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You Say Tomato

© Audrey Stallsmith

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and jimpson weeds that constituted the garden.
from Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

There’s an old joke that we country people only lock our doors in late summer—and that’s to prevent our neighbors from unloading their excess garden produce on us! There’s some truth to that notion, since this is the time of year that we all have tomatoes piled high on our kitchen counters.

We’re not talking about those hard and scentless ethylene-ripened imposters you city-dwellers buy in the supermarket, but the soft and sun-succulent real things! Considering how essential the tomato has become, it’s hard to believe that it didn’t gain popularity in the U. S. until the 1840’s.

As with most of the solanums, the wild plant seems to have originated in the Andes of South America. From there, it spread northward to Mexico where the Aztecs domesticated the immigrant they called xitomatle. At that time, the fruits were small, round, and yellow—similar to our cherry tomatoes. The conquistadors apparently carried seeds with them back to Spain.

Matthiolus was the first European herbalist to mention the plant, calling it pome d’oro (“golden apple”). The French knew it as pomme d’amour ("the love apple"), but that may have been a mistaken translation of pome dei Moro ("Moor’s apple").

The tomato had to overcome the suspicion directed toward any member of the often toxic solanum family. Gerard wrote that “Apples of Love grow in Spaine, Italie, and such hot Countries” and added that persons from those regions “eate the Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt, and oyle.” He quickly added that the fruits “yeeld very little nourishment to the body, and the same naught and corrupt.”

He did grow the love apples in his own garden as an ornamental, however. By his day, the fruits had grown to “the bignesse of a goose egge or a large pippin.” Even the official name of the tomato, lycopersicon esculentum, contains some of the old prejudice. It means “edible wolf peach”—a reference to the fact that witches were believed to use solanums to call up werewolves.

Although colonists carried tomato seeds back to the Americas, only a few adventurous cooks or gardeners—like Thomas Jefferson—actually consumed the fruits. Everybody else used them externally to remove pustles! George Washington Carver tried, without success, to talk his poor neighbors into growing tomatoes. The Creoles, perhaps because of their French heritage, were the first Americans to really adopt "love apples" into their diet.