If someone looked in your kitchen right now, there’s a good chance they’d find a tomato. It’s the third-most popular vegetable, according to the Foundation for Fresh Produce, a trade organization that tracks and promotes fruit and vegetable sales in the United States. You’ll find it tucked in sandwiches, simmered into sauces, tossed in salads, grilled, and roasted.
A Slow Rise to Fame
The tomato is native to South America. Its wild cousin, the currant tomato (Solanum pimpinellifolium), offers tiny plump red fruit about the size of a fingernail. The Aztecs and Mayans cultivated the tomato. It flavored sauces and stews and was often served with chiles and native spices.In the early 16th century, Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World in search of gold and treasures. They collected many plants, including the tomato, and brought them home to Europe. While tomatoes were a staple of Mesoamerican cuisine, European cooks would take nearly 300 years to widely adopt them. It took them another century to become popular.
The vibrant green tomato plants with their tiny, plump fruits resembled a plant more familiar to Europeans: Belladonna, also known as deadly nightshade. Before modern medicine, experienced herbalists and physicians used the plant as a muscle relaxant and to soothe violent, spasmodic coughs. But, true to its name, the plant could be deadly, causing rapid heartbeat, hallucinations, and, eventually, respiratory failure.
So, in the first two centuries of its introduction to Europe, people approached the plant with an understandable trepidation. Nevertheless, southern Europe’s warm, sunny climate proved hospitable. By the late 18th century, the crop became popular in Spain and southern Italy, where it flavored various regional dishes. It took longer yet, for the rest of the continent to catch on. Tomatoes don’t grow well in northern Europe’s cool, damp climate.
Most early American cookbooks omit references to tomatoes, outside of catsup, until about the late 19th century. It took an influx of Italian immigrants to popularize the tomato in U.S. cookery, and even then, it wasn’t without controversy.
As tomatoes grew in popularity, businessmen began to import them in huge quantities, but there was a catch. Beginning in 1883, vegetables were subject to stiff tariffs, but fruits were not. Naturally, businessmen keen to avoid expensive tariffs imported tomatoes as fruits. Indeed, they are fruits, botanically speaking, but they are typically used in savory dishes like vegetables. Eager to collect tariffs, port authorities classified them as vegetables. The argument over whether tomatoes were vegetables or fruits bubbled over in the case of Nix v. Hedden, which reached the Supreme Court in 1893. The court ruled, perhaps unsurprisingly, in favor of port authorities, creating a sort of legal fiction. While any botanist will tell you that tomatoes are fruits, they are legally vegetables.
Embracing the Harvest
Research on tomatoes has only expanded since then. In addition to vitamin C, they’re a powerful source of many other antioxidants, including lycopene, which is of keen interest to researchers. A 2022 systematic review suggests it has potent anticancer effects. Cooking tomatoes concentrates lycopene, and partnering it with fat helps your body absorb it more easily. The timeless pairing of tomatoes with olive oil is not only delicious but also super nutritious.If you’re keen to take advantage of tomatoes’ culinary and health benefits, look for plump, slightly firm fruits that yield slightly when pressed. Plum tomatoes are meaty and work best for sauces and roasting, while larger beefsteak varieties taste delicious sliced and served with salt and pepper or added to salads and sandwiches. When buying canned tomato products, look for those that contain minimal additives beyond salt and citric or ascorbic acid, which helps preserve them.
