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Who pefected the tomato sauce? the french or italians.

4K views 15 replies 10 participants last post by  renau04 
#1 · (Edited)
I know escoffier created the mother sauces which tomato was a mother sauce, but who exactly perfected the tomato sauce? Im not really looking for opinion answers just who came up with the idea of the sauce
 
#4 ·
Well if you don't want opinion, then you have to give credit to someone in the Americas where tomatoes originate, likely from Peru

The Aztecs had a tomato sauce fairly early in the Common Era.  The Spanish are credited with distribution of Tomatos to Europe. The earliest recorded recipe is from Naples in the 1692 according to Wikipedia.
 
#5 ·
Like so many things, it doesn't take much to find that when you've cooked the tomatoes, they might taste good with something.  How many women created tomato sauce from peru to spain to italy to france and anywhere else?  thousands?  each inventing it on her own, and then passing it on to others.  .  It's like asking who thought to tan hides or who invented sewing, or who thought to grind grains and cook them, or take flour and water and make a paste that could be rolled out and boiled, or fermented and baked?   or what genius thought of taking a string and winding it around and weaving it into cloth, or making it into a knitted thing... there are many unsung geniuses in history. 
 
#6 ·
Good Afternoon.

According to informative website: www.wikipedia.com

The tomato arrived in Spain in the 1500s ... then, fairly recently as a matter of fact, a Viceroy who was working as a Chef, brought it to Italia.

However, let us regress to Spain´s relationship with France during the 1500s, due to the Monarchy -- in which Felipe II had involvements with France, and the numerous invasions in Spain, tomatoes wer taken to France. However, the sauce itself, much later ...

Gazpachos were taken to France in 1747 by Eugenia de Montijo from Granada, as she was married to Napolean III ...

Happy Holidays.

Margcata.
 
#8 · (Edited)
Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (20 April 1808 - 9 January 1873) was the President of the French Second Republic and as Napoleon III

Napoléon II (20 March 1811 - 22 July 1832), after 1818 known as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt,

Napoleon Bonaparte (French: Napoléon Bonaparte [napoleɔ̃ bɔnɑpaʁt]) (15 August 1769 - 5 May 1821)

Doña María Eugenia Ignacia Augustina de Palafox-Portocarrero de Guzmán y Kirkpatrick, 16th Countess of Teba and 15th Marquise of Ardales; 5 May 1826 - 11 July 1920), known as Eugénie de Montijo (French pronunciation: [øʒeni də montixo]), was the last Empress consort of the French from 1853 to 1871 as the wife of Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.
 
#11 ·
Interesting what internet searches turn up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomato_sauce lists "...The use of tomato sauce with pasta appears for the first time in the Italian cookbook L'Apicio moderno, by Roman chef Francesco Leonardi, edited in 1790.[sup][2]"[/sup]
But how many massaie and bonnefemmes (sp?) and (i don't know the spanish word for housewives) were making tomato-based sauces long before they were "discovered" by some chef? It's like talking about Columbus "discovering" America. Bringing it to the attention of Europe perhaps, but not discovering it.

The story i heard was that tomatoes were considered poisonous for a very long time in europe (for their membership in the deadly nightshade family) and were used only decoratively for a time, but I don't have the research to support that.
 
#12 ·
But how many massaie and bonnefemmes (sp?) and (i don't know the spanish word for housewives) were making tomato-based sauces long before they were "discovered" by some chef? It's like talking about Columbus "discovering" America. Bringing it to the attention of Europe perhaps, but not discovering it.

The story i heard was that tomatoes were considered poisonous for a very long time in europe (for their membership in the deadly nightshade family) and were used only decoratively for a time, but I don't have the research to support that.
Another story says that, rich or well off people kept their distance with the tomato for a rather long period because, using plates made of lead, the acidity of the tomato reacted with this metal, hence provoking lead poisoning; meanwhile, peasants who could only afford wooden plates didn´t have this problem and consequently started to enjoy this fruit much before the others... Not sure how much truth there is in this story though, but one thing is more certain, the tomato started to be cultivated around the Mediterranean well before it appeared in cooking books.
 
#13 · (Edited)
Columbus didn't discover America he just claimed it. He actually found it by going the wrong way.  A Dummy

Tomato Sauce

 From my research it was a way of preserving an over abundant crops  of  tomatoes, and that led to tomato sauce.(like a paste or puree)
 
#15 ·
The food timeline has this to say :

Tomato sauce

http://

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."
---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."
---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.

http://

"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."
---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."
---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."
---Food in Early Modern Europe, Ken Albala [Greenwood Press:Westport CT] 2003 (p. 32)
 
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