The Illustrious Tomato
by Elizabeth Thompson
Tomato days have arrived! More lauded and classic even than the zucchini season, tomatoes are a staple of fresh summer cuisine. What is your favorite way to use the tomato? The possibilities could fill several volumes of an encyclopedia of vegetable use. This round, bright globe of a fruit has worked its way into cuisines worldwide from its humble, cherry sized beginnings in the Americas.
The tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) is actually native to the Americas. Wild tomatoes, most likely cherry- sized and yellow, like the sungolds available today, originated in South America. The tomato was originally cultivated by the Incas and Aztecs around 700 AD. Around the 16th century the tomato found its way to Europe on the ships of the early explorers. It was embraced in southern Europe first, where it was called “yellow apple” and eaten mainly by the Italians. In northern Europe tomatoes were thought to be poisonous and cultivated only as ornamentals. The story of why they were thought to be poisonous has many versions. This reputation may have come from the smell of the leaves, the fact that the acidity of tomatoes reacted with the pewter flatware of the rich, or the fact that tomatoes are in the nightshade (Solancea) botanical family, which boasts a number of poisonous members. Whatever the reason for the belief that tomatoes were poisonous, it held for a long time. French botanist Tournefort gave the Latin botanical name, Lycopersicon esculentum, to the tomato, which translates into “wolfpeach” — peach because it was round and luscious and wolf because it was considered poisonous.
Cultivated tomatoes were brought back to North America with the colonists and cultivated in home gardens. However, the belief in their danger persisted and they were not eaten. Thomas Jefferson was one of the pioneers in eating tomatoes, but they were not fully embraced until one Colonel Johnson took this issue to task. Legend has it that Colonel Johnson stood on the courthouse steps in Salem, NJ and ate a whole bushel of yellow tomatoes. People gathered to watch him, expecting him to keel over and die. Physician James Van Meter supposedly gave the following warning:
“The foolish colonel will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis. All that oxalic acid, in one dose, and you’re dead. If the Wolf Peach (tomato) is too ripe and warmed by the sun, he’ll be exposing himself to brain fever. Should he, by some unlikely chance, survive, I must warn him that the skin . . . will stick to his stomach and cause cancer.”
That is quite a warning! There is no record of what gave Colonel Johnson the courage to stand up to such warnings as well as the historical belief in the tomato’s deadly qualities, but he did and inspired the cultivation of tomatoes for consumption in southern New Jersey. An Ohio plant breeder, Robert Livingston, began developing many of the most well-known tomato cultivars of today, cultivars that produce the large, round, red fruits that we have come to expect. However, these cultivars lacked the flavor of earlier tomato varieties, since they were developed for high yields and ease of storage and transport. Earlier varieties may not have lasted as long (they certainly could never survive the distance that some of our tomatoes travel to reach our supermarkets today), but they were grown for taste! There is currently a growing interest in preserving and cultivating some of the more unique and lesser-known tomato varieties. There are hundreds of these varieties and they are known as heirlooms, many passed down from generation to generation in a family. They are like heirloom treasures that we want to preserve – for their flavor, for their colors, for the sake of plant diversity on our planet. So don’t run away from a funny looking tomato! It may be the best tomato you’ve tasted since your grandmother’s garden.
Whichever varieties you eat and however you eat them, there is nothing like tomato season, and tomato season it is. So get out your recipes, get out your creativity, or just get out your saltshaker, and jump on in to the tomato daze!
P.S. Please feel free to share a favorite recipe in the comment section!
