The Colombian Exchange: The Tomato

Before the year 1600, no recipes existed—anywhere—for these: spaghetti with tomato sauce, Caprese salad, red gazpacho, tabbouleh, Israeli salad, chicken tikka masala, fried green tomatoes, cream of tomato soup, ketchup, pico de gallo, chicken paprikash or, alas, the tomato sandwich.

When I give talks on the history of Italian cuisine and mention that there were eons in the kitchens of Rome before the Italians figured out what to do with the tomato, few believe me.

‘Twas the Maya who first figured out what to do with the tomato 2,000 years before the year 1600, but that seems harder to swallow than anything from Chef Boyardee.

In truth, the tomato is the great American vegetable. (Botanically it is a fruit, a berry, though culinarily we consider it a vegetable.)

The tomato got to Europe (and then to the Levant) in the holds of ships sailing East after Columbus, and then to the Pacific and into Asia and India via the Philippines and the Spanish conquering westerly from the New World. It is part of the Colombian Exchange, that vast interchange of foods that the globe experienced only after 1492.

The North American colonies didn’t even obtain the tomato from its native (what we now call) Mexico; it came to us from British settlers here. And from the likes of Thomas Jefferson, who planted tomatoes at Monticello in 1781.

The first cookbook from the Italian peninsula to mention tomatoes as an ingredient dates to 1692 and was from the so-called Kingdom of Naples, for all intents and purposes a Spanish territory. Long into the 19th century, for many Europeans including Italians, the tomato was an ornamental bush, often grown indoors for its aromatic leaves. It was not food.

But, mamma mia, did that change when people got over their fear of it (it’s a member of the oft-poisonous nightshade family) and started eating it. Globally, it is now the second most popular “vegetable” after the potato, and a foodstuff extraordinarily high in glutamate for that umami, savory-juicy taste that keeps us baptizing other foods with ketchup. (It also is very high in vitamin C and in the antioxidant carotenoid lycopene.)

The tomato is just so dang delicious when plucked off its aromatic bush or vine come August or September, bitten into, and its sweet-tart jelly run down your chin. Few fruits of the garden contain so much sugar or electrifying acidity; they’re magic.

Cooking tips for tomatoes:

- Removing the skin, seeds and jelly, a common practice, before cooking raw tomatoes results in concentrating the fruit’s sugars. Keep that in mind when balancing tastes; perhaps putting some of the jelly into the pot might be a wise idea.

- It’s long been known that adding a tad of both sugar and acid (say, a squeeze of lemon) to a tomato-based dish ratchets up the intensity of overall tomato flavor.

- You also might consider adding a few tomato leaves, should you have any (especially homegrown) to your tomato sauce or masala. The prominent oil glands on the leaves contain enzymes that also intensify overall tomato flavor. Tomato leaves are tender, fragrant and eminently edible.

- Do not refrigerate fresh tomatoes; that doesn’t just retard flavor development, it kills it. Allow them to ripen further on the counter. If, in order to avoid spoilage, you do refrigerate a fully ripe tomato, bring it back to life outside the refrigerator for a day or two. It will return to a semblance of its old self.

- The salt and preservative calcium chloride in many canned (especially cut-up) tomatoes isn’t dangerous at all, but it firms up the cell walls of the tomato and keeps the mash from becoming mushy. But it keeps doing that even when the canned tomatoes are cooked, interfering with the breakdown of the tomatoes into a sauce-like form. If you want smooth, go for processed tomatoes free of forms of calcium.

All recipes in this series on foods of the Colombian Exchange come from places where the foodstuff “landed.” In this case, the Israeli-born chef Yotam Ottolenghi, in his book “Plenty,” offers a fresh and simple salad using oven-dried tomatoes.

Lettuce Salad
Serves 4.

Ingredients
For the dressing:
1 garlic clove garlic, crushed
1 1/2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon grapeseed oil (or other neutral oil)
Salt and black pepper
For the salad:
1 head butter lettuce, leaves separated
1/2 head curly lettuce, leaves separated
1 head radicchio, leaves separated
3 green onions, green and white parts, sliced thinly on a sharp angle
20 radishes, trimmed and cut into 1/8-inch-thick slices
2 cups semi-dried tomatoes, whole or roughly torn (see recipe below)
2 tablespoons capers, whole if small or very roughly chopped

Directions
Make the dressing: In a small bowl, whisk together the ingredients, being quite generous with the salt and pepper. Wash the lettuce leaves, dry well and keep whole or tear into large pieces. Place in a large mixing bowl and add the radicchio, green onions, radishes and tomatoes.

Just before serving, pour the dressing over the salad and toss gently. Transfer to a large mixing bowl and sprinkle the capers over the top.

RECIPE: Semi-dried Tomatoes
Makes 20 pieces.

Ingredients
5 plum tomatoes
8 thyme sprigs
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
Salt

Directions
Preheat the oven to 275 degrees. Quarter the tomatoes vertically and place skin-side down on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Arrange the thyme sprigs on top of them. Drizzle over the olive oil and balsamic vinegar and sprinkle with some salt. Roast for 1 and 1/2 hours, or until semi-dried. Discard the thyme and allow to cool down slightly.