Tomato
The tomato is a plant whose fruit is an edible berry that is eaten as a vegetable. The tomato is a member of the nightshade family that includes tobacco, potato, and chili peppers. It originated from western South America, and may have been domesticated there or in Mexico. It was introduced to the Old World by the Spanish in the Columbian exchange in the 16th century.
Tomato plants are vines, largely annual and vulnerable to frost, though sometimes living longer in greenhouses. The flowers are able to self-fertilise. Modern varieties have been bred to ripen uniformly red, in a process that has impaired the fruit's sweetness and flavor. There are thousands of cultivars, varying in size, color, shape, and flavor. Tomatoes are attacked by many insect pests and nematodes, and are subject to diseases caused by viruses and by mildew and blight fungi.
The tomato has a strong savoury umami flavor, and is an important ingredient in cuisines around the world. Tomatoes are widely used in sauces for pasta and pizza, in soups such as gazpacho and tomato soup, in salads and condiments like salsa and ketchup, and in various curries. Tomatoes are also consumed as juice and used in beverages such as the Bloody Mary cocktail.
Naming
Etymology
The word tomato comes from the Spanish tomate, which in turn comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl . The specific name lycopersicum, meaning 'wolf peach', originated with Galen, who used it to denote a plant that has never been identified. Luigi Anguillara speculated in the 16th century that Galen's lycopersicum might be the tomato, and despite the impossibility of this identification, lycopersicum entered scientific use as a name for the fruit.Pronunciation
The usual pronunciations of tomato are and . The word's dual pronunciations were immortalized in Ira and George Gershwin's 1937 song "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off".History
The likely wild ancestor of the tomato, the red-fruited Solanum pimpinellifolium, is native to western South America, where it was probably first domesticated. The resulting domesticated plant, ancestral to the modern large-fruited tomato varieties, was probably the cherry tomato, S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme. However, genomic analysis suggests that the domestication process may have been more complex than this. S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme may have existed before domestication, while traits supposedly typical of domestication may have been reduced in that variety and then reselected in the cultivated tomato. The analysis predicts that var. cerasiforme appeared around 78,000 years ago, while the cultivated tomato originated around 7,000 years ago, with substantial uncertainty, making it unclear how humans may have been involved in the process.The Spanish first introduced tomatoes to Europe, where they became used in Spanish food. Elsewhere in Europe, its first use was ornamental, not least because it was understood to be related to the nightshades and assumed to be poisonous.
Mesoamerica
The exact date of domestication is unknown; by 500 BCE, it was already being cultivated in southern Mexico and probably other areas. The Pueblo people believed that tomato seeds could confer powers of divination. The large, lumpy variety of tomato, a mutation from a smoother, smaller fruit, originated in Mesoamerica, and may be the direct ancestor of some modern cultivated tomatoes.The Aztecs raised several varieties of tomato, with red tomatoes called xitomatl. Bernardino de Sahagún reported seeing a great variety of tomatoes in the Aztec market at Tenochtitlán : "large tomatoes, small tomatoes, leaf tomatoes, sweet tomatoes, large serpent tomatoes, nipple-shaped tomatoes", and tomatoes of all colors from the brightest red to the deepest yellow. Sahagún mentioned Aztecs cooking various sauces, some with tomatoes of different sizes, serving them in city markets: "foods sauces, hot sauces;... with tomatoes,... sauce of large tomatoes, sauce of ordinary tomatoes,..."
Spanish distribution
The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés's capture of Tenochtitlan in 1521 initiated the widespread cultural and biological interchange called the Columbian exchange; certainly the tomato was being grown in Europe within a few years of that event. The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in Pietro Andrea Mattioli's 1544 herbal. He suggested that a new type of eggplant had been brought to Italy. He stated that it was blood red or golden color when mature, and could be divided into segments and eaten like an eggplant—that is, cooked and seasoned with salt, black pepper, and oil. Ten years later Mattioli named the fruits in print as pomi d'oro, or "golden apples".After the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribbean. They brought it to the Philippines, from where it spread to southeast Asia and then the whole of Asia.
The Spanish brought the tomato to Europe, where it grew easily in Mediterranean climates; cultivation began in the 1540s. It was probably eaten shortly after it was introduced, and was certainly being used as food by the early 17th century in Spain, as documented in the 1618 play La octava maravilla by Lope de Vega with "lovelier than... a tomato in season".
China
The tomato was introduced to China, likely via the Philippines or Macau, in the 16th century. It was given the name 番茄 , as the Chinese named many foodstuffs introduced from abroad, but referring specifically to early introductions.Italy
In 1548, the house steward of Cosimo de' Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, wrote to the Medici private secretary informing him that the basket of tomatoes sent from the grand duke's Florentine estate at Torre del Gallo "had arrived safely". Tomatoes were grown mainly as ornamentals early on after their arrival in Italy. For example, the Florentine aristocrat Giovanvettorio Soderini wrote how they "were to be sought only for their beauty", and were grown only in gardens or flower beds. The tomato's ability to mutate and create new and different varieties helped contribute to its success and spread throughout Italy. However, in areas where the climate supported growing tomatoes, their habit of growing close to the ground suggested low status. They were not adopted as a staple of the peasant population because they were not as filling as other crops. Additionally, both toxic and inedible varieties discouraged many people from attempting to consume or prepare any other varieties. In certain areas of Italy, such as Florence, the fruit was used solely as a tabletop decoration, until it was incorporated into the local cuisine in the late 17th or early 18th century. The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, though the author had apparently obtained these recipes from Spanish sources.Varieties were developed over the following centuries for drying, for sauce, for pizzas, and for long-term storage. These varieties are usually known for their place of origin as much as by a variety name. For example, there is the Pomodorino del Piennolo del Vesuvio, the "hanging tomato of Vesuvius", and the well known and highly prized San Marzano tomato grown in that region, with a European protected designation of origin certification.
Britain
Tomatoes were not grown in England until the 1590s. One of the earliest cultivators was John Gerard, a barber-surgeon. Gerard's Herbal, published in 1597, and largely plagiarized from continental sources, is also one of the earliest discussions of the tomato in England. Gerard knew the tomato was eaten in Spain and Italy. Nonetheless, he believed it was poisonous. Gerard's views were influential, and the tomato was considered unfit for eating for many years in Britain and its North American colonies. By 1820, tomatoes were described as "to be seen in great abundance in all our vegetable markets" and to be "used by all our best cooks", reference was made to their cultivation in gardens still "for the singularity of their appearance", while their use in cooking was associated with exotic Italian or Jewish cuisine. For example, in Elizabeth Blackwell's A Curious Herbal, it is described under the name "Love Apple " as being consumed with oil and vinegar in Italy, similar to consumption of cucumbers in the UK. In 1963, The New York Times gave an explanation of the name 'Love Apple' as a French misreading of the Italian pomo dei Mori as pomme d'amour,.Middle East
The tomato was introduced to cultivation in the Middle East by John Barker, British consul in Aleppo. Nineteenth century descriptions of its consumption are uniformly as an ingredient in a cooked dish. In 1881, it is described as only eaten in the region "within the last forty years".United States
The earliest reference to tomatoes being grown in British North America is from 1710, when herbalist William Salmon saw them in what is today South Carolina, perhaps introduced from the Caribbean. By the mid-18th century, they were cultivated on some Carolina plantations, and probably in other parts of the Southeast. Thomas Jefferson, who ate tomatoes in Paris, sent some seeds back to America. Some early American advocates of the culinary use of the tomato included Michele Felice Cornè and Robert Gibbon Johnson. Many Americans considered tomatoes to be poisonous at this time and, in general, they were grown more as ornamental plants than as food. In 1897, W.H. Garrison stated, "The belief was once transmitted that the tomato was sinisterly dangerous." He recalled in his youth tomatoes were dubbed "love-apples or wolf-apples" and shunned as "globes of the devil".When Alexander W. Livingston began developing the tomato as a commercial crop, his aim had been to grow tomatoes smooth in contour, uniform in size, and sweet in flavor. He eventually developed over seventeen varieties. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's 1937 yearbook declared that "half of the major varieties were a result of the abilities of the Livingstons to evaluate and perpetuate superior material in the tomato." Livingston's first breed of tomato, the Paragon, was introduced in 1870. In 1875, he introduced the Acme, said to be in the parentage of most cultivars for the next twenty-five years. Other early breeders included Henry Tilden in Iowa and a Dr. Hand in Baltimore.
Because of the tomato's need for heat and a long growing season, several states in the Sun Belt became major producers, particularly Florida and California. In California, tomatoes are grown under irrigation for both the fresh market and for canning and processing. The University of California, Davis's C.M. Rick Tomato Genetics Resource Center maintains a gene bank of wild relatives, monogenic mutants and genetic stocks. Research on processing tomatoes is also conducted by the California Tomato Research Institute in Escalon, California. In California, growers have used a method of cultivation called dry-farming, especially with Early Girl tomatoes. This technique encourages the plant to send roots deep to find existing moisture.