Tomato

A Global History

Clarissa Hyman

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781789140835
• eBook ISBN: 9781789141160
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Culinary Arts

In the history of food, the tomato is a relative newcomer outside its ancestral home in Mesoamerica. And yet, as we devour pizza by the slice, dip French fries in ketchup, delight in a beautiful Bolognese sauce, or savor tomato curries, it would now be impossible to imagine the food cultures of many nations without the tomato. The journey taken by the tomato from its ancestral home in the southern Americas to Europe and back is a riveting story full of culinary discovery, innovation, drama, and dispute. Today, the tomato is at the forefront of scientific advances in cultivation and the study of taste, as well as a popular subject of heritage conservation (heirloom tomato salad, anyone?). But the tomato has also faced challenges every step of the way into our gardens and kitchens—including that eternal question: is it a fruit or a vegetable? In this book, Clarissa Hyman charts the eventful history of this ubiquitous everyday edible that is so often taken for granted. Hyman discusses tomato soup and ketchup, heritage tomatoes, tomato varieties, breeding and genetics, nutrition, tomatoes in Italy, tomatoes in art, and tomatoes for the future. Featuring delicious modern and historical recipes, such as the infamous "man-winning tomato salad" once featured in Good Housekeeping, this is a juicy and informative history of one of our most beloved foods.

1

Origins

Tomatoes are ubiquitous in the modern world but their fleshy, shiny proliferation could hardly have been foreseen when the original fruits, some no bigger than redcurrants, first grew in northwestern South America. The progeny of these vines were irregular and erratic in habit but they were the founding fathers of what has been described as ‘the human tomato’, in the sense that they have grown up entwined with the global history of food.¹

Botanical classification has evolved over the centuries but the tomato is now accepted as part of the Solanaceae family, a highly diverse group of flowering plants that also includes the potato, aubergine (eggplant), tobacco, deadly nightshade and petunia. Solanum is the largest genus, and Linnaeus placed the tomato within this category in 1753, calling it Solanum lycopersicum (which derives from the Greek for wolf peach). However, the botanist Philip Miller later gave the tomato its own genus, Lycopersicon esculentum (the latter simply means edible), thereby sowing the seeds of considerable taxonomic confusion in the process.

However, genetic evidence, based on molecular studies by David Spooner in the early 1990s, established that Miller’s Lycopersicon is ‘nested’ within Solanum and, as a result, its species transferred to the latter as a sub-genus. So Linnaeus appears to have got it right after all, although L. esculentum continues to have its adherents. The taxonomic debate continues but you may as well quarrel over the correct pronunciation of the rosy-red objects in question and, like Mr Gershwin, make your choice and just call the whole thing off.

Solanum pimpinellifolium, the currant tomato.

Many wild species have been identified: most are green-fruited, although a few are coloured, and are found in habitats ranging from the deserts of the Pacific coast to the green valleys and damp mountains of the Andes, as well as the Galápagos islands. They can thrive in extremely harsh conditions, often surviving with little water as long as they are not killed outright by frost or have waterlogged roots. Most, however, have very small populations, making them vulnerable to extinction. The indigenous Peruvian chronicler Guamán Poma mentions the occasional eating of wild tomato fruit in the Inca empire, but other references are rare. Although the wild fruits are not toxic, their complex taste, according to legendary tomato geneticist Charles Rick, is for the most part extremely unpalatable.²

Tomatillos are still much used in Mexican cooking but are unrelated to the tomato.

One of the main wild species and distant ancestor of the modern tomato is Solanum pimpinellifolium, the currant tomato. The plant has a bushy growth and sprays of tiny flame-red berries that split when ripe to release minute seeds. It is an aggressive colonizer that grows like a weed from northern Chile to Peru-Ecuador. Another wild tomato, Solanum cerasiforme or cherry tomato, is thought to have originated out of the former although demarcations between them are not straightforward. The cherry is also the only wild tomato found outside South America and bears greater genetic resemblance to the cultivated tomato than to other wild species. Recent investigations, however, suggest that it is a mixture of wild and cultivated tomatoes rather than being ‘ancestral’ to the latter.³

Varieties of Solanum cerasiforme, cherry tomatoes.

Although the detailed parentage of the modern tomato remains somewhat unclear, ethnobotanists and geneticists have attempted to track down the geographical centre of domestication. It is thought that a type of pre-domestication took place in the Andean region before the process continued in Mesoamerica, where seeds and plants were carried northwards on the wind as weeds or by birds, wildlife and indigenous peoples. Rachel Laudan describes how beans, squash, tomatoes and chillies were planted in Olmec villages in small forest clearings surrounded by cacao bushes and avocado trees.⁴ And Andrew F. Smith notes how genetic mutation around this time likely produced a larger, lumpier, multi-celled fruit.⁵

Much later, in the Puebla-Veracruz area of Mexico, the most significant wave of domestication occurred under the Aztecs. They adopted the plant easily, most likely because of its general similarity to the abundant tomatillo (husk tomato) or Physalis philadelphica, which was already a familiar native food. The latter, both wild and cultivated, was commonly used in sauces and salsas: in the view of the botanist J. A. Jenkins, it was ‘undoubtedly the original tomato of the Aztecs and related peoples’.⁶ The tomato was not of great importance, simply an extra plant in the maize fields. However, compared to the tomatillo it had a greater resistance to rot, plus a particularly colourful appearance, and in the end the tomatillo became marginalized, an also-ran in the race to conquer the way the world eats.

The word ‘tomato’ derives from the Nahuatl tomatl, a generic term for a globose fruit or berry with seeds and watery flesh sometimes enclosed in a membrane. It was also described by the Franciscan friar and priest Alonso de Molina in his Nahuatl–Spanish dictionary (1571) as referring to ‘a certain fruit used to add a sour flavour to stews and sauces’. As many nouns in Nahuatl that ended in ‘tl’ were absorbed into Spanish, their suffix was replaced with ‘e’. Hence tomatl became the Spanish tomate.

Counter-intuitively, at least to European minds, the green and tart tomatillo with its papery husk is called tomate in certain parts of Mexico; the word for the (mostly) red tomato is xitomatl or jitomate, meaning peeled or skinned tomato. Unfortunately, some of the sixteenth-century chroniclers of native life made no distinction between tomate and xitomatl or jitomate, a point that was to become a source of future uncertainty.

From Bernardino de Sahagún’s The General History of the Things of New Spain, written in both Nahuatl and Spanish within a decade of the Conquest, it is evident that both fruits were on display in the local markets. Sometimes described as the world’s first anthropologist, the Franciscan friar documented many aspects of Aztec life and he vividly and meticulously noted three types of red tomato and seven types of tomatillo, although it is not quite clear to which he was referring when he described, almost in the form of a prose poem,

large tomatoes, small tomatoes, green tomatoes, leaf tomatoes, thin tomatoes, sweet tomatoes, large serpent tomatoes, nipple-shaped tomatoes, coyote tomatoes, sand tomatoes, and those which are yellow, very yellow, quite yellow, red, very red, quite ruddy, bright red, reddish, rosy dawn coloured . . .⁷

He also came across the ‘bad tomato seller’ who sold ‘spoiled tomatoes, bruised tomatoes, and those which cause diarrhoea’. Tomatoes, he noted, featured in chicken and shrimp casseroles, even with tortillas from street sellers. The scene is remarkably immediate:

He sells foods, sauces, hot sauces; fried, olla-cooked, juices, sauces of juices, shredded with chile, with squash seeds, with tomatoes, with smoked chile, with hot chile, with yellow chile, with mild red chile sauce, with ‘bird excrement’ sauce . . . He sells toasted beans, cooked beans, mushroom sauce, sauce of small squash, sauce of large tomatoes, sauce of ordinary tomatoes, sauce of various kinds of sour herbs, avocado sauce . . .⁸

Some years later, José de Acosta, a sixteenth-century Jesuit missionary and naturalist, reported the sight of what clearly were red tomatoes, according to Janet Long, when he described them as fresh and healthy, large and juicy, and said they made a tasty sauce and were even good to eat on their own.⁹

The cultivated tomato or ‘plump thing with a navel’ was first scientifically catalogued by Francisco Hernández, a naturalist and personal physician to Philip II. He gave only a brief nod to the red tomato and was more interested in the tomatillo, to which he devoted five pages listing the different types and their culinary and medicinal uses. His observations, however, are undermined by the fact that his chapter on tomatoes is illustrated with a drawing of a tomatillo.¹⁰

Francisco Cervantes de Salazar, rector of the newly founded University of Mexico, described in 1544 how tomatoes were added to sauces and stews along with ground squash seeds to offset the bite of chillies while adding a pleasing tartness. Less appetizingly, in 1632 Bernal Díaz del Castillo recounted that when the Spanish went across the country from Veracruz to Tenochtitlan, the natives wanted to ‘kill and eat us and eat our meat’ and had pots ready with chillies, tomatoes and salt. He also mentioned that the Aztecs ate the arms and legs of their sacrificial victims with a sauce made with chilli peppers, tomatoes, wild onions and salt. As Janet Long points out, the ingredients were nearly the same as that of salsa mexicana, used in most Mexican homes today.¹¹

Mexican tomato salsa being made in a molcajete, a stone mortar.

The mega-tough Spanish explorers of the day may have been fearsome warriors and adventurers, buccaneering and bloodthirsty, but they were cautious and conservative when it came to new foods. They likely would have tried to shape the exotic and unknown into a safe, familiar European scheme: get it wrong and they could be poisoned. Their wariness was both a result of their unwillingness to try new things, a reluctance to eat the food of irreligious natives and a question of survival. Manioc, for example, made the Spanish extremely sick before they understood it had to be peeled before serving. The tomato would initially have seemed an enigma, resembling a fruit but too acidic to be used as one.

Foot soldiers of the Spanish armies may have been reluctant to try the local food but it was a different story in the palaces, convents, townhouses and haciendas of the wealthy and powerful. As Rachel Laudan argues, ‘In spite of the European disdain for the cuisine of Mesoamerica, intermarriage and servants meant that the kitchens of the conquerors and the conquered could not be kept completely separate.’ She describes an interesting, fusion-style, eighteenth-century Catholic-criollo recipe: braised fowl mestizo, a ‘mixed race’ dish of hen with Mexican t...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Origins
• 2 New World to Old World
• 3 The Italian Tomato
• 4 Elsewhere in Europe
• 5 Back to America
• 6 Soup and Ketchup
• 7 Glasshouses and Beyond
• 8 Varieties, Organics and Heirlooms
• 9 Science and Technology
• Recipes
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Websites and Associations
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements
• Index