The Tomato

Since starting a DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stopping Hypertension) eating style I've gotten into the habit of posting recipes for the meals I've eaten that past week. It's been great! But when I began this blog, I had hopes that I would be able to write and reflect on the methods of cooking, the history of certain foods and their culinary accessories, and gain more experience in the field of food photography.

Well, I've certainly been able to post a lot of pictures. I am grateful for my handy little Canon Power Shot. It makes my life so much more exciting and adventurous, both inside the kitchen and out.

For the last year or so, I've been posting my photos on Etsy. This last week, one of my food images made the cut.

Check out "Let's Make Salsa" and a "At Home in the Kitchen," a treasury (an Etsy collage) inspired by this photograph.
















When I was younger, I remember learning that tomatoes were once thought to be poisonous because of their bright red color. I was also correctly instructed that a tomato was in fact a fruit, not a vegetable. To brush up on my tomato lore, I mosied on over to Wikipedia where I was not disappointed. [Please note that Wikipedia is not an academically-reliable source, but a super fun place to glean random and sometimes-useful information].

The Tomato, a History

The Tomato, a member of the nightshade family, is botanically a fruit, it is considered a vegetable for culinary purposes. Tomatoes originate from South America. The fruit was transplanted to Europe by either the Spanish explorer Cortés in 1521 when he captured the Aztec city of Tenochtítlan, or by the infamous Christopher Columbus in 1493. Regardless, the earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in an herbal handbook written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist, who named it pomo d’oro, or "golden apple."

Tomatoes grew easily in Mediterranean climates, and began being cultivated the 1540s. It was probably eaten shortly after it was introduced, and was certainly being used as food by the early 17th century in Spain. The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, though the author had apparently obtained these recipes from Spanish sources. In certain areas of Italy, such as Florence, however, the fruit was used solely as a tabletop decoration before it was incorporated into the local cuisine in the late 17th or early 18th century. ^[3]


I hope you've enjoyed that brief history lesson and artsy endeavor.
Go find a tomato and eat it!