The Tomato

Before the year 1600, no recipes existed—anywhere—for these: spaghetti with tomato sauce, Caprese salad, red gazpacho, tabbouleh, Israeli salad, chicken tikka masala, fried green tomatoes, cream of tomato soup, ketchup, pico de gallo, chicken paprikash, or, alas, the tomato sandwich.

When I give talks on the history of Italian cuisine and mention that there were eons in the kitchens of Rome before the Italians figured out what to do with the tomato, few believe me.

‘Twas the Maya who first figured out what to do with the tomato 2,000 years before the year 1600, but that seems harder to swallow than anything from Chef Boyardee.

In truth, the tomato is the great American vegetable. (Botanically, it is a fruit, a berry, though culinarily we consider it a vegetable.)

The tomato got to Europe (and then to the Levant) in the holds of ships sailing East after Columbus, and then to the Pacific and into Asia and India via the Philippines and the Spanish conquering westward from the New World. It is part of the Colombian Exchange, that vast interchange of foods that the globe experienced only after 1492.

The North American colonies didn’t even obtain the tomato from its native (what we now call) Mexico; it came to us from British settlers here. Globally, the tomato is the second most popular “vegetable” after the potato.

The tomato is just so dang delicious when plucked off its aromatic bush or vine come August or September, bitten into, and its sweet-tart jelly run down your chin. Few fruits of the garden contain so much sugar or electrifying acidity; they’re magic.

Cooking tips for tomatoes:
- Removing the skin, seeds, and jelly, a common practice, before cooking raw tomatoes results in concentrating the fruit’s sugars. Keep that in mind when balancing tastes; perhaps putting some of the jelly into the pot might be a wise idea.

- It’s long been known that adding a tad of both sugar and acid (say, a squeeze of lemon) to a tomato-based dish ratchets up the intensity of overall tomato flavor.

- You also might consider adding a few tomato leaves, should you have any (especially homegrown) to your tomato sauce or masala. The prominent oil glands on the leaves contain enzymes that also intensify overall tomato flavor. Tomato leaves are tender, fragrant, and eminently edible.

- Do not refrigerate fresh tomatoes; that doesn’t just retard flavor development, it kills it. Allow them to ripen on the counter. If, in order to avoid spoilage, you do refrigerate a fully ripe tomato, bring it back to life outside the refrigerator for a day or two. It will return to a semblance of its old self.

- The salt and preservative calcium chloride in many canned (especially cut-up) tomatoes isn’t dangerous at all, but it firms up the cell walls of the tomato and keeps the mash from becoming mushy. But it keeps doing that even when the canned tomatoes are cooked, interfering with the breakdown of the tomatoes into a sauce-like form. If you want smooth, go for processed tomatoes free of forms of calcium. (Almost any from Italy, say.)

Recipes on this site that highlight tomatoes, fresh heirloom, or put up in Italy:

- Sicilian-Braised Swordfish
- Baked Colorado Bass (or other firm-fleshed fish)
- Pan con Tomate
- Quick-Pickled Green Tomatoes
- Watermelon and Tomato Salad with Feta and Mint
- “Grandma-Style” Pizza
- Lidia’s Marinara Sauce
- Homemade Ketchup
- Pasta alla Norma, and
- Gazpacho Andaluz