Pomodoro! - book

Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, David Gentilcore (Columbia University Press, 2010)

This is an interesting book by a Professor of Early Modern History who tends to specialize in Italy. Interesting, that is, if you want to know things about food, Italy, and tomatoes in general. Given the dominant place of the tomato, tomato paste, and tomato sauce in Italian cooking you might well think the tomato has always been in Italy. It is, however, of New World origin, where wild tomatoes still grow in parts of South America. It did not arrive in Italy until the 16th century, having been brought there by the Spanish explorers. It was first regarded as a novelty, then as an ornamental, and was widely regarded at first as poisonous. In fact, it took three hundred years for the tomato to reach the tremendous importance it currently enjoys. Interestingly enough, there are still a few areas in Italy where tomatoes are of little importance.

As Gentilcore makes clear, you cannot separate the tomato from the history of Italian culture in general, especially medical beliefs, poverty (it often substituted for meat), changes in diet, attitudes to food and diet over time, and botanical developments, nor can the rise of the humble tomato be understood apart from the history of pasta as a foodstuff, and the rise of food preservation in general that was/is, in turn, intimately related to the changing varieties of tomatoes that have been developed. I, for one, was not completely aware of the nuances involved in tomatoes grown for paste as opposed to juice, or sauce as opposed to being canned whole, and tomatoes to be eaten fresh, and so on. Not only that, but there are incredible nuances of flavor involved in tomatoes, differences that clods like me are not even aware exist. The creation of pizza also features prominently in this history, especially by way of spreading the use of tomatoes to a wider public.

As tomatoes have a definite growing season, early forms of preservation were both time-consuming and labor intensive. Women strained tomatoes to eliminate the skins and seeds, the result was then spread out on boards to dry and eventually rolled up to be used as paste throughout the rest of the year. This, and making sauce, was a ritual engaged in by virtually all Italian families every year at the end of the growing season, a custom that survived in America for quite a long time as Italian Americans tended to be suspicious of canned tomatoes when they first began to appear. Green tomatoes were hung so as to continue to ripen into fall and winter as long as possible. Naturally, the invention of canning was an incredible boon to those who depended upon tomatoes and brought about important changes in the way tomatoes were grown and processed. Large tomato farms were not possible until canning became commonplace, and tomatoes were not commercialized substantially until then as well.

The author has done his research well, tracing the first appearances of the tomato in paintings and prose, and especially in the earliest cookbooks, and also considering the influences of Spain and France on the preparation and cooking of tomatoes. The concluding chapter is appropriately titled “The Tomato Conquest,” as the result of this history has established the tomato as the premier vegetable not only of Italy but of most of the rest of the world as well (not bad for what is actually a fruit). This conquest has not come about without a dark side. The move to huge tomato farms has at times been plagued by a criminal element and has also encouraged the use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that are not good for nature or the soil over time. The Italian government has at times intervened in the growing of tomatoes, not always for the better, as during the Fascist regime of Mussollini. But the tomato can truly say, “we’ve come a long way, baby.” Is there anyone these days who has not heard of and most probably eaten pasta al pomodoro?