However, a large percentage of Europeans feared the tomato early on. A nickname for the fruit was the “poison apple” because it was thought that people got sick and died after eating them. In reality, it was the pewter plates used by the aristocracy that caused the malady as the acid in tomatoes caused lead to leach out from the pewter, resulting in many deaths from lead poisoning. Other herbalists and botanists equated tomatoes with deadly nightshades and mandrake, a plant surrounded in lore and thought to possess magical and aphrodisiac properties. Hence, tomatoes were also known as “love apples.” Another nickname for the plant, “golden apple,” suggests that the first varieties of tomatoes brought to Europe were yellow or orange in color. Today, the Italian name for a tomato is still Pomodoro.
The Spanish introduced the tomato to the Caribbean and the Philippines, spreading from there to other regions of Asia. According to culinary historian Andrew Smith, the earliest known cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, with the author identifying the recipe as Spanish. Tomatoes took much longer to be accepted in Britain, where the plant was considered foul smelling and poisonous, and grown mostly as an ornamental for the beauty of its fruit. It wasn’t until the 19th century that tomatoes were accepted in the United States, slowly. Some scholars credit Thomas Jefferson and his experimental garden for the propagation of tomato cookery; others state that the vegetable canning industry that boomed after the Civil War is the reason for the widespread acceptance.
According to Modern Farmer, cherry, pear and egg-shaped tomatoes were common at the time, but larger tomatoes tended to be lumpy and ridged. Alexander Livingston, an Ohio farmer considered the father of the modern tomato, changed all that when he started a seed company in 1850. “There was not in the United States at the time an acre of tomatoes from which a bushel of uniformly smooth tomatoes could be gathered,” he wrote in Livingstone and the Tomato. He introduced his first hybrid tomato, the Paragon, in 1870. He called it “the first perfectly and uniformly smooth tomato ever introduced to the American Public.”
Today, home gardeners and urban farmers are favoring those odd colored, misshapen fruits for their unique color and superb taste. Heirloom varieties like Cherokee Purple, Brandywine, Black Krim, Yellow Pear, Green Zebra and Mortgage Lifter are open-pollinated varieties popular in our Central Texas region, available in nurseries and farmers’ markets. And we know that tomatoes are not only not poisonous, but loaded with antioxidants and beneficial phytochemicals. If you’ve ever grown your own, you know there is nothing that can top a just-picked juicy tomato, still warm from the sun, with a sprinkle of sea salt. You can make a nutritious and refreshing gazpacho, or try your hand at a favorite salsa recipe. Either way you slice them, tomatoes are the most prized staple of summer, our reward for gardening in the heat of Central Texas.