Tomato History!

Come October, if my tomato vines have survived the extremes of our growing season, this box appears on my to-do list and gradually transforms into jars of salsa on the shelf and tubs of puree in the freezer.  There's always a point in the process where I solemnly promise myself NOT to grow as many plants next year.  But of course, come next planting time, the garden seems so big and the plants so small...I plant more than I need again.

Tomatoes are usually only a distant memory in January, but this year I had the unique pleasure of reading a whole history book about them:  David Gentilcore's Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato In Italy (2010).  Having appreciated what I'd read of Gentilcore's work on the history of medicine, and being a tomato grower and consumer myself, I was confident the book would be an enjoyable read.  But I also hoped the book would be able to make a case for the importance, and not just the interest, of food history.

I'm pleased to report that it did.  I'll admit I couldn't always locate the "so what?" in each chapter, but there were enough big-picture connections and surprises to keep me thinking each time I put the book down.  Since then, I've read a variety of other books about food.  Curiously, one of the key things they're missing is history.
 

Get the full recipe here

I suppose I've always been curious about the history of food.  Food is so basic and mundane, yet so culturally complex (as I've been learning from Professor Kelly Brownell's fascinating Open Yale course on Food Psychology).  You don't have to go back very far in time to find people eating strange things.  How about this Jello "Egg Souffle Salad" from, thankfully not my mom's, but probably my grandma's cookbook?  The further back in time you go, the less edible the food sounds.  Two years ago, I read the chapters on medieval food and cooking in Misconceptions about the Middle Ages (2008) and Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England (2010) with great interest, considerable disgust...and also a twinge of disappointment that these examples of food history weren't contributing the sort of historical insight I expected on so, um, essential a topic.  Getting from a recipe or an image to useful historical or cultural critique is evidently more complicated than it seems at first glance, perhaps in large part because the process involves re-thinking our current assumptions about what food is and what it does.

So, for my next few blog posts, I plan to review the various food books I've been reading.  Book reviews are good writing practice, and I'd like to pin down more precisely what makes Gentilcore's book the best of the bunch (in my opinion).  Here's the line-up, in order of reading:

Gentilcore, David. Pomodoro!: A History of the Tomato in Italy. Columbia University Press, 2010.
Smith, Andrew F. Hamburger: A Global History. The Edible Series. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.
Schama, Simon. Scribble, Scribble, Scribble: Writing on Politics, Ice Cream, Churchill, and My Mother. New York: Ecco, 2010.
Pollan, Michael. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. New York: Penguin, 2008.
Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Harcourt, 1937.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Harcourt, 1929.

Quite the mix!