Tomatoes, maize and potatoes reach Europe

The story

A kitchen without tomatoes

Try to imagine Italian cooking before 1500: no tomato pizza, no spaghetti with red sauce, no maize polenta, no chips. It seems impossible, but it is true. Tomatoes, maize and potatoes did not exist in Europe: they grew only in the Americas, where the native peoples had farmed them for thousands of years. When Spanish ships began to cross the ocean, alongside gold and silver they also brought seeds, tubers and curious plants, and that is how these plants came to Europe.

This exchange of plants, animals and diseases between the two continents, which began with Columbus, is called the “Columbian exchange”. Europeans took wheat, grapevines, cows, horses and sugar to the Americas. From the Americas, besides maize, tomatoes and potatoes, came cocoa, chilli peppers, beans, squash, turkeys and tobacco.

Maize

Maize was one of the first American plants to be brought to Europe: Columbus himself collected some seeds on his first voyage. In Spain people soon began to grow it, first as a curiosity, then as animal feed and finally as food for people. It grows well even where wheat does not, it gives a high yield and it can be ground into flour. In the 17th century, in the Veneto, in Lombardy and in other regions of northern Italy, maize polenta began to replace the kind made from other grains, becoming the everyday food of peasants.

But a diet made almost only of polenta, with no other foods, caused a disease called pellagra, which brings skin sores, diarrhoea and mental disorders. Only many years later did people understand that it was caused by a lack of a vitamin, niacin, which maize does not make available unless it is treated in a certain way. In the Americas the native peoples knew a treatment with lime or ash, called nixtamalisation, which avoided the problem.

The potato

The potato comes from the Andes, in what is now Peru and Bolivia, where hundreds of varieties were grown. It arrived in Spain around 1570, perhaps from the Canary Islands. At first Europeans found it strange: it grew underground, some said it was not mentioned in the Bible, and others thought it caused diseases. It was times of famine and war that pushed peasants to grow it, because it survived the damage of wars and soldiers better than wheat did.

Kings and scientists helped to spread it too. Frederick II of Prussia, in 1756, ordered his peasants to plant it; in France Antoine-Augustin Parmentier made it known with a famous promotion campaign. In Ireland the potato became the basic food of the poorest people, and for this reason, when a plant disease destroyed the crops in the years 1845–1852, a terrible famine followed: about a million people died and another million emigrated.

The tomato

The tomato comes from Mexico and Central America. Its name comes from Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, “tomatl”. It arrived in Europe after the conquest of Tenochtitlán. It was first described by a doctor and botanist from Siena, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, in 1544, who called it “pomo d'oro”, or “golden apple”, because the first varieties were yellow.

For a long time in Europe the tomato was used as an ornamental plant. It belongs to the same family as deadly nightshade and other poisonous plants, and many people thought it dangerous. The earliest Italian recipe with tomato known to us is found in a book of 1692 by Antonio Latini, from the Marche, who worked in Naples: a “tomato sauce in the Spanish style”. Only in the 19th century, with preserves and pasta, did the tomato become the symbol of Italian cooking.