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1 A Solanaceous history or mythology The Tomato, Capsicum, Chilli and Eggplant are all members of the
Potato or Nightshade family known botanically as the Solanaceae family. Many of the 90
genera have toxic alkaloids or solanins in their leaves and fruits which is why the Tomato
had a very slow introduction to our dining tables. Today it's hard to imagine any of the
world's great cuisines without Tomatoes, or without Potatoes, or the Chilli Pepper. Yet
these 'essential' fruits, vegetables and condiments are now so much a part of European and
Asian cooking that it would be easy to imagine that they have been used since antiquity.
The Spanish Conquistadors brought back more than silver and gold from the plundered Aztecs
and Mayans of South and Central America in the early sixteenth century. The Tomato and its
relatives the Chillies and Bell Peppers originated in what is now Peru and Ecuador and by
the time the Spanish were venturing in the region they were already being cultivated in
Mexico and Central America. Isabella I, Queen of Spain had many treasures laid at her feet
but I would imagine the "Xitomate" seeds from the New World colony of Mexico,
barely raised her plucked eyebrows. They didn't raise many eyebrows at all until 1554,
when the first reference in print appears. From Gerard's Herbal of 1597 and even Marcus
Woodward's revision of it in 1636, we get the impression that the English gardener had not
exactly fallen under the influence of the "Apple of Love" to which they had
ascribed the Latinised name Poma Amoris for the red fruited variety and Pomum
Aureum for the "Golden Apples". The French had named them Pommes d'amour
, literally the "Apple of Love", but it was only the Spanish and the
Italians who called it "Pomodoro" the "Golden Apple", where it was
regarded seriously as food in the sixteenth century.
Gerard observed that ...
"In Spain and those hot Regions they use to eat the
Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt and oil: but they yield very little
nourishment to the body, and the same naught and corrupt." (sic.)
Well John Gerard you could have been right, but we've grown
to love them and so have a billion others all over the world in the twentieth century.
Although the bucolic peasants of Portugal, Spain and the
disparate Italian states in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries grew the Tomato and
Chilli, it was not until the French Revolution in 1783 that the culinary acceptance of the
Tomato in Europe was completed. The patriotic Republican citizens of Paris who wore the
Red Cap as a mark of faith in the Republic, were addressed on one occasion by a zealous
chef who suggested that the faithful should eat red food to demonstrate their fealty. The
Tomato was known to be popular with southern French, Italians and Spanish but was a food
not recommended by the French Aristocracy. It quickly became the fruit of choice to the
Republican masses and came to be served as stewed side dishes and as summer salads. With
the French culinary acceptance, the Tomato never looked back, taken on a wave of colonial
migration into South Asia and Asia Minor.
I'd doubt if the First Fleet to Sydney Cove had Tomato seed
on board, because it wasn't until the mid 1840's that they became popular in America and
England. The First Fleet admittedly provisioned in Rio de Janeiro en route to the new
colony and would certainly have been exposed to the fresh fruits by the Portuguese traders
who were growing and eating Tomatoes by then. If only the provisioners had known that
their scurvy could have been combated by eating Tomatoes, due to its high vitamin C
content, not to mention the vitamin B and K. Plus being an annual, they would have
produced a good source of vitamins long before their young citrus trees fruited in the
colony of New South Wales.
A popular book for early gardeners in my 'colony' was
"The Amateur Gardener for South Australia", by E.B. Heyne third edition 1881
which the modern day Heyne's Nurseries family business reproduced in a facsimile edition
in 1979. In it Tomatoes are surprisingly mentioned as subordinate to Capsicums. It seems
the Chillies and a small Cherry Pepper, as well as Birdseye Peppers were quite popular
along with the long and heart-shaped Capsicums. The latter sounds very much like what we
know as Sweet Capsicums and the Americans call Bell Peppers. Eggplants or Aubergines to
our European readers are mentioned for curiosity and Herr Heyne states that they are
mainly only grown in America. He'd obviously not travelled through the Indian Empire's
Punjab, Scinde (Sind) and Baluchistan or through any of the Ottoman Empire or he'd have
had a very different opinion. I think the Eggplant became more common as a home garden
vegetable in the warmer Australian states, at least in inner suburban migrant suburbs,
with the first wave of Greek and Italian immigrants in the 1920's. While Ernst Heyne
acknowledged that he was able to supply a great many varieties of Tomatoes as seed and
seedlings, he maintained that most of them "are more curious than useful and most
growers here prefer the old Large Red, which is exceedingly prolific and
well-flavoured". The relatively small and dismissive entry in Heyne's book suggests
that Tomatoes were not the natural occupants of the home garden that they are today. I
guess the modern refrigerator had a lot to do with that. Prior to its invention one can
imagine that the Tomato would not have had a very long shelf life. Commercial growers were
restricted by its inability to travel to market in a firm condition, so they picked green.
That has been overcome, much to our chagrin by cultivars which have tougher skins and can
be kept in cold store for months on end. Then when they are removed they can be hastily
'ripened' be being gassed with Ethylene. Incidentally Ethylene is a component of coal gas,
but it is also emitted naturally from many fruits as a ripening catalyst in the normal
process of plant metabolism. The Apple gives off particularly high concentrations of
Ethylene in storage, so much so that you cannot store Apples and green Tomatoes in the
same cold room or the Tomatoes will prematurely ripen! Native Orchid growers use the
decaying skins of ripe bananas, which also emit Ethylene, in their potting mixtures to
force Lyperanthus species into flower. Under natural conditions the Fire Orchid is
a shy flowering plant and only flowers after a bushfire, when natural Ethylene is released
from the soil. We are talking about infinitesimally small quantities of Ethylene by the
way, in the range 0.1 to 1.0 parts per million. It is also believed that following insect
attack some plants can release their own Ethylene at up to 20 times the required
concentrations and this can cause a chain reaction akin to the production of antibiotics
in the human metabolism.
There's little doubt that the refrigerator for storing, the
microwave oven for rapid meal preparation and home de-hydrators for drying home garden
produce have made the Tomato very popular. In the market place we also cannot overlook the
huge influence that our European and Asian migrants have had on the Tomato's popularity in
Australian kitchens either.
On a more sobering note, our strict plant quarantine laws
have seen the influx of European Tomato cultivars and selected forms illegally introduced
to Australia, dwindle to a trickle. The importance of maintaining and observing the plant
quarantine laws in Australia should not be over-looked since they protect a most valuable
resource of virus free seed, which is the envy of the European and North American seed
industry. Not just Tobacco Leaf Mosaic Virus which has decimated foreign Tomato and
Lettuce crops, but many other seed-borne viruses which effect Onions, Carrots and all of
the Brassicaceous crops such as Cauliflower, Cabbage and Kohlrabi. We have a fledgling
vegetable seed industry in Australia which could be a billion dollar industry within a
decade. It's simply not worth being tempted to import vegetable seed of any sort. The
importation of Tomato seed even from New Zealand, where we have the Australia-New Zealand
Closer Economic Relationship Agreement, to facilitate free trade on most items, is still
however illegal. |
