The food timeline has this to say :
Tomato sauce
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Tomatoes are a "new world" food. The first tomato sauces were made by ancient South Americans. These spicy sauces/salsas also employed chilies, peppers, and other finely diced vegetables. About
salsa. The practice of combining
pasta and tomato sauce originated in the late 18th century.
Ragus,
sugos and
tomato gravies proliferated. By the middle of the 19th century,
tomato ketchup became America's favorite condiment. Italian-American pasta dishes (
Spaghetti and meatballs ) slathered with tomato sauce gained popularity in the 20th century.
Where did tomatoes originate?
Food historians generally agree the ancestors of the fruits we now call tomatoes originated in the Andes.
"Sophie Coe and others explain that the tomato originated in north-western S. America, where the ancestor of our edible tomato was most likely L. cerasiforme, S. pimpinellifolium, or currant tomato, which bears a long spray of tiny red fruits which split on the plant is another candidate, but L. cerasiforme has greater genetic similarity to the cultivated variety than any other. The edible descendant traveled north to Mexico and was one of the Solanaceae cultivated by the Aztec. There is no evidence that the wild varieties were ever eaten in their lands of origin, and all tomatoes consumed in S. America were reintroduced after the Spanish Conquest."
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Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson [Oxford University Press:Oxford] 2nd edition, 2007 (p. 802)
"The tomato (lycopersicon esculentum) is an American plant with an American name. In Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, tomatl indicates something round and plump, and this fruit (rather than vegetable) was almost certainly domesticated in Mexico, even though the presence of its numerous wild relatives (consisting of at least seven species) in South America suggests that it originated there. Apparently, however, tomatoes were not much used in the Andes region."
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Cambridge World History of Food, Kenneth F. Kiple & Kriemhild Conee Ornelas [Cambridge University Press:Cambridge] 2000, Volume Two (p. 1870) [NOTE: This book contains far more information than can be paraphrased here. Check with your university to see if they can supply you with pages.]
Tomatoes in Europe
Tomatoes were introduced to Europe from the New World by explorers in the 16th century. They were not immediately embraced because they were considered poisonous. Tomatoes were grown as "botanical curiosities," not as food. Tomatoes grew easily in the Spain and Italy and were widely used in Southern European dishes by the 17th century. Tomatoes slowly spread throughout Northern Europe, then back to the American colonies.
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"The first description of the tomato in the Mediterranean was in 1544, by the Italian botanist Pierandrea Mattioli. He was desribing the yellow-fruited varity, and it has been suggested that the Italian word for tomato, pomodoro (apple of gold), derived from this variety...Another theory of the origin of pomme d'amour is that it is a corruption of pomme des mours, "apple of the Moors," in recognition that two important members of the Solanaceae family, the egglant and the tomato, were favorite Arab vegetables. At first the tomato was used only as an ornamental plant in Mediterranean gardens because growers recognized it as a member of the nightshade family, then only known as comprising only poisonous members such as mandrake."
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A Mediterranean Feast, Clifford A. Wright [William Morrow:New York] 1999 (p. 213)
"The tomato, initially regarded as an ornamental fruit and later adopted as a food, was an exotic curiousity that first appears in the writings of P.A. Mattioli and Jose de Acosta, travelers and naturalists. Apart from these sources, allusions to its consumption are very rare. Costanzo Felici tell us...that the usual "gluttons and pople greedy for new things" did not realize they could eat the tomato as they would eat mushrooms or eggplants, fried in oil and flavored with salt and pepper. Although we must not exclude the possibility that tomatoes were consumed at an earlier date by the common people, it is only at the end of the seventeenth century that we observe their inclusion in elite cuisine, thanks to the Neapolitan recipe collection of Antonio Latini. Iberian influences may be detected in their adoption for culinary purposes, since various recipes that call for tomatoes are designated as "in the Spanish style." Among these is a recipe for "tomato sauce," which is flavored with onions and wild thyme "or piperna" and subsequently adjusted to taste by adding salt, oil, and vinegar. With a few modifications, this preparation was to enjoy a remarkable future in Italian cuisine and in the industry of preserved foods. The custom observed in ancient and medieval times, as well as during the Renaissance, of serving sauces as accompaniments to "boiled foods or other dishes"--as Latini expresses it in this instance--facilitated the acceptance of the tomato by integrating it into an established gastronomic tradition. For the same reason, it gained widespread ocurrence in Italian cooking in the eighteenth and nineteenth cneturies. Panunto in Tuscany, Vincenzo Corrado in Naples, and Francesco Leonardi in Rome all include it in their recipe books."
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Italian Cuisine: A Cultural History, Alberto Capatti & Massimo Montanari [Columbia University Press:New York] 1999 (p. 42-3)
"Despite the current enthusiasm for tomatoes in Italy, Spain and the rest of southern Europe, they were not well received upon arrival from the New World in the sixteenth century. Looking and smelling much like their poisonous relatives in the Solanaceae family it is not surprising that few people tried to eat them. They were usually grown as ornamental flowers, and only described botanically in Mattioli's
Commentaries on Dioscordes in 1544. Although wealthy diners would not eat tomatoes, it does appear that their poorer neighbors had begun to eat them out of necessity. Good evidence of this can be found in 1650 in Melchior Sebizius' On the Faculty of Foods in which he writes that they are so cold and moist that they must be cooked with pepper, salt and oil, but "our cookes abosolutely reject them, even though they grow easily and copiously in gardens." The first published cookbook recipes including tomatoes appeared in Naples at the very end of the seventeenth century in Antonio Latini's
Lo Scalo all a Moderna."
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Food in Early Modern Europe, Ken Albala [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2003 (p. 32)