English language

How to pronounce lycopersicon in English?

Full Transcript

From sauce, to soup, to ketchup, sun-dried, roasted or even raw, the tomato can
liven up pretty much any dish. But that was not always the case.
So today we are going to make an early Italian tomato recipe from the 18th Century
called Pomodori Farciti all'Erbette; tomatoes stuffed with herbs.
Then we'll take a look at how the once vilified tomato made its way into
grocery stores around the world. This time on Tasting History.
Today's recipe comes from Il Cuoco Galante or the Gallant Cook by Vincenzo
Corrado, first published in the kingdom of Naples in 1773. Now it's not the first
European cookbook to use tomatoes and recipes, but it is the first that uses
them in ways that we would associate with modern Italian cuisine. So since
this is an Italian dish go ahead and pour a glass of fine Italian wine, or in
my case decent Californian wine, and let's get started.
Tomatoes Stuffed with Herbs: Mince parsley, onion, sorrel, and mint. Add ham,
season with salt and pepper; add egg yolk and grated provatura; stuff the mixture
into the tomatoes, fry them and serve them with ham broth. First, thank you to
my friend Francesco Vitellini who helped me translate that. I would have
been lost without him, especially when I get to the ham broth part, and frankly I
don't know what ham broth is, and I don't really want to make ham broth right now
so I'm just going to do the stuffed tomatoes. Now the amounts of each
ingredient that you're going to need for this recipe are going to vary depending
on the size of your tomatoes and how many you want, so you're gonna kind of
have to eyeball it. What you'll need is several small tomatoes. You don't want
the big beefsteak ones but you also don't want, like tiny little heirloom
ones; those are gonna be too hard to stuff so something in the middle.
Italian parsley. Onion. Sorrel. Now if you have trouble finding sorrel and if you live
in the United States you're probably gonna have trouble finding sorrel like I did,
go ahead and use either arugula or chard, which is what I ended up using,
or really any kind of bitter green is gonna do the trick; we make do.
Mint. Prosciutto. Egg yolks. It's gonna be about 1 egg yolk to every one and a half or
two tomatoes depending on the size. Provatura, which is a fresh cheese
made from either cow or buffalo milk; also might be hard to find in the United States
so go ahead and use a fresh mozzarella. It'll do the trick.
And then, just a bit of salt and pepper and olive oil for frying. So to get started on the
filling mince your parsley, sorrel, or whatever green you're using, your mint,
and the onion and mix them in a bowl together. Then either chop or tear up your
prosciutto into small pieces and mix that in along with a bit of salt and pepper.
Then grate in a liberal amount of cheese and drop in your egg yolks,
and mix everything together until it forms a paste. Super easy, and super quick which
is great because that'll give us time to see how the star of our dish
made its way on to menus world wide.
Now, tomatoes are a New World food, and there is some
debate about exactly where in the New World they came from, you can still find
wild tomatoes in the Andes of Peru, but they were cultivated by around 700 AD
all over Central and South America. But it's the Aztecs that we can thank for
their modern English name tomato coming from the Aztec word Tomatl. And it was
just one of many new world ingredients that the Spanish conquistadors snapped
up and took back with them to Europe. But once they got there, Tomatoes got some
mixed reviews. Italian herbalist Pietro Andre Mattioli, who called it the apple
of gold or Pomme D'Or, where the Italians get the word Pomodoro, associated it with
the Mandrake which was a biblical aphrodisiac. But before long people began
associating it with belladonna or deadly nightshade which was a popular poison at
the time and may have been the poison that Juliet took to appear dead at the
end of the play. Not a great association. So it was time to give tomatoes a
rebrand with a new scientific name. Unfortunately, the rebrand sucked because
the scientific name for tomatoes is Lycopersicon Esculentum or edible
wolf peach. I'm guessing they did not workshop that name because it's not great. Not great.
And poor tomato's reputation took another hit
when Europe's elite thought that it was killing them because it kind of was.
See, back in the 16th and 17th century, the elite of Europe were eating off of
pewter plates with peter forks and knives.
Unfortunately pewter has lead in it which isn't enough to give you acute lead
poisoning, or anything like that unless you put some highly acidic foods on it
which leach the lead out rather quickly and that is what tomatoes do... so yeah.
So it didn't take long for Northern Europeans to just completely abandon
eating tomatoes but they were still grown in abundance in Britain
and the American colonies for decoration. They were kind of like the Christmas
tree ornaments of an English garden I suppose. But in southern Europe they must
have looked around and seen the poor people eating them
not on pewter plates, and they weren't dying so they thought, "Huh! Maybe we'll
give these things another shot", and by the end of the 18th century they were
all the rage in Italian cooking. And it must have been one of the descendants of
those Italian cooks who finally brought eating the tomato to America. Though it
took quite some time, which I've always thought was weird because just down the
way in Mexico they were eating them this entire time and like nobody in America noticed?
I guess they were busy with smallpox and stuff.
Anyway, in his book The Tomato in America, Andrew Smith talks about the shabby reputation this future
Bloody Mary ingredient had in the United States. I have two favorite quotes from
the book where people are throwing shade on this not so deadly nightshade.
The first comes from Pennsylvanian J.B. Garber. "Hardly two persons in a hundred on first
tasting, it thought they would ever be induced to taste that sour trash a Second Time."
And as if taking Garber up on some sort of dare, S.D. Wilcox of the
Florida Agriculturalist, decided to make his own tomato pie afterward calling it
an arrant humbug and deserved it forthwith to be consigned to the tomb of all the Capulets."
Here we are again with that Romeo and Juliet thing, see?
Must have been a fan. But then a miracle happened back in old Napoli. See the poor
of Naples had been putting tomatoes on their flatbreads for years. Then one day
in the 1880s, while serving Queen Margherita of Savoy, Rafaelle Esposito
added in basil and mozzarella, The Queen loved it. The people loved it. Everyone loved it!
And finally, they brought it over to America to change the face of
our nation forever to one filled with pizza parlors. So that's it everything's
hunky-dory. Not poisonous. Goes on pizza. Tomatoes are in like Flynn... almost.
See, there is still that age-old question of, is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? Hmmm.
Well, botanically speaking it is a fruit. It is a plant's seed-bearing structure.
End of debate. Case closed. Not so fast, counselor, I object!
Because according to the United States Supreme Court, a tomato is a vegetable.
See, the Tariff Act of 1883 required a tax to be put on any imported vegetables, but not fruit.
So when the state of New York slapped a tariff on a shipment of
incoming Caribbean Tomatoes destined for John Nix & Co., Mr. Nix filed a
lawsuit claiming that tomatoes are a fruit because they are so the case went
all the way up to the Supreme Court and in 1893, after what seems like a lot of
lawyers reading the definitions of fruits and vegetables from varying
dictionaries, Justice Horace Gray wrote an opinion stating, "Botanically speaking,
tomatoes are the fruit of a vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans, and peas,...
but in the common language of the people, whether sellers or consumers of provisions,
all these are vegetables." But lucky for us the pizza parlors of
America were not deterred just as I will not be deterred from making the rest of this recipe.
So now that your filling is ready go ahead and cut the tops off of
your Tomatoes, and scoop out the inside with a spoon, then go ahead and stuff the
tomatoes as full as you can. Now the recipe says to fry these, and I'm going
to do that, but they do have raw egg in them so I also ended up putting them
into the oven for just a few minutes, about 10 minutes, because the center was
not getting to the temperature that you need to cook egg. So if you're worried
about raw egg go ahead and turn your oven on to 350° Fahrenheit or 175° Celsius
Then take out a frying pan and pour some olive oil in it and turn it on to medium heat.
Once the oil is nice and hot, set the stuffed tomatoes into the oil and
let them cook for about 2 minutes which will let them get some char on the bottom.
Then flip them over and cook the tops for 2 or 3 minutes as well.
At this point you're going to put that whole pan into the oven for about 10 to 12 minutes
but if you want you can do like I did and add a little extra cheese on top because... why not?
After about 10 minutes in the oven, pull them out,
plate them up and go ahead and serve.
Et Voilà! Though I... that's French...
I don't know what "and here it is" in Italian. Anyway, here are our Tomatoes.
They are gorgeous and they smell so good.
There's a little sweetness to the scent but then you can also smell the herbs
which is really nice, and a little char which I like. So here we go...
get a lot of filling here...
More filling.
That is wonderful. Oh, it's perfect for summer.
The ham actually really, really comes through, that kind of that salty... ham flavor.
But then the herbs are really what your tasting.
The tomato, of course, your tasting as well, but because we scooped out the inside
it's not as overpowering of a tomato flavor unless you're getting a really big bite of the outside.
But oh, they are lovely, and not that hard. I think if you're
making like a heavy pasta dish or something and looking for a lighter
appetizer this is the way to go. Really not that hard and just lovely for summer.
Anyway if you do end up making them I would love to see pictures so make sure
to tag me on Instagram or Twitter; my handles are down in the description.
And I will see you next time on Tasting History.