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From Wolf Peach to Outer Space—Tomato History & Lore
by Karan Davis Cutler
You say tuh-MAY-toe, I say tuh-MAH-toe. Or, depending on where I live, I might say tomaat or tomate or even pomodoro. And depending on when I lived, I might say love apple, Moor's apple or stinking golden apple. Or even amorous apple, which the 16th-century Dutch botanist Dodoens observed, "be of two sortes, one red and the other yellowe, but in all other poyntes they be lyke."
Or I might have called the tomato a wolf peach, from its genus name Lycopersicon, a reflection of a long-held belief that the tomato—a member of the nightshade family—was poisonous. That view was largely the result of Renaissance botanists, who, relying on Greek and Roman texts, misidentified and misclassified the tomato. Their errors were copied by popular 16th-century English herbalists, such as John Gerard, who saw no contradiction in writing that while Spaniards and Italians ate tomatoes, the plant was nevertheless "of ranke and stinking savour."
In fact, people were eating tomatoes without fatal consequences well before the fruit made its way to Europe early in the 1500s. Native to the coastal highlands of western South America, the tomato emigrated to Central America and then to Mexico. The Aztecs, according to a contemporary account, mixed tomatoes with chilies and ground squash seeds, a combination that sounds suspiciously like the world's first recipe for salsa.
Spanish conquistadors carried seeds across the Atlantic, where tomatoes soon flourished in Mediterranean gardens and kitchens. Southern Europeans didn't waste any time taking culinary advantage of the tomato—the first cookbook to contain tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692—but suspicion of tomatoes persisted into the 19th century in both England and the United States.
The tomato's reputation was partially rescued among English-speaking peoples in the 1750s, when esculentum, which means edible, was designated its species name. About the same time, tomato recipes began to appear in British cookbooks, the first in a revised 1758 edition of Hannah Glasse's popular The Art of Cookery (though the revisor may have been hedging her/his bets, for the entry is titled "To Dress Haddock after the Spanish Way").
The early American colonists, English to the core, not only brought tomatoes back to this continent but also imported all the popular prejudices about them. While a few adventuresome gardeners grew tomatoes—Thomas Jefferson, who first mentions planting them in 1809, is the most prominent—they were not widely cultivated until after 1830. Suspicion gave way, however, and tomatoes were included in American cookbooks, such as The Cook's Own Book (1832), and in garden books, such as the Shaker Gardener's Manual (1843) and The Gardener's Text-Book (1851).
Alas, the well-known tale of Robert Gibbon Johnson wolfing down a bushel of tomatoes on the Salem, New Jersey, courthouse steps in 1820—a manly effort to prove they were edible—has no basis in fact, according to Andrew Smith in The Tomato in America (1994). Too bad, for it's a wonderful story—so good that CBS dramatized it in 1949 in the "You Are There" series—creating the peculiar situation of our being there while Johnson wasn't.
The Landreth Seed Company, which once extended George Washington 30 days on his unpaid bill, is usually credited as being the first company to sell tomato seeds. One of the first is more accurate, but it is true that Landreth's, established in 1784, was first among present-day seed houses to sell tomato seeds. By the end of the Civil War, tomatoes were fairly common fare in American gardens, and the first Fanny Farmer cookbook, which appeared in the late 1890s, included recipes for tomato soups, salads and sauces without cautions or reservations.
Improving tomatoes was just a step behind eating and selling them. Farm magazines urged readers to keep a sharp eye out for the best fruits and to save their seeds. 'Trophy', a large, smooth round tomato, was one of the best early selections; its seeds, which are still available today through Seed Savers Exchange (SSE), sold for a remarkable 25¢ each. Horticulturist Fearing Burr listed two dozen tomatoes in Field and Garden Vegetables of America (1865), including 'Yellow Pear', a variety popular with discriminating 20th-century gardeners. The tomato was "universally relished," Burr wrote, but "to a majority of tastes, the tomato's flavor is not at first particularly agreeable; but by those accustomed to its use, it is esteemed one of the best, as it is also reputed to be one of the most healthful, of all garden vegetables."
If the controversy over the tomato being toxic or benign weren't enough, an additional debate has centered over whether the tomato is a vegetable or a fruit. In 1887, the question went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court in Nix v. Hedden. The real issue was money and protection for American growers: if tomatoes were vegetables, they could be taxed when imported under the Tariff Act of 1883. The Court's botanical knowledge was sound—tomatoes are specialized reproductive structures that contain seeds, in other words, fruits—but it chose utility over botanical technicalities and ruled on the side of American farmers:
Botanically speaking tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people...all these are vegetables, which are grown in kitchen gardens, and ...are usually served at dinner in, with or after the soup, fish or meats...and not, like fruits generally, as dessert.
John Nix, the New York tomato importer, had to pay. The Court's pragmatism was echoed in 1981, when the director of USDA's Division of Food and Nutrition Service officially declared that ketchup was a vegetable as part of the Reagan Administration's effort to justify cuts in the school-lunch program.
Fruit or vegetable—plant breeders have been changing the tomato ever since it cleaned up its reputation. Thousands of varieties have been produced, including the uniform cultivars that launched the Campbell Soup Company (which now sells more than 300 million cans of tomato soup each year). The latest breeding achievement—or mischief, some would say—is 'Flavr Savr', a commercial variety with tweaked genes developed by Calgene Fresh, Inc. Taking advantage of something known as antisense genetics, Calgene scientists were able to suppress the gene that controls softening. 'Flavr Savr' tomatoes ripen but remain firm, allowing commercial producers to delay picking.
What's next for America's favorite vegetable? The sky's not the limit, since the tomato—well, tomato seeds—were blasted into outer space in April, 1984. For six years, more than 12.5 million 'Rutgers California Supreme' seeds circled earth aboard a satellite, then were retrieved by the crew of the Columbia. Back on earth, the seeds were distributed to more than 3 million school children and 64,000 teachers in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and 34 foreign countries.
There are no rampaging killer tomatoes to report, though some recipients—an unrepresentative sample—suggested that space-exposed seeds germinated and initially grew slightly faster than earth-bound seeds, and that plants from space-exposed seeds had higher levels of chlorophyll and carotenes than the homebodies. Over time, however, the terrestrial tomatoes equaled their more adventuresome counterparts, and overall, no significant differences were found between the earthlings and the space travelers.
The experiments continue: SSE members are making third-, fourth- and fifth-generation NASA seeds available to home gardeners. And the seeds-in-space study, while it revealed no worrisome mutations, wasn't without casualties. "Dear NASA," wrote one participant. "My name is Matt. I am in grade 2. I really enjoy growing my plants. Here are my results. My earth seed did not grow. My space seed grew but it fell off my desk. It died."
Karan Davis Cutler gardens on 15 acres in northern Vermont. An award-winning writer, newspaper columnist, and magazine editor, she is the author of Burpee: The Complete Vegetable and Herb Gardener(Macmillan, 1997) and is currently working on The New England Gardener's Book of Lists, forthcoming from Taylor Publishing in 1999.