As with the humble potato, it's hard to think that such a widely-used food source was once considered deadly poisonous (up until the end of the eighteenth century, physicians warned against eating tomatoes, fearing they caused not only appendicitis but also stomach cancer from tomato skins adhering to the lining of the stomach!)
The tomato, as I see it, is an enormous, shiny berry. And, in fact it is.
Tomatoes belong to the genus Lycopersicon, which is in the same family, Solanaceae, as potatoes. The resemblance betwixt leaves and flowers of potato and tomato plants seems to validate this taxonomic grouping.
The tomato still grows wild in the Peruvian Andes, the land of its origin, but the small, wild tomato does not bear a great deal of resemblance to the red, plump and juicy fruit that we use in so many hot & cold dishes. According to most tomato pundits, Cortez discovered the red devils growing in Montezuma's gardens and brought seeds back to Europe where they were planted as ornamental vines but never eaten.
Most likely the first variety to reach Europe was yellow in color, since in Spain and Italy they were known as pomi d'oro, meaning yellow apples. Italy was the first to embrace and cultivate the tomato outside South America.
We French, because we can, referred to the tomatoes as pommes d'amour, or love apples, as they thought in those days to have some kind of aphrodisiacal properties. How wrong were they! Missed the oyster's zinc content by a mile!
In 1897, some soup mogul named Joseph Campbell came out with condensed tomato soup, a move that set the company on the road to wealth as well as, several decades later, further enhancing Andy Warhol's career to the general public.
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