Tomatoes: Apples of love

Tomatoes, a late arrival to Europe, have enormous importance in Spain, both in the indigenous cuisine and as a valuable export earner. Here is their story.

For thousands of years humans have sought out foods and digestible substances that they hoped might intensify their love life. Not content with eating for taste, texture and nourishment, prurient gourmets have paid large amounts of money to hunters and gatherers to bring them ingredients that might stimulate the libido as well as the taste buds.

The result of this quest has seen the Rhinoceros hounded close to extinction, myriad seahorses ground up into love potions, herds of deer robbed of their velvety antlers, billions of oysters ingested, truffles consumed by the cart load and sturgeons stripped of their roes and their future. The bones of the Siberian tiger, the paws of the Asian bear, and the testicles of the Spanish fighting bull are also fancied as performance-enhancing drugs, despite negative reports from scientists and doctors as to their efficacy.

Various fruit and vegetables have also been heralded as early forms of organic Viagra, including the humble tomato. Promoted as “Apples of Love” by a clever Medieval trader, the tomato should have got off to a good start in Europe. Not so. “The whole plant is of a ranke and stinking savour” reported Gerard in his respected ‘Herball’ of 1636, “they yeeld very little nourishment to the body and the same is naught and corrupt.”

The tomato has its origins in the lower Andes, in an area that today covers parts of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. The pre-Columbian Indians simply gathered the wild, cherry-sized fruit but made no attempt to cultivate it. It seems to have spread northward, as far as Mexico before the Spanish conquistadors arrived but didn’t make it across the border into the United States. Even in Mexico the tomato was a relatively late arrival. Remains of beans, squash and maize have been found in caves dating from 2000BC, but not the indigestible tomato seed.

Some of the first tomatoes to find their way into Europe arrived in Italy in 1523. They were yellow and known as ‘Mala aurea’, (‘golden apple’), from where we get the modern Italian name for the tomato: ‘pomodoro’. The name was changed for a while to ‘Mala insana’ (‘unhealthy apple’), when 16th.Century botanists found that the ‘tomatl’, to give it its Aztec name, was a member of the ‘Solanaceae’ family, along with such treats as Belladonna, Black Henbane and Deadly Nightshade.

Tomatoes were thought to cause gout and cancer and it wasn’t until the mid 19th.Century that they came to be regarded as a wholesome food. Even then it was recommended that they be cooked to “neutralise their venom”. A leading American cookbook of 1860 recommended: “tomatoes should be cooked for three hours and will not lose their raw taste in less than this time.” It is not recorded who was the first person to eat a raw tomato in Europe but in 1840 a daredevil American, Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson, defied death publicly by eating a raw tomato on the steps of the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey. Despite Johnson’s bravery the tomato salad did not become popular until after the First World War.

Waverley Root in his book “Food” poses the interesting question “how did the tomato get from its native Peru, where it was held in slight esteem, to Italy, which was to make so much of it?” The Italians claim that Neapolitan sailors brought it back from Peru but Root thinks it more likely that Spaniards carried back the first tomato seeds from Peru or Mexico and passed them on to Italy through their Bourbon Kingdom of Naples in the early 1500’s. If the Spanish weren’t initially very enthusiastic about the ‘Love Apple’, the Italians were and cultivated it widely. It soon spread throughout Europe.

By the early Renaissance, it had been planted in France, Portugal, Spain, Poland and England, mainly as an ornamental plant, and it was to be another two hundred years before its culinary properties were appreciated.

Probably the first cook to use the tomato much as we do today was the Italian, Francesco Leonardi, chef to Catherine the Second of Russia between 1750 and 1780.

Empress Eugenie, the Spanish wife of Napoleon the Third, supposedly introduced tomato dishes into France in the 1850’s but they were generally unknown, or ignored , by the general public and it wasn’t until the 20th.Century that French chefs acknowledged the existence of ‘le tomate’.

The English also approached the tomato very cautiously and used it first in ketchup and other sauces, believing the mixture of vinegar and spices would neutralize the toxic effects of the fruit.

Tomatoes were found growing in the interior of Africa in 1860. They were certainly not native to the region and probably had been introduced by slave traders. Africans were amazed when a visiting European actually ate one of the tomatoes, as they were considered inedible by the locals. Today tomatoes are widely eaten everywhere in Africa, including the Sahara Desert, where they are one of the most important fruits of that region. Saharan bread is often made from dough mixed with tomatoes and onions.

When we think of the tomato today we think of a large, red, smooth spherical fruit, occasionally slightly fluted. Until 1830 the dominant kind everywhere was deeply ribbed, like an orange under its peel. This was the form reached by the best tomatoes after the Italians bred them away from the small yellow fruit of the Peruvian original

In spite of the great variety of tomatoes today, often radically different in taste, productivity, hardiness, shape and colour, there are only two species of commercial importance.

All our commonly cultivated tomatoes are varieties of ‘Lycopersicum esculentum’: the garden tomato, the large-leaved tomato, the pear tomato, the cherry tomato and many others. The cherry tomato is probably the closest species to the original Peruvian ‘pomo d’oro’ of the 16th. Century.

In Spain, we can find tasty, vine-ripened tomatoes in the summer months but they are less common and more expensive than the mass-produced, uniform varieties that are picked green and ripened by ethylene gas.

The latter are perfect in every aspect, except taste. From the U.S.A., with its Macdonald’s mentality, Calvin Trillin notes: “the agribusiness Frankensteins’ want to breed a tomato that has the shelf life of a mop handle. They hope to find one that does not have a bright red skin so hard that anyone who wanted to indulge in the old-fashioned American pleasure of slinging it at a windy political speaker would risk being arrested for assault with intent to kill.”

Tomato health facts:

Tomatoes are high in potassium and vitamins A and C, and are cholesterol-free.

Recent scientific studies indicate that eating cooked tomatoes reduces one’s likelihood of suffering from cholesterol-related heart problems and digestive-tract cancers.

Why cooked tomatoes?

Cooking tomatoes releases lycopene, a strong antioxidant, from the skin of the tomato.