Although it is hard to imagine Italian cuisine without the tomato, that juicy red fruit was not introduced to Italy until the sixteenth century; the tomato is, after all, a “New World” fruit, native to Peru and Central America where the Aztecs called it tomatl. When they returned to Europe with the fruit, Spanish explorers called it tomate, which is how the English spelt the name when they adopted it at the beginning of the seventeenth century; in the mid eighteenth century however, the English started spelling the word tomato, the final e having been replaced by an o partly to make the word look more Spanish, and partly to make it more closely resemble potato (the resemblance to potato also caused the pronunciation to change, at least in North America, from toe-mah-toe to toemay-toe). At first, the tomato was grown merely as a ornamental plant, due to the belief that the fruit was poisonous: the tomato belongs to the nightshade family and its vines are indeed toxic. By the eighteenth century, however, Europeans had realized the culinary potential of the tomato, although North Americans remained wary of the plant until the early nineteenth century. Tomatoes are sometimes called love apples because of a linguistic mix-up: the Italians occasionally called the tomato porno dei Mom, meaning apple of the Moors, because the fruit was first imported from Spain via Morocco; the Italians also sometimes called the tomato porno d’oro, meaning golden apple, because one of the varieties introduced to them was yellow. One of these two Italian names—or perhaps both—was eventually mistaken for the phrase pomme d’amour, meaning love apple, which became the plant’s English nickname in the sixteenth century.
Behold the tender, succulent fruit of a trailing plant hailing from the vibrant lands of South America, its influence now spanning across countless corners of the globe. The realm of tomatoes boasts a diverse tapestry of varieties, spanning from petite cherries to substantial orbs rivaling the grandeur of a sizable orange. These botanical wonders exhibit a breathtaking palette of hues, ranging from the classic crimson of ripe red, to the radiant shades of orange and the sun-kissed yellows.