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Lycopersicon lycopersicum L. (Solonaceae)
Turkish: domates; French: tomate, pomme d'amour ; Italian: pomodoro; Spanish: tomate; Greek: dolmades; Arabic: tamatim, tumata
Plant origin
When Spanish arrived in the New World, they found the tomato to be already a well-developed cultigen. The plant was taken to Europe in the 16th century and later disseminated to many parts of the world. But the origin and early history of the cultivated tomato in the Americas are not definitive.
Plant history
Once the conquest of Mexico was completed by Hernando Cortés by 1523, the tomato was brought to Europe. Seville, which dominated the American trade, was probably the first place in Europe where tomatoes were grown. Although it is sometimes claimed that the tomato originated in Peru, and its wild ancestor did, it was in Mexico that the tomato was first domesticated. Spanish chroniclers of the New World do mention the tomato. In his The General History of the Things of New Spain, Bernardino de Sahagun mentions all kinds and colors of tomatoes being sold at the Tlateloco market in Tenochtitlan in 1519.
The first description of the tomato in the Mediterranean was in 1544 by the Italian botanist Pierandrea Mattioli. He described a yellow-fruited variety, and it has been suggested that this variety is responsible for the Italian name for tomato, pomodoro (apple of gold). It is not clear how this word was transformed into the apple of love (pomme d'amour), as the tomato was known to Provence, although the fruit may have taken on aphrodisiac properties in the minds of some people. At first the tomato was only an ornamental plant in Mediterranean gardens, because growers recognized it as a member of the nightshade family, which included plants such as mandrake that were known as poisonous plants. The tomato arrived in Italy before 1550, in either Naples or Palermo, then under Spanish rule. Tomatoes required extra watering and therefore it seems likely that the first use of tomato plant in Italy was as an ornamental in gardens, as it
was in Spain, perhaps at the Neapolitan or Palermitan villas of the Spanish viceroys. In any case, although the tomato arrived in Italy shortly after the discovery of America, it did not become generally accepted into Italian cuisine until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the time of the tomato's arrival in Italy, pasta was still being made in Naples in the centuries'-old Arab-influenced style of using lots of sugar and cinnamon, as late as the publication of Latini in 1692. Not until a century after Latini, in 1790 does the spaghetti and tomato sauce of today begin to emerge. The history of the arrival of the tomato in other Mediterranean countries is not known at this time, but it seems likely that the tomato had dispersed everywhere by 1600. One botanist credits that the Turks with the diffusion of the tomato in the eastern Mediterranean. The Turks also brought the chile pepper to Hungary possibly as early as 1526, and therefore this seems likely.
