Hiya, Tomato

It’s so hard to imagine Italian food without tomato sauce that it comes as a shock to learn that salsa di pomodoro, salsa marinara and the rest are recent innovations. No Italian cookbook recorded a tomato sauce recipe until well into the 19th Century.

Italians have been eating tomatoes much longer than they have been making sauce out of them. The people of Florence were enjoying them within a couple of decades after Columbus’ voyages, but they weren’t eating red tomatoes; they were cutting up green tomatoes for frittata or breading and frying them, as they still do. That’s right--fried green tomatoes are Italian.

But why didn’t Italians--or anybody else in Europe--eat ripe tomatoes? It may have to do with why tomatoes were called “love apples” (pommes d’amour in French, pomi d’amore in Italian).

We think of the Renaissance as an enlightened period of reborn Greek and Roman learning, but it was also a time when educated people believed deeply in magic. In fact, they believed in magic partly because the Greeks and Romans had. Like the ancients, Renaissance scholars believed that many objects had occult (“talismanic”) powers, the nature of which was signaled by the appearance of the object itself. This belief was known as the “doctrine of the signatures.”

If you looked at a ripe tomato for signatures of its talismanic powers, you’d see a vegetable with tender, satiny skin (far more like human skin than any vegetable’s) and soft, yielding flesh. Combined with its lurid red color, this gave people the idea that the powers of the tomato were erotic. It may be that people thought that green tomatoes--not yielding, not red--hadn’t developed their aphrodisiac qualities yet, and were therefore safe to eat.

Maybe. And maybe there’s a simpler answer. Green tomato slices look like, and the Italians cooked them like, eggplant, a cousin of the tomato that was already well known in Italy. It may have taken a while to think of a good way to use ripe tomatoes, with their unique mushy texture and faintly sweet-sour juices.

So what did Italian cooks put on pasta and scaloppine instead of tomato sauce in those days? Wine sauces and grated cheese, mostly.