As you may well know I am a bit of a food buff. This means I am passionate about the usual suspects of cooking, provenance, animal husbandry etc. There is something else that I greatly enjoy doing, I call it food archaeology. Fear not I will not be rooting in your dustbins to find out what you had for lunch last week. Rather I like to research ingredients or even dishes as they have spread throughout the world; how they evolve and how they are embraced by the different communities they touch. 

Let us start with the humble tomato.

For us the tomato is salad, the base of Italian, Provençal, and Indian cooking amongst many others. It is a fruit (yes) that is available, even embedded throughout the culinary world.

So how did this happen? Because the truth is the tomato started in South America, and to be more precise and not unlike an unnamed bear, the tomato originates from darkest Peru. So how did it make it to the majority of the world’s tables?.

Well there is a battle between Cortez the Spaniard and Columbus an Italian working for Spain as to who can claim the right for exporting the first tomato (still in its yellow incantation) The first mention is in the middle fifteen hundreds when there are mentions of a “pommo d’oro” or golden apple. The name stuck in Italy but the rest of the world stuck with tomato (wolf peach in Aztec).

Once you have a lead it is then easy to follow the tomato, follow the Spanish. Off they went to the Philippines, and off went the tomato with them, managing a beachhead in Asia. Spreading into Europe was relatively easy, the whole of the Med basin was conducive to growing toms, so they just followed the coastline from Spain all the way to Sicily. England had to wait a bit longer, a misguided botanist falsely declaring them to be poisonous – was this the first food scare?.

Sometimes the name of tomatoes around the world give a clue as to who brought them, witness the French Plum in Iran.

The Spanish went to South America for gold, the pickings were rich but I bet they now wish they had patented their other stowaway; the humble globetrotting tomato.