Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy (Arts and Traditions of the Table: Perspectives on Culinary History)

David Gentilcore

Language: English

Pages: 272

ISBN: 023115206X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


More than just the beloved base ingredient of so many of our favorite dishes, the tomato has generated both profound riches and controversy in its farming, processing, exchange, and consumption. It is a crop infused with national pride and passion for those who grow it, and a symbol of Old World nostalgia for those who claim its history and legacy.

Over time, the tomato has embodied a range of values and meanings. From its domestication in Central America, it has traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, powering a story of aspiration and growth, agriculture and industry, class and identity, and global transition. In this entertaining and organic history, David Gentilcore recounts the surprising rise of the tomato from its New World origin to its Old World significance. From its inauspicious introduction into Renaissance Europe, the tomato came to dominate Italian cuisine and the food industry over the course of three centuries.

Gentilcore explores why elite and peasant cultures took so long to assimilate the tomato into Italian cooking and how it eventually triumphed. He traces the tomato's appearance in medical and agricultural treatises, travel narratives, family recipe books, kitchen accounts, and Italian art, literature, and film. He focuses on Italy's fascination with the tomato, painting a larger portrait of changing trends and habits that began with botanical practices in the sixteenth century and attitudes toward vegetables in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and concluded with the emergence of factory production in the nineteenth. Gentilcore continues with the transformation of the tomato into a national symbol during the years of Italian immigration and Fascism and examines the planetary success of the "Italian" tomato today, detailing its production, representation, and consumption.

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pasta was a holiday luxury, not an everyday staple. Nonetheless, it had become the “symbol of joy and abundance,” according to the compiler of the Molise submission for the Statistica. The different seasonings they used reflect an almost medieval mixture of sweet and savory: “Rarely do the people season it with cheese, but with oil, pork fat, or else with vinegar or cooked grape must.” For more affluent people, pasta was fast becoming an everyday food, beginning in the grain-producing regions of

production, truly delicious, conquered the tastes of connoisseurs within the space of a few years.” The result was the spread of the cultivation and production of tomatoes. British and American imports more than doubled during the 1920s over the previous decade. Producers for the British market labeled their cans of “Naples peeled plum tomatoes” with brand names like the English-sounding “Goodwood Cup.” The tomato variety that made all this possible was what Baldoni’s manual called “a recent

except the oil in a large boil. Rinse your hands with cool water and lightly shape the mixture into 2-inch balls. Heat the oil in a large heavy skillet. Add the meatballs and brown them well on all sides. (They will finish cooking later.) Transfer the meatballs to a plate. After two hours, add the meatballs and cook for 30 minutes or until the sauce is thick and the meats very tender. To serve, remove the meats from the sauce and set aside. Toss the cooked pasta with the sauce. Sprinkle with

Veneto in the east—it was not often eaten elsewhere in the country. To change this, special “rice trucks” toured the country, especially the south, distributing free samples and recipe booklets. Fascist food policies worked together with a message praising sobriety and thrift, as well as the consumption of certain foods, as national virtues. Propagandists linked consumption patterns and favored foodstuffs to the national character, a message strangely reminiscent of the Renaissance notions

factory, with its endless blue packets of pasta, bringing with him only cans of tomatoes. From middle class to working class: the dream was at last coming true. Italians could now eat spaghetti al pomodoro to their heart’s content, and they did, to the extent that stereotype and reality began to fuse. What would Marinetti have made of it? In the same year, 1947, the Neapolitan playwright Eduardo De Filippo wrote a poem in which the fussy narrator reminds his listeners and his long-suffering wife

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