Tomatoes: The golden apples of the sun

‘Potato-potahhto, Tomatotomahhto’ — that absolutely horrid, trite song jingling around in my head.

I guess it’s because these past weeks have been nothing, if not inundated with tomato preparations of all sorts in the restaurant and on the home front. But before moving on to this week’s column, I want to be clear about one thing. There are people who say tomahhto, my mother-in-law did, but there is not one person on this earth who says potahhto. Stupid song.

Late summer, early autumn or full-on hot and sticky summer as these past late-September weeks have been in Niagara, is truly tomato time. I mean tomatoes do come earlier in the summer to be sure, but as they are a fairly hardy plant, they can certainly maintain late into the growing season.

Tomatoes are perennials and not annual plants (which is counter-intuitive for most people), so they can be transported indoors in the winter and back out in the spring. They will continue on ad infinitem if well-tended. I know that my bushes at home just do not stop producing fruit, and will do so until frost — and I am not an accomplished gardener by any stretch.

A few plants will keep you in tomatoes for months. Niagara is teeming with them right now.

Originating in what is modern day Peru, where Aztec cultures considered the seeds to be aphrodisiacal, tomatoes were first introduced to Europe in the 1500s by returning Spanish explorers and colonists. They certainly didn’t take off as a market crop immediately as the plant resembles belladonna, a poisonous plant, which is also known as deadly nightshade. In time, though, tomatoes caught on and today myriad preparations of tomatoes exist across many cultures around the globe.

Perhaps the most iconic cuisine to promote the tomato is the cuisine of southern Italy. It is difficult to think of Italian food without tomatoes somewhere in the mix, a vision of unctuous red sauce poured over pasta. Strange, then, to note that the Italian word for tomato — pomodoro — translates as ‘golden apple.’ The answer lies in the fact that the first tomatoes to come to Europe from South America were a golden yellow variety: golden apples.

Tomatoes, as most people know, are really a fruit. In fact, botanically speaking they are a berry — the seed ovary of a flowering bush.

So where does the vegetable versus fruit debate come from?

Leave it to the government to lend confusion even to the order of nature. Sometime in the late 1880s the United States government introduced a tariff on domestically grown vegetables, but not fruits. What resulted was a great legal battle by tomato growers who hoped to avoid paying the extra tariff on their crop. The legal battle took time and escalated to the Supreme Court, which, eschewing all botanical litany and science, deemed the tomato a vegetable as “it was more often consumed in savoury preparations, whereas fruits are for dessert.” Don’t get me going on legal process.

There are more than 10,000 varieties of tomatoes and they range in size from very small to rather large and can be white, yellow, red, pink, striped, spotted and even black.

Lots of culinary applications, too. But for me, the best way to enjoy a tomato is to select a fat and juicy variety, picked right off the vine with a pinch of salt. If this weather keeps up, you will have lots of time to do just that.