How Carrots Won the Trojan War

by Rebecca Rupp

  There are three basic types of spinach. Landreth’s Bloomsdale is a Savoy spinach, characterized by large deeply crinkled leaves that are difficult to clean, since the crinkles tend to retain gritty particles of sand. Flat-leaf spinach has broad smooth leaves that are far easier to rinse; a small-leaved version of this is sold as “baby” spinach. Semi-Savoy, which teeters between Savoy and flat, is a slightly crinkled hybrid — not as flat as flat, not as wrinkled as Savoy. All are members of the Amaranthaceae family, along with beets, pigweed, and the signature amaranths — grown for grain and used by the Hopi Indians to make a deep red dye.

  Sexually, spinach is dioecious, with most cultivars producing approximately equal numbers of male and female plants. Variations appear on either side of the sexual average: there are, for example, perfect-flowered hermaphroditic spinaches, which consolidate all the necessary sexual equipment in a single flower, and monoecious spinaches, which produce both male and female flowers on a single plant. All are annuals. Most American spinach — over 90 percent of the commercial crop — is grown in California and Arizona. “The Spinach Capital of the World,” however, is in neither state: contenders for the title are Crystal City, Texas, and Alma, Arkansas, which boasts a town water tower painted to resemble an enormous can of spinach.

  Far from restricting itself chastely to Spinacia oleracea, the term spinach is frequently used in a generic sense to mean practically anything leafy and green. Captain Cook discovered New Zealand spinach, Tetragonia expansa, on his landmark voyage down under in 1771; though edible, it was grown back home in England initially as a houseplant. Good-King-Henry, Chenopodium bonus-henricus, is commonly known as wild spinach or poor man’s asparagus; orach, Atriplex hortensis, whose elegant pearly gray leaves were popular in colonial salads, is nicknamed mountain spinach. Amaranthus tricolor, sometimes called Joseph’s-coat for its gaudy multicolored leaves, is also called Chinese spinach.

  “Spinach!” has meant “stuff and nonsense” since at least the 1920s, probably from the mid-nineteenth-century “gammon and spinach,” as in Charles Dickens’s rueful “What a world of gammon and spinage it is, though, ain’t it!” Spinach thus fell in with such anti-bombast expressions as humbug, twaddle, baloney, moonshine, balderdash, hogwash, horsefeathers, and “Go tell it to the Marines!” When Will Rogers, in 1924, told the nation, “I tell you, folks, all politics is applesauce,” he could just as well have said spinach.

  “Spinach!” has meant “stuff and nonsense” since at least the 1920s.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In Which

  TOMATOES FAIL

  TO KILL

  COLONEL JOHNSON

  plus

  Wolf Bait, Mary Randolph’s Marmalade,

  Pills, Panaceas, and Suspect Syrup,

  How Radiator Charlie Beat the Depression,

  An Alternative Use for an Incense Burner,

  and A Day in Court

  A world without tomatoes is like a string quartet without violins.

  LAURIE COLWIN

  “It is difficult to think anything but pleasant thoughts while eating a homegrown tomato,” wrote Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Lewis Grizzard. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, four out of five people prefer tomatoes to any other homegrown food. American tomato enthusiasm runs so high that gardenless fans have grown them in backyard barrels, patio pots, and window boxes, on apartment balconies, on houseboat decks, and even, in the case of a few intrepid souls, on the roofs of Volkswagens. Over 90 percent of home gardeners plant tomatoes, and the tomato is so popular among consumers that it’s been voted the official state vegetable (or fruit) of Arkansas, Ohio, New Jersey, and Tennessee. It’s quite a turnaround for a plant that most of our ancestors wouldn’t have touched with a ten-foot pole.

  The tomato came originally from the Andes of South America, where small-fruited wild forms, described by botanists as weedy and aggressive, still proliferate in a swath of territory across Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Ecuador and north into Central America and Mexico. It seems to have been generally ignored on its home turf — the Incas didn’t eat it — but instead was domesticated over a thousand miles to the north, by the Mayas of Central America and southern Mexico.

  By the time the Europeans reached the New World, tomatoes in dozens of colors, shapes, and sizes were a staple of native cuisine, eaten in proto-enchiladas, stewed with peppers, beans, and corn, and chopped into a sauce with peppers and ground squash seeds that sounds a lot like an early form of salsa. Spanish priest Bernardino de Sahagún, in his sixteenth-century General History of the Things of New Spain, described the mind-boggling array of tomatoes routinely on sale in the Aztec market of Tenochtítlan:

  “. . . large tomatoes, small tomatoes, leaf tomatoes, thin tomatoes, sweet tomatoes, large serpent tomatoes, nipple-shaped tomatoes, serpent tomatoes . . . coyote tomatoes, sand tomatoes, those which are yellow, very yellow, quite yellow, red, very red, quite ruddy, ruddy, bright red, reddish, rosy dawn colored.”

  Hernando Cortés and company saw tomatoes growing in Montezuma’s Mexican gardens in 1519 and later described them recognizably, though in less than glowing terms: they found the sprawling vines scraggy and ugly. Nonetheless, Cortés may have brought the first tomatoes to Spain, from whence they spread to continental Europe and the Middle East.

  The earliest mention of tomatoes in Europe comes from Italian botanist Pietro Andrea Mattioli in 1544 — apparently a yellow variety, since he later dubbed it pomo d’oro, “golden apple.” (Pomodoro to this day is Italian for a tomato of any color, though most modern European languages call tomatoes by some version of the Aztec tomatl.) Based on morphology, Mattioli perceptively linked the tomato to the eggplant, as well as to a number of more disreputable relatives, among them mandrake, henbane, and the aptly named deadly nightshade — Atropa belladonna, popular among upper-class Romans for permanently eliminating rivals.

  The tomato’s association with known poisonous plants was distinctly off-putting and most likely the reason for the three-hundred-year hiatus before it was accepted as an everyday article of European diet. In fact, by mid-sixteenth century, the tomato was ominously nicknamed the wolf peach — “peach” from its luscious appearance, “wolf” from its presumptive poisonous qualities — in analogy to pieces of aconite-sprinkled meat thrown out as bait to destroy wolves. This nickname, Latinized, has persisted as lycopersicon, which figures in Solanum lycopersicon, the modern scientific moniker for the tomato.

  Early names for the tomato indicated vast confusion about where the tomato came from and what it was or wasn’t good for. Italians called it the Moor’s apple or the apple of Peru; German herbalist Joachim Camerarius (the Younger) — who rewrote and helpfully beefed up Mattioli — called it the apple of India; and the Iranians called it the Armenian eggplant.

  * * *

  Love Apple

  The tomato’s nickname “love apple” may stem from its association with the sinister mandrake, which also bears red or yellow fruits. The hallucinogenic mandrake is traditionally associated with magic and witchcraft — it did Joan of Arc no good at her trial when it was revealed that she carried one around for good luck — and it has a history as an aphrodisiac, possibly because a low dose of it made people woozy and lowered their inhibitions.

  * * *

  The tomato’s poisonous aura was not without its element of truth. Tomatoes belong to the Nightshade family, Solanaceae, known for their manufacture of potentially toxic alkaloids, examples of which include morphine, quinine, nicotine, and strychnine. Compared to such alkaloid superstars, however, tomatine, the major alkaloid in tomatoes, is wimpy. It’s found primarily in tomato leaves and stems, and in the green fruit, from which it disappears as the tomato ripens.

  Green tomatoes, however, fried and pickled, have been enjoyed without lethal incident for generations: Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife (1824) includes a recipe for a spicy green tomato marmalade. Researcher Mendel Friedman of the U.S. Department of Agriculture points
out that tomatine may actually have substantial health benefits. Studies in animals indicate that tomatine lowers the blood levels of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) — a.k.a. “bad cholesterol” — and it inhibits the growth of cancer cells in culture. It also kills bugs. Pre-pesticide nineteenth-century gardeners used broth from cooked tomato foliage to destroy aphids and bedbugs; and tomatine in situ fends off Fusarium wilt, a destructive fungal disease and common bane of tomatoes.

  In Europe, the Spaniards and the Italians ate tomatoes first. They were certainly eating them by the late sixteenth century, when John Gerard noted of the “Apples of Love” in his Great Herball: “In Spaine and those hot Regions they use to eat the Apples prepared and boiled with pepper, salt, and oile” — but, he adds disapprovingly, “they yeeld very little nourishment to the bodie, and the same nought and corrupt.” He admitted that tomatoes were attractive to look at (“of a bright red colour and the bigness of a goose egg or a large pippin”), but smelled awful (“of ranke and stinking savour”) and were probably dangerous to eat.

  In similarly reluctant France, agronomist Olivier de Serres wrote in 1600 that “love apples are marvelous and golden” but were primarily grown as ornamentals, noting that “they serve commonly to cover outhouses and arbors.” Richard Bradley, professor of botany at Cambridge University, wrote in 1728 that the tomato “makes an agreeable Plant to look at, but the Fruit of most of them is dangerous” and the leaves and stalks “yield a very strong and very offensive smell.”

  Early American colonists followed the lead of their mother country: tomatoes, fetid and potentially death-dealing, are conspicuously absent from early seed lists. The fruits were condemned by ministers and physicians, and the Puritans — perhaps influenced by the designation “love apple” — considered them an abomination, on par with dancing, card-playing, and theatergoing. At least one liberal pastor in early Massachusetts Bay was fired by his congregation for thoughtlessly growing some in his kitchen garden.

  Southerners were more amenable to the tomato. According to tomato authority Andrew Smith, the first reference to colonial tomatoes appears in William Salmon’s Botanologia (1710), in which he mentions viewing some while traveling through the Carolinas in the late 1680s. The first evidence that anyone was actually eating them comes from Harriott Pinckney Horry’s Receipt Book of 1770, whose instructions “To Keep Tomatoos for Winter use” involve stewing chopped tomatoes with salt and pepper, then storing them in “pint Potts” topped with melted butter for later use in soups. The fact that there were enough tomatoes around to keep implies that they were prolific inhabitants of at least some Southern gardens.

  The Puritans — perhaps influenced by the designation “love apple” — considered tomatoes an abomination, on par with dancing, card-playing, and theatergoing.

  The first formal American reference to tomatoes as food plants appears in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia in 1781, in which he writes that “The gardens yield muskmelons, watermelons, tomatas, okra, pomegranates, figs, and the esculent plants of Europe.” He himself purchased “tomatas” for presidential dinners and planted them annually at Monticello, beginning in June, 1809. Mary Randolph’s Virginia Housewife lists seventeen recipes for tomatoes, among them gumbo, gazpacho, scalloped tomatoes, stewed tomatoes, eggs and tomatoes, and “Ochra and tomatos.”

  The North — possibly in part because the climate was less congenial to tomatoes — remained reluctant to adopt them. Amelia Simmons’s American Cookery (1796) doesn’t so much as mention a tomato. Tales of tomato failures include that of a vegetable-promoting refugee from Santo Domingo who brought some to Philadelphia in 1798, only to find that nobody liked them much, and an account of an Italian painter who brought some to Salem, Massachusetts, in 1802, but couldn’t persuade anyone even to taste them.

  Two thousand people assembled to watch Colonel Johnson suffer these awful fates, to the accompaniment of a local firemen’s band playing dirges.

  The turning point for the tomato, according to time-honored legend, occurred on September 26, 1820, on the steps of the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey, when Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson ate, in public and without ill effect, an entire basketful of tomatoes. The colonel, a notorious eccentric, was not a man to be trifled with. During the Revolutionary War, at the tender age of seven, he had patriotically slapped a British officer in the face, and as an adult he habitually dressed in imitation of General Washington in a black suit with impeccable white ruffles, a tri-corn hat, black gloves, and a gold-topped walking stick.

  Tomatoes, claimed the colonel, had been eaten by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks, but the original accounts of this beneficial diet had been lost in the mists of history. The colonel’s personal physician, a Dr. James Van Meeter, took a dim view of the proposed tomato eating and was quoted as saying, “The foolish colonel will foam and froth at the mouth and double over with appendicitis.” Also threatened were aggravated high blood pressure and brain fever. Two thousand people assembled to watch Colonel Johnson suffer these awful fates, to the accompaniment of a local firemen’s band playing dirges. Undaunted, the colonel ate and stalked away, to live in undisputed health to the ripe old age of seventy-nine.

  It’s a great story, but the truth seems to be that none of this ever happened. Andrew Smith cites it as “fakelore,” one of our cultural collection of exaggerations, hoaxes, tall tales, and flat-out lies that frankly are just so appealing that we can’t bear to let them go. The tomato-eating colonel, in other words, is in the same boat as George Washington’s cherry tree, Newton’s apple, Nero’s fiddle, and the landing of the Pilgrims on Plymouth Rock.

  What does seem to be true is that by the 1820s, even without the help of the probably apocryphal colonel, the tomato had effected a turnaround. Even New Englanders had begun to plant and eat it. Bernard M’Mahon of Philadelphia was selling tomato seeds by 1805, William Booth of Baltimore by 1810, and Philadelphia’s D. Landreth Seed Company by 1825. From New York, Grant Thorburn’s 1832 Catalogue of Kitchen Garden, Herb, Flower, Tree and Grass Seeds not only offered tomato seeds, but — just in case customers didn’t know what to do with the resultant tomatoes — listed two recipes for tomato relish.

  Boston’s Hovey & Co., by the 1830s, was touting two kinds of tomatoes (“small and large”), soon thereafter upping the tally to four. By 1835, tomatoes were being grown in the gardens of Maine, and the editor of the Maine Farmer had pronounced them “a useful article of diet” — probably, for Down East conservatives, gushing praise.

  Seedsman Robert Buist — a specialist in rare plants and the first to sell poinsettias in America — wrote of the tomato in his Family Kitchen Gardener (1847):

  “In taking a retrospect of the past eighteen years, there is no vegetable on the catalogue that has obtained such popularity in so short a period as the one now under consideration. In 1828-9 it was almost detested; in ten years more every variety of pill and panacea was ‘extract of Tomato.’ It now occupies as great a surface of ground as Cabbage, and is cultivated the length and breadth of the country . . . It is brought to the table in an infinite variety of forms, being stewed and seasoned, stuffed and fried, roasted and raw . . . It is also made into pickles, catsup, and salted in barrels for Winter use, so that with a few years more experience, we may expect to see it as an every-day dish from January to January.”

  Buist cites four common varieties: the large smooth Red, the Large Red (an enormous ribbed tomato, measuring up to 18 inches in circumference), the pear-shaped, and the cherry-shaped (recommended for pickling). He also mentions offhandedly “several other fancy sorts, generally of a yellow color.”

  The upsurge in tomato popularity was due in no small part to the above-mentioned pills and panaceas. Beginning in the 1830s, physicians, both amateur and professional, touted the tomato as a remedy for practically anything, including indigestion, diarrhea, liver and lung diseases, and cholera. Popular nostrums included “Dr. Miles’s Compound Extract of Tomato” and “Dr. Phelps’ Compo
und Tomato Pills,” neither of which actually contained any form of tomato. Catharine Beecher — sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe and an active proponent of education for women — recommended Tomato Syrup for the sick in her Domestic Receipt-Book (1858). It contained tomato juice and sugar, to be bottled for several weeks before use, and, despite Catharine’s staunch advocacy of Temperance Drinks, sounds suspiciously like tomato wine.

  * * *

  Fruit? Or Veggie?

  The tomato, botanically, is a fruit — that is, an organ that develops from the ovary of the flower and encloses the developing seeds. More specifically, like the avocado and papaya, the tomato is a berry, composed of seeds surrounded by parenchymatous cells. Legally, however, it’s a vegetable.

  In 1886, importer John Nix landed a load of West Indian tomatoes in New York, for which the presiding customs agent demanded the payment of a 10 percent tax in accordance with the Tariff Act of 1883, which levied a duty on foreign vegetables. Nix, who knew his botany, protested that the tariff applied only to vegetables; tomatoes, as fruits, should be exempt. The controversy eventually reached the Supreme Court, where, in 1893, Justice Horace Gray decreed the tomato a vegetable:

  “Botanically speaking, tomatoes are the fruit of the vine, just as are cucumbers, squashes, beans and peas. But in the common language of the people . . . all these vegetables . . . are usually served at dinner, in, with, or after the soup, fish, or meat, which constitute the principal part of the repast, and not, like fruits, generally as dessert.”