Tomato
The tomato was first domesticated by the Aztecs, which makes sense given its usage in guacamole [1]. In 1519, Hernan Cortès reached the Mexican coast. Once contact was made with the Aztecs by Cortès, the tomato was widely distributed in Spain and across Europe [2].
This is evident from the tomato’s appearance in Pietro Mattioli’s Discorsi on Dioscorides’ Materia Medica (first image on left). Pietro Mattioli was a botanist living in the 16th century. He added descriptions of plants to the Materia Medica (written in the 1st century), as well as added new plants, like the tomato. Mattioli’s book includes the first representation of the tomato in Europe. This work suggests that the tomato that first appeared in Europe was a yellow tomato because of how the tomato is painted as well as his reference to the golden apple (“poma aurea”).
The image shown to the left specifically, comes from a German edition of the text, published in 1590. This was a print coming from a woodblock done by Johann Feyerabend. The black ink was put on the subtracted wood engraving with the color added afterwords. It depicts the tomato plant and its various parts and phases, showing a flower, the fruit, and the leaves. It’s unclear what the larger, more elongated object is in the lower right corner. I would assume that it is a tomato as well, given no evidence to the contrary, but it is unclear. The work also shows the inside of a tomato, with a bisection of one in the lower left corner. This image, given its context within a larger book detailing different species of plants, appears to be informational in its purpose. It gives a detailed look at what exactly a tomato would look like, to educate the reader on all its parts and help them presumably identify the plant.
The tomato appears again in John Gerard’s Generall historie of plantes. This work, published in 1597, describes “apples of love” that grow in Spain and the hot countries [3]. He writes of two different varieties of the tomato, one of a “shining red color” and another “yellow of color”, showing that the red variety of tomato that we are familiar with in the twenty-first century had become available in Europe since the Mattioli’s image was created fifty years prior [4]. The image shown in Gerard’s work, a simple drawing, is very similar to Mattioli’s, as it depicts each part of the tomato in painstaking detail; this makes for two very similar images. The two works had similar goals, to describe the plants in detail; however, Gerard focuses more on textual information, as his drawing is only a small part of the entry on tomato compared to the colored, full page illustration found in the edition of Mattioli’s Discorsi.
Gerard also details how the tomato was perceived in Europe at this time. Gerard describes the plant as having a “ranke and stinking flavor.” [5]. Gerard, however, was British, and his opinion seems to only reflect the opinion of his country at the time, for he writes that the Spaniards and in those like regions “eate the apples prepared and boiled with pepper, sald, and oyle” [6]. Gerard seems not to understand why they eat them, however as he says that the tomatoes “yeeld very little nourishment to the body” [7]. Tomatoes seem to be, during the sixteenth century, to be a food eaten specifically in Spain and those “hot”, or what we would now consider to be Mediterranean, countries like Italy.
Another English description of the tomato in Spain appears in Richard Twiss’ Travels in Portugal and Spain, also seen to the left. In this section, Twiss writes about the crops grown in Granada, a region in the south of Spain, near the Mediterranean. This description comes from late in the early modern period, in 1772-3. Twiss writes that tomatoes are “a sort of apple of a scarlet color, and of a very tart flavor” [8]. Again, tomatoes are compared to apples. This was a wide reaching analogy that also appeared in France, where tomatoes were referred to as “pommes d’amour” [9]. This name had further implications in France, where tomatoes were believed to be aphrodisiacs [10]. It is unclear whether this belief extended into other areas of Europe; in Spain, the tomatoes were referred to as “Moor’s apples”, rather than apples of love[11]. The apple analogy still held true; however, there is no reference to love. This implies that this belief did not exist in Spain, though there is no concrete evidence supporting claims one way or another.
The majority of the early modern sources that I found in researching tomatoes were not written in Spanish, but were rather secondhand accounts of British writers who were writing on their observations after having traveled in Spain. This problematizes how one can see the Spanish reaction to the tomato, as it is hard to find a firsthand account of what a Spaniard thought of the tomato. Though these Spanish sources may exist, I was unable to find mention of them in my research.
Written by Cat Gallagher.
[1] EU-SOL Website. "Tomato (Solanum Lycopersicum) - Information on Tomato - Encyclopedia of Life." Encyclopedia of Life. March 10, 2012. Accessed November 10, 2014. http://eol.org/pages/392557/overview.
[2] Kole, Chittaranjan. Vegetables. Berlin: Springer, 2007, 9.
[3] Gerard, John, and Robert Davies. The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes. London: Printed by Adam Islip Joice Norton and Richard Whitakers, 1633.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Twiss, Richard. Travels through Portugal and Spain, in 1772 and 1773 By Richard Twiss, Esq. F.R.S. With Copper-plates; and an Appendix. London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by G. Robinson, T. Becket, and J. Robson, 1775.
[9] Gerard.
[10] EU-SOL Website.
[11] Kole, 9.