How the Tomato Became Italian

Dante never saw a tomato. Neither did Leonardo, and Michelangelo, who died in 1564, could at most have glimpsed one growing as a curiosity in a collector's garden. The fruit that now stands for Italy on every menu in the world is an American plant, first recorded in Europe in 1544. It spent its first two centuries in Italy under botanical suspicion, met pasta in a printed recipe, by the credit usually given, only in 1839, and became Italian in the world's eyes largely through a Turin canning factory and four million emigrants. Like the tale that Marco Polo brought pasta home from China, the myth of the eternal Italian tomato dissolves the moment anyone checks a date. The real history is better, and it is documented line by line.

An Aztec plant with a Tuscan name

The tomato's wild ancestors grew in the Andes, but the plant was domesticated in Mesoamerica, where the Aztecs cultivated it and called it tomatl, the root of nearly every European name for it except the Italian one. It crossed the Atlantic in Spanish hands sometime after the conquest of Mexico in 1521, and its first appearance in European print is Italian: in 1544 the Sienese physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli described the new fruit in his commentary on Dioscorides, and in the 1554 edition he gave it the name that stuck, pomi d'oro, the golden apples. The name is a clue in itself. The first tomatoes Italy knew were very likely yellow, and Italian stands apart from the tomatl family of names - French tomate, English tomato, Spanish tomate - because Italy named the thing before anyone there had a use for it.

Two centuries of suspicion

Naming a plant is not eating it. Sixteenth-century botanists filed the tomato where it belongs, among the nightshades, kin to mandrake and belladonna, and that kinship shaped its reputation for generations. Herbals treated it as a curiosity to be looked at rather than a food to be cooked, and for roughly a century and a half Italians grew tomatoes mainly as ornamentals, trained up garden trellises for the pleasure of the fruit's color. Mattioli himself recorded the exception that proves the rule: he noted that some people ate the new fruit the way they ate eggplant, fried in oil with salt and pepper. That throwaway line from the 1540s is the first European record of anyone cooking a tomato, and then the written record goes quiet on the kitchen for almost 150 years.

Naples writes the first sauce, and calls it Spanish

The tomato entered Italian cooking through Naples, and it arrived wearing a Spanish label. Naples in the seventeenth century was ruled by Spain, and Spain, holding the American trade, had a head start on cooking the new world's plants. In 1692 Antonio Latini, steward to a Spanish official in Naples, published the first volume of Lo scalco alla moderna, and in it appears the first tomato sauce printed in Italian: salsa di pomodoro alla spagnuola, tomato sauce in the Spanish style, a chopped relish of fire-roasted tomato, onion, chile and thyme served with boiled meat. It looks more like a salsa than a ragù because that is what it was, a Spanish idea passing through a Spanish court kitchen on Italian soil. Spain never gave up its older claim; the simplest Spanish tomato dish of all, bread rubbed with raw tomato (bread rubbed with raw tomato guide), still makes the point at the table.

Pasta and tomato, a late marriage

The pairing the whole world now reads as shorthand for Italy is younger than the United States Constitution. Through the eighteenth century Naples became a city of mangiamaccheroni, macaroni eaters, and street vendors sold pasta eaten out of hand, dressed with grated cheese and nothing else. The tomato was climbing the social ladder in the same city at the same time, but the two national emblems kept missing each other in print. The wedding finally has a date: Ippolito Cavalcanti, a Neapolitan aristocrat, published his Cucina teorico-pratica in 1837, and its Neapolitan-dialect appendix, expanded in the 1839 edition, carries vermicelli co le pommodore, the recipe generally credited as the first printed pasta sauced with tomato. Everything the guide to Italian pantry pasta takes for granted rests on that marriage, and the page credited with recording it first is not yet two hundred years old.

The can makes it national

A fresh tomato is a southern summer crop; a national ingredient has to survive winter in Milan. The step that turned a regional habit into a pantry staple was industrial. Nicolas Appert had worked out heat preservation in glass at the start of the nineteenth century, the same method that launched the sardine tin, a history told in the piece on how tinned fish was invented. In 1856 Francesco Cirio founded his preserving firm in Turin and built it into the company that put Italian tomatoes in cans and on trains, and eventually in export holds. Preservation changed what farmers planted: the tall, dense-fleshed, easily peeled plum tomatoes of the Agro Sarnese-Nocerino, the volcanic plain south of Vesuvius, were shaped by and for the canning line, and the San Marzano became their aristocrat. The kitchen caught up with the factory in 1891, when Pellegrino Artusi published La scienza in cucina e l'arte di mangiar bene, the cookbook that did more than any other to give newly unified Italy a shared way of eating, with the tomato threaded through it as a settled fact rather than a novelty.

The emigrants make it Italian

The last act happened mostly abroad. Some four million Italians, the great majority from the south, entered the United States between 1880 and 1920, and they carried the Neapolitan plate with them. In America the emigrants were poor in wages but rich in meat and wheat by the standards of the villages they had left, and the occasional feast dish of the old country, pasta with tomato sauce, became a weekly and then a daily table. Their demand pulled canned tomatoes and dried pasta across the Atlantic by the shipload, and in the eyes of their new neighbors the plate became the definition of Italian food itself. Italy then did what nations do with a successful export: it embraced the emblem. Spaghetti al pomodoro, a dish still rare on any Italian table in 1800, settled into its role as the national signature, and in 1996 the European Union closed the loop by granting the Pomodoro S. Marzano dell'Agro Sarnese-Nocerino its DOP, a legal declaration that this fruit, of all fruits, belongs to that soil. Four and a half centuries after Mattioli filed it among the suspect nightshades, the golden apple had papers.

The timeline, plainly

Read one way, the table is a correction. Read another, it is the more flattering story: Italy did not inherit the tomato, it argued itself into it, seed by seed, page by page, can by can, until the adoption was total. The tomato joined a southern pantry that already knew how to concentrate flavor into jars and tins, alongside the anchovies (anchovies guide), capers and olives it still cooks with, and a jar like Bianco di Napoli's organic marinara (shop Bianco di Napoli's organic marinara) is the same idea in its modern form, tomato sauce made to keep. What the labels, grades and traps on a modern tin mean is the subject of the guide to buying tomatoes, and storage and shelf life are covered in the piece on tinned tomatoes and passata. The shop is at 263 Josephine Street in Cherry Creek, Denver, and products ship nationwide from theambrosianpantry.com. The most Italian thing about the tomato is how recently it became so.

Sources & Further Reading

• David Gentilcore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (Columbia University Press)
• European Commission eAmbrosia register: Pomodoro S. Marzano dell'Agro Sarnese-Nocerino DOP
• Library of Congress: Italian immigration to the United States, 1880 to 1920
• Cirio: company history since 1856
• Casa Artusi: Pellegrino Artusi and La scienza in cucina
• The Pantry Dispatch: Marco Polo Did Not Bring Pasta from China
• The Pantry Dispatch: How Tinned Fish Was Invented