Growing Tomatoes like an Italian

In some ways I am the wrong person to write about tomatoes. I don't love them. Not the way some people do. It's a texture thing. I love tomato sauce and tomatoes in other dishes, but I'll never be the person who just eats a tomato like an apple or a pear. 

In fact, I pretty much hated tomatoes until my first trip to Rome nearly 25 years ago. There to meet my father-in-law, I sat at a table outside in the Roman sunshine and bit into a piece of bruschetta – toasted bread topped with minced tomatoes, basil, and olive oil –  largely to not be rude. But that first bite was an awakening. What I had known as tomatoes – the grocery store varieties of the 80s and 90s – were mealy and tasteless and slimy. This bruschetta was a different experience altogether. The tomatoes had more flavor than texture. And the balance of salt and olive oil and basil – it was sublime. 

My father-in-law and I had many conversations about growing tomatoes over the years. He claimed it was Italy's volcanic soil that made their tomatoes different, and he is probably right, at least in part. The tomatoes I've eaten in Italy bear little resemblance to what we grow in North America. They are smaller, more dense, and perfectly suited to Italian cooking. Or perhaps, it's the cooking that suits the tomatoes. But they have evolved hand-in-hand over the last few centuries. 

Tomatoes are native to the Andes Mountains in South America. Indigenous peoples cultivated 'tomatl', and over time their cultivation and use spread north to Mexico which is probably where European explorers/colonizers first encountered them. When the tomato arrived in Italy sometime in the mid-1500s, the Italian Renaissance had peaked, and the country was awash in money and art and political intrigue. 

The first record of the tomato in Italy comes from 1544 in a text by Pietro Andrea Mattoli who called the fruit "pomo d'oro" (golden apple). The name eventually became the modern Italian word, "pomodoro". The tomatoes Mattoli describes were small, yellow fruits and were probably tomatillos in actuality, tomatillos having also arrived around the same time. Where tomatillos didn't find a place in Italian cooking, though, the red, ribbed tomato which Mattoli describes in a later piece of writing, did. 

Italians didn't eat the tomato right away, however. It was classified incorrectly as poisonous, so it was cultivated and used medicinally. Cosimo I de' Medici grew it in his gardens in Florence and Pisa, and indeed, his wife, Eleanor of Toledo may have brought them with her from Spain when she married him in 1539. 

The descriptions of early tomatoes in Italy are of ribbed tomatoes, probably closely related to the Zapotec tomato cultivated by the indigenous peoples of Oaxaca, Mexico. And in this video and this video from the Le Galerie degli Uffizi, Gianni Simonti, one of the historical botanists at the Boboli Gardens in Florence, discusses choosing historical tomato varieties for their reestablished vegetable gardens. One of the plants they chose was the Zapotec tomato because they suspect it is the closest to what Cosimo I de'Medici may have grown. 

But as with many European food cultures, it was probably the poor and those on the outskirts of society, possibly in Italian monastic communities,  who eventually adopted tomatoes into their cuisine first. Tomato varieties spread and gardeners cultivated hybrids which varied widely across the Italian principalities – and preferences for one variety over another became as deeply entrenched as Italian dialects, wines, and politics. It would take over 300 years for a recipe for spaghetti with tomato sauce (in 1844) – what we now consider a classic – to be published, but the tomato by then had become a staple up and down the Italian peninsula.

In those 300 years, tomatoes spread across the globe, too, becoming a keystone ingredient in a wide range of cuisines. Many tomato varieties are easy to grow, they hybridize easily, and the seeds are easy to save. Plus tomatoes are nutritious and can be preserved in a variety of ways. So their spread around the globe was relatively quick. 

One of the biggest problems with cooking with tomatoes is that the varieties that are foundational to Italian cuisine are very different from those in Mexican dishes which are different again from Chinese or Indian or any of the delicious African cuisines. For as the tomato spread globally the number of varieties multiplied. There are more than 10,000 varieties now known – a number which grows each year as ancestral varieties are catalogued and new varieties are bred. And they aren't always interchangeable. Using the "wrong" tomato in a dish can change everything: texture, color, moisture content, and certainly taste. 

For a great primer on tomato breeding and rare tomatoes for the home grower, I highly recommend Heide Dolan's Twine and Trellis account on Instagram. She has taught me so much about tomatoes and is very generous with her readers. 

So, like so many other things, tomatoes are culturally and botanically complicated!

Having said all of that, in some ways I am the perfect person to write about tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum). I am fussy about tomatoes – and I'm not willing to baby them or to put up with growing bad tomatoes or tomatoes that are hard to grow. I grow them for my family who all love tomatoes. I grow them as a labor of love. And I grow them because what I grow in my garden tastes a little bit like Italy. 

I will confess: if you are looking for variety suggestions for Asian or African cuisines, I am clueless. Sorry! This is the beginning of a conversation which I hope will carry on in the comments where you can tell us where you are gardening and what kinds of tomatoes do well for you!