, Andy’s mom served him Campbell’s tomato soup for lunch every day for twenty years. This is probably why he painted the soup can and possibly why he became a night person whose schedule didn’t include lunch.

​

What Can We Say in Conclusion?
Indeed, what can you say that can give requisite thanks to all those tomato breeders and cookers throughout history? The tomato deserves all manner of prose (even poetry) written in its praise. It also deserves to be eaten, but most of all grown in our own gardens. Organically. Even lovingly (think of the French). And in as many varieties as we can research and manage.

​

References

Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Tantalizing Tomatoes: Smart Tips and Tasty Picks for Gardeners Everywhere, Brooklyn, Ny: Brooklyn Botanic Garden, (1997).

 

David Gentilcore: Pomodoro: a history of the tomato in Italy. New York. Columbia University Press. 2010.

 

Tony Leather. The Secret History of the Tomato. http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/plants/news-wolf-peaches-bring-out-animal-you

​

Rose Prince. Hannah Glasse: The Original Domestic Goddess. http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/features/hannah-glasse-the-original-domestic-goddess-405277.html

​

​