Garden Vegetable | Chef Foster: The Tale Of The Unhealthy Apple
By John Foster
KyForward contributor
Let us consider the tomato ” Lycopersicon lycopersicum, golden apple, apple of love, rose of the vegetable garden, cousin of the deadly poisonous nightshade, and the focus of every late August garden and gardener. From its extremely humble beginnings 2,000 years ago in the Andean foothills of South America to its wastrel wanderings as an ornamental plant in Europe, this marvelous fruit has seen a redemption so complete that it’s safe to say that the entire world has a love affair with this most versatile of plants.
The tomato traveled a long and sometimes arduous road to reach the peak of vegetables. It was Hernan Cortes in 1519 who saw the tomato being eaten by the Aztecs he was about to conquer, and soon after, the seeds for the plant began showing up in Spain, the Kingdom of Naples, and then in Italy.
It was in Italy in 1544 that tomatoes were first described in the writings of the naturalist Pierandrea Mattioli as a “golden apple” (most tomatoes at that time were yellowish in color) and later as “mala insana,” meaning unhealthy apple.
In fact, in Waverly Roots’ wonderful book “Food” he spends quite a few pages describing the many ways in which people tried to get rid of or disparage the fruit that finally gave a nation its culinary identity. That nation, of course, is Italy and it was the Italians who came quite quickly to embrace the cultivation, preparation and consumption of the tomato. They recognized the tomato as a ready-to-eat food, a filler, a balance of acid and sweetness, a coloring agent, and a new vegetable capable of replacing pulsed root vegetables as a viable and piquant sauce for their meats and fishes.
Perhaps it is the versatility of the tomato that has made it the romantic symbol of summer. Can you honestly say you’ve never tasted a garden tomato over the sink in your kitchen? I’ve had more than a few tomato sandwiches this summer on really good bread with nothing more than olive oil and salt and pepper. And I look forward to the later fall tomatoes that will be sweet and bursting with flavor. I’ll use them to make sauce or roast slowly and then freeze so I can enjoy a little bit of summer in January.
Tomatoes make most dishes better simply by adding color to the dish. Black beans and rice with a little salsa to spruce it up has become commonplace, and you can’t have a B.L.T. without the T (tomato).
The many varieties of tomato enable the cook to add many levels to food and highlight the richness of some dishes, such as spaghetti with meatballs, while cutting the richness of others in the complex form of a tomato sorbet used as a palate cleanser. No other garden vegetable marries itself as well to this many foods. No other vegetable lends itself to all 12 of the traditional cooking methods and still
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