The tomato presents one of the great puzzles of domestication, for its wild ancestor and its eventual home lie a continent apart. The wild progenitor of every cultivated tomato is Solanum pimpinellifolium, the currant tomato, a sprawling, weedy plant bearing fruits no larger than a pea, intensely flavoured and brilliantly red, which grew along the dry coastal valleys and scrublands of northern Peru and Ecuador. Yet it was not in the Andes that the tomato became the plant we know. The Andean peoples appear to have gathered the wild fruit and tolerated it as a volunteer in their gardens without ever fully taking it into cultivation; the decisive work was done far to the north, in Mesoamerica, where over many centuries the small wild fruit was carried, selected, and enlarged into the cultivated Solanum lycopersicum. By the time of the great Mesoamerican civilisations the tomato had become a substantial crop in many forms, and it was the peoples of Mexico, above all the Aztecs and their predecessors, who gave the world both the domesticated plant and its name.
The genetics tell a two-stage story. From the wild S. pimpinellifolium of South America came first an intermediate, the cherry-sized S. lycopersicum var. cerasiforme, which spread northward; and from this, through deliberate selection in Mesoamerica, came the large-fruited cultivated tomato. Quite when this happened is uncertain, and the older confident date of around 500 BCE for full domestication is better expressed as a long process completed well before the Spanish arrival rather than a single moment. What is certain is the cultural outcome. In the markets of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan the tomato was sold in many varieties, large and small, red and yellow, ribbed and smooth, alongside its close relative the tomatillo, and it was ground with chillies into the sauces that the Nahuatl speakers called by names built on the same root. That root is tomatl, the Nahuatl word for the swelling, plump fruit, and it is the direct ancestor of the Spanish tomate and of the English 'tomato', so that every nation that eats the fruit also, unknowingly, speaks a word of the Aztec tongue. The plant belongs botanically to the nightshade family, the Solanaceae, alongside the potato, the aubergine, the chilli, and the deadly nightshade itself, a kinship that would shape its uneasy reception in Europe for two full centuries.
Of all the gifts of the Columbian Exchange, the tomato travelled the furthest in culinary imagination while moving, at first, the most reluctantly. Its dispersal began in the Aztec heartland of Mesoamerica, where tomatl was a foundational market ingredient in Tenochtitlan, ground with chillies into the sauces that still define Mexican cooking. Hernán Cortés encountered it during the conquest of 1519, and within a few years Spanish ships had carried its seeds back to Seville. There the tomato's long European hesitation began. For the better part of two centuries it was treated across much of the continent as a botanical curiosity rather than a food: grown for ornament in the gardens of the curious, fed at times to livestock, and viewed with deep suspicion because its kinship with the nightshades, the belladonna and the mandrake, marked it in the herbalists' minds as probably poisonous. The leaves and stems are indeed mildly toxic, which lent the fear a grain of truth, and the fruit was widely thought to be cold, damp, and unwholesome.
The breaking of this prejudice came first in the south. Spain itself, and especially Andalusia, took the fruit into the kitchen earliest, working it with garlic, olive oil, and stale bread into the cold soups that became gazpacho, and rubbing it over bread as the elemental pan con tomate of Catalonia. But it was Naples, under Spanish rule and pressed by the hunger of its vast poor, that made the tomato a true staple. By the late seventeenth century the first Italian tomato sauce recipes were being written down, and by the eighteenth the street food of Naples was built upon the fruit, the tomato meeting flatbread in the dishes from which the pizza would emerge. From the western Mediterranean the tomato spread outward along every trade route of the age. The Ottoman Empire received it through Venice and Spain and folded it into the mezze, salads, and braises of the Levant and Anatolia. Portuguese ships carried it east to Goa and the Indian coast, where it entered the curry and the chutney; on across the Indian Ocean it reached Siam and, through Portuguese and Dutch traders, China, where cooks paired it with egg. It moved south into the cooking of North Africa, and from there along the colonial networks into West Africa, where it became the very base of the stew and the colour of jollof rice.
The tomato's final, decisive conquest came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries through three great vectors. The mass emigration of southern Italians carried the tomato sauce and the pizza to the Americas, to Britain, and around the world, fixing the fruit forever in the global idea of Italian food. The British Empire's networks distributed it to every continent and bred the Anglo-Indian tomato chutney and the mulligatawny that travelled home to Victorian tables. And in the United States, once early fears of poisoning had been laughed off, industrial processing turned it into bottled ketchup and condensed soup, two of the most successful manufactured foods in history. Within less than four hundred years of leaving Mexico, the tomato had become one of the three most consumed vegetables on earth by production volume and the defining ingredient of more national cuisines than any other plant.
The tomato is one of the world's most important food plants, a fruit by botany and a vegetable by every habit of the kitchen, and it occupies a place in modern cooking that is genuinely without rival in its breadth. Cultivated at approximately 180 million tonnes a year, it stands amongst the three most consumed vegetables on earth by weight, grown under glass and in the open field on every inhabited continent. What sets it apart is the speed and completeness of its adoption: unlike rice, wheat, or the older staples that took millennia to spread, the tomato made its journey from suspect curiosity in European gardens to indispensable foundation of a dozen cuisines in under four hundred years. It does not belong to one tradition but defines many at once, and the same fruit performs entirely different work in each.
It is the long-cooked base of the sauce in Naples and the soul of the ragù; a fresh, raw, lime-sharpened condiment in the salsa and pico de gallo of Mexico; a slow-fried gravy of tomato, onion, and scotch bonnet in Lagos, the obe ata beneath half of Nigerian cooking; the makhani gravy of butter chicken and the pulpy bhaji of Mumbai; the cold, drinkable gazpacho of an Andalusian summer; the relish ezme of the Turkish grill; and the bottled ketchup of the American and Australian table. No other single ingredient has been so thoroughly and so deeply absorbed by culinary traditions that share nothing else and that would otherwise have no common ground at all. Nutritionally Solanum lycopersicum supplies vitamin C, potassium, and above all lycopene, the red carotenoid pigment and potent antioxidant whose availability to the body actually increases with cooking, so that a cooked or concentrated tomato delivers more of it than a raw one. The fruit is eaten and used in every conceivable state: fresh and raw, sun-dried, tinned whole or chopped, reduced to paste and passata, juiced, fermented, and cooked down for hours into the deep, sweet, umami-rich foundation on which so much of the world's everyday cooking now rests.
Historical Journey of Tomato
Andean Region, Peru & Ecuador — c. 7000 BCE
Along the dry coastal valleys and the arid western scrublands of what are now Peru and Ecuador grew the wild Solanum pimpinellifolium, the currant tomato, ancestor of every cultivated tomato on earth. Its fruits were tiny, no larger than a redcurrant or a pea, but brilliantly red and astonishingly intense in flavour, the concentrated essence of everything the cultivated tomato would later spread thin across its larger, wetter flesh. This was the raw material, and the Andean peoples who lived amongst it gathered the wild fruit and tolerated it as a useful weed in the margins of their gardens, but, so far as the evidence shows, they never took the decisive step of fully domesticating it as they had domesticated the potato, the bean, and so many other plants of the cordillera. The tomato's transformation would happen far to the north, in Mesoamerica, leaving the South American homeland in the curious position of holding the wild origin of the species without ever cultivating it. Yet the Andes remain bound to the tomato's story, for the modern fields of Peru still grow it abundantly, and the fruit threads through the country's celebrated cuisine, brightening the cold potato terrines of causa limeña and the pungent cheese sauce that bathes papas a la huancaína. From this dry Andean cradle, the small wild fruit began its long journey towards becoming the most consumed vegetable in the world.
Mesoamerica, Mexico — c. 500 BCE
It was in Mesoamerica, and not in the South American homeland of the wild plant, that the tomato became a crop. Over many centuries the Aztecs and the cultures that preceded them carried, sowed, and selected the small fruit, enlarging it through patient choice into the substantial Solanum lycopersicum, and gave it the Nahuatl name tomatl that the whole world now speaks. By the height of the Aztec empire the tomato was sold in the great market of Tenochtitlan in a profusion of forms, large and small, red and yellow, ribbed and smooth, set out beside its tart green cousin the tomatillo. There it joined the chilli and the squash, and above all stood beside the maize and the bean at the heart of Mesoamerican eating, ground together with chillies on the volcanic-stone metate into the cooked and raw sauces that the Nahuatl tongue named for the fruit and that survive directly in the salsa roja and the fresh, raw pico de gallo of the modern Mexican table. When Hernán Cortés and his men entered Tenochtitlan in 1519 they saw these tomatoes in the market and tasted them in the sauces of the Aztec court, and amongst the plunder, plants, and reports sent back across the Atlantic went the seeds of the fruit, beginning the tomato's long and hesitant career in the Old World.
Seville & Andalusia, Spain — c. 1521
Tomato seeds reached Seville with the returning ships of the conquest, and Spain became the first door through which the fruit entered the Old World. For the first several decades it was treated, as it would be across most of Europe, with caution and curiosity rather than appetite: grown as an ornamental novelty in the gardens of the curious and of the monasteries, regarded with suspicion as a probable poison owing to its nightshade kinship, and eaten, where it was eaten at all, by the poor who could not afford to be fastidious. But Andalusia, hot, Mediterranean, and close in spirit to the cooking of the Maghreb and Italy, came round to the fruit earlier than the cooler north. By the seventeenth century Andalusian cooks were pounding ripe tomatoes with garlic, olive oil, vinegar, and stale bread into the cold, drinkable soups that became gazpacho, a dish whose older, breadier ancestors the tomato now coloured and sharpened into the thing we know. In Catalonia the fruit met bread in its simplest possible form: the pa amb tomàquet or pan con tomate, a slice of bread rubbed with the cut face of a ripe tomato and dressed with oil and salt, the most elemental snack in the Spanish repertoire and proof that the tomato had ceased to be an ornament and become, in Spain at least, plain and beloved food. From Spain the fruit would pass to Italy and to the Spanish-ruled kingdom of Naples, where its true European transformation awaited.
Naples & Rome, Italy — c. 1550
No European nation embraced the tomato so wholly as Italy, and no Italian city did more with it than Naples. Under Spanish rule and burdened with one of the largest and poorest urban populations in Europe, Naples had every reason to take up a cheap, prolific fruit that thrived in the volcanic soils around Vesuvius, and take it up it did, more thoroughly than anywhere else on the continent. The first printed Italian tomato sauce recipe appears in Antonio Latini's Lo Scalco alla Moderna of 1692, a sauce 'in the Spanish style' of chopped tomato, onion, chilli, and herbs, marking the moment the fruit entered the written record of Italian cooking. Through the eighteenth century the tomato married the flatbread of the Neapolitan poor, and from that union came the dish that would conquer the world: the pizza, dressed with tomato. Its two classic forms became the poles of Neapolitan genius, the marinara of tomato, garlic, oregano, and olive oil, austere and red, and the later Margherita of tomato, mozzarella, and basil. Beyond the pizza, the tomato spread through the whole southern repertoire, into the bruschetta heaped on grilled bread, the bread salad panzanella, the Pugliese tomato-and-oregano rusks friselle, the Neapolitan fish poached in the 'crazy water' of acqua pazza, and, further north, into the Tuscan beans stewed with sage, rosemary, and tomato. From this Neapolitan crucible the tomato sauce would travel, with the great Italian emigrations, to the ends of the earth.
Provence, France — c. 1650
France resisted the tomato longer than Italy or Spain, holding to the old learned suspicion of a fruit so plainly a cousin of the deadly nightshade, and in the cooler and more northerly parts of the kingdom it remained for a century an ornamental curiosity, the 'love apple' or pomme d'amour, grown for its glossy fruit but not for the table. It was the warm Mediterranean south, Provence and the country around the old Italian and Spanish borders, that adopted it first and most naturally, for there the climate, the olive oil, and the garlic of the kitchen were already those of the lands that had taken the fruit to heart. By the eighteenth century the tomato had become central to Provençal cooking, and the Revolution helped carry its southern habits north when volunteers from Marseille brought their food, and their songs, to Paris. The fruit anchors the great set pieces of the Provençal table: ratatouille, the slow-stewed summer medley of tomato with aubergine, courgette, and sweet pepper; the salade niçoise of Nice; the soupe au pistou finished with basil; and the whole family of tomato, olive, caper, and anchovy sauces that flavour the fish and meat of the Riviera. In Provence the tomato found its first secure French home, and from there its use spread slowly through the rest of a country that would, in time, embrace it as warmly as any.
Istanbul & Levant, Ottoman Empire — c. 1700
The Ottoman Empire received the tomato through its dense trading ties with Spain, Venice, and the wider Mediterranean, and the fruit found in the Ottoman kitchen a readier welcome than it had met in northern Europe. It integrated swiftly into the cooking of the empire's Arab provinces: across Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine the tomato became central to the mezze table, to the salads, and to the slow vegetable braises in olive oil that define the Levantine repertoire. From this world emerged shakshuka, eggs poached in a spiced sauce of tomato and sweet pepper, a dish of the North African and Levantine margins of the empire that has since crossed every border and become a breakfast eaten around the globe. In Anatolia the raw tomato met the chilli, the parsley, and the pomegranate molasses in ezme, the finely chopped, fiery relish that is the defining accompaniment to grilled meat at the Turkish kebab house, while the aubergines of imam bayıldı were stewed soft in tomato, onion, and oil. Even the cool Turkish shepherd's salad, the çoban salatası of diced tomato, cucumber, onion, and parsley, rests on the fruit. Through the Ottoman lands the tomato spread onward into the Balkans, into Egypt, and across North Africa, naturalised so completely that within a few generations it seemed to have belonged to the eastern Mediterranean table forever.
Goa & Bombay (Mumbai), Estado da India (Portuguese India) — c. 1700
The tomato entered the Indian subcontinent through the Portuguese, who introduced it to Goa as one strand of the great Columbian Exchange that also brought the chilli, the potato, the cashew, and the pineapple to Indian soil. The Estado da India, with its capital and chief port at Goa, was the primary conduit through which New World plants passed into the subcontinent, and Goa's role with the tomato was above all that of a point of entry and redistribution rather than a culinary destination in its own right, which is why this remains a trade and transit node rather than a place where the fruit became a staple. Bombay, the cluster of islands that would grow into Mumbai, was administered from Goa until 1661, when it passed to the English crown as part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza on her marriage to Charles II, and through the markets of Goa and Bombay the tomato spread slowly into coastal Indian cooking. It took its first real hold in the Goan Catholic kitchen, where, alongside the Portuguese vinegar and the New World chilli, it entered the fierce, sour preparations that became the prawn balchão, the spiced pickle-curry of the Goan table, and the vindaloo. From this Konkan coast the fruit moved northward and inland, towards the Deccan and eventually the wheat-eating plains, where in time it would help build the tomato-rich street food of Bombay such as the buttery vegetable mash pav bhaji and the great masala gravies of the north.
Ayutthaya, Kingdom of Siam (Thailand) — c. 1700 CE
Ayutthaya, the capital of the Kingdom of Siam and one of the most cosmopolitan trading cities in Asia, received the tomato through the Portuguese and Dutch maritime networks that made it a hub of the 17th-century Indian Ocean economy. Portugal signed a commercial treaty with King Ramathibodi II in 1516, establishing permanent trading quarters within the city; the Dutch East India Company followed in 1604. At its peak, Ayutthaya housed separate residential quarters for Portuguese, Dutch, French, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Malay, and Indian traders, with a population estimated to rival London. New World crops moving along the Portuguese Eastern Route from Goa through the Malay ports arrived in this cosmopolitan marketplace, and the tomato entered a culinary tradition already built on a precise, fourfold flavour framework: hot, sour, sweet, and salty in simultaneous balance. It was absorbed not as a sauce base, as in the Italian and West African traditions, but as one element in the sour-acidic register, complementing lime, tamarind, and green mango as a souring and textural agent.
The dish in which the Thai tomato tradition is most visible internationally is som-tam, the green papaya salad of the Isaan and Lao tradition, in which cherry tomatoes are bruised directly into the dressing alongside chilli, lime, and fish sauce. More revealing of the tomato's culinary depth is nam prik ong, the Lanna tradition of Chiang Mai: a coarse, deeply flavoured paste of roasted tomatoes, dried chillies, minced pork, and fermented shrimp paste, pounded in a mortar and served with raw vegetables and sticky rice; the preparation in the Thai repertoire where tomato most closely approaches the structural role it plays in the Mediterranean kitchen. Kaeng som, the sour orange curry of central and southern Thailand, uses cherry tomatoes alongside tamarind as a co-acidic element in a clear, fiercely spiced fish or prawn broth. Thailand's tomato relationship is characterised by this versatility: fresh and bruised in salads, roasted and pounded in relishes, dissolved into sour broths, the tomato is present throughout the Thai kitchen without ever becoming its singular foundation.
Tunisia & Morocco — c. 1750
North Africa took the tomato to heart as completely as anywhere on earth, weaving it into the harissa paste, the salads, the tagines, and the slow-cooked stews that anchor the cooking of the Maghreb. Tunisia in particular became one of the most tomato-intensive cuisines in the world by the measure of consumption per head, the fruit running through the whole day's eating from the shakshuka of the morning, the chakchouka of eggs poached in a sauce of tomato and pepper, to the long-braised lamb dishes of the arid south. Tomato concentrate, double-reduced into the dense, dark, sun-deepened paste that Tunisians keep always to hand, gives the cooking its characteristic depth and colour. The great set-piece tomato dish of the country is mechouia, the 'grilled' salad, in which tomatoes, sweet peppers, onions, and garlic are charred over the flame until soft and smoky, then pounded or chopped together with olive oil, caraway, and coriander and crowned with flaked tuna, capers, and olives. From the Tunisian table the tomato runs west into the tagines of Morocco and Algeria and south into the Sahel, naturalised so thoroughly into the cooking of the Maghreb that it is impossible now to imagine the food of the region without it.
Madurai, Pandya Kingdom & Madras Presidency — c. 1750
The tomato reached the Tamil-speaking south through the Portuguese trading networks that fringed the peninsula, and it spread quickly through the cooking of the ancient Pandya heartland around Madurai, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world. There it was absorbed into one of the foundational preparations of the Tamil kitchen, rasam. In its original form rasam was a thin, sour, peppery broth of tamarind and black pepper, the milagu-thanni or 'pepper water' taken to clear the palate and ease the digestion, and into this ancient framework the tomato slipped with perfect ease. Tomato rasam, an intensely aromatic broth of tomato, black pepper, cumin, garlic, curry leaves, and tamarind, simmered and tempered with mustard seeds in hot oil, became the second course of the traditional Tamil meal, poured over rice and drunk from the cupped hand or the rim of the plate. From Tamil Nadu the dish spread across the south into Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Kerala, each region working its own variation. Its most famous descendant, however, travelled in the other direction: British colonial officers of the Madras Presidency, encountering this pepper water, adapted it into a thick, lentil-bound, curry-flavoured soup they called mulligatawny, the name a direct Anglicisation of the Tamil milagu, pepper, and thanni, water, and carried it home to become a fixture of the Victorian dining room and a monument to the Anglo-Indian encounter.
London & Victorian Britain — c. 1790
Britain came to the tomato from several directions at once, and made it a staple from each. The first route ran east, through empire: colonial officers and their households returning from the Madras Presidency brought back mulligatawny, the British transformation of Tamil pepper water into a thick soup bound with lentils, enriched with cream, and warmed with curry powder, ladled out in every colonial club and Victorian dining room as the very taste of Anglo-India. The same colonial kitchen produced tomato chutney, the slow-cooked preserve of tomatoes with onion, ginger, vinegar, sugar, and warm spices that became a permanent fixture of the British larder, spooned beside Cheddar and cold meat in the ploughman's lunch of every public house. The second route ran south from the Mediterranean: first as a trickle of refinement through cookery writers and travellers, and then as a flood with the post-war Italian emigration and the continental food revolution that followed, until tomato-sauced pasta had entered every home and spaghetti bolognese, the anglicised 'spag bol' that no Bolognese would recognise, had become the default weeknight dinner of a whole generation by the 1970s. To these the British added their own peculiar contributions, the tinned tomato soup and the bottle of tomato ketchup or brown-tinged tomato sauce that sits on every cafe table. By so many converging paths the New World fruit, once feared as a poison, became one of the most thoroughly British ingredients of all.
Lagos & Accra, West Africa — c. 1800
The tomato came to West Africa through Portuguese and, later, British and French colonial trade, arriving on the same coasts that the chilli, already long established, had reached before it, and it integrated into the region's cooking so completely that it is now reckoned absolutely fundamental, impossible to imagine the food without. It is the base of the Nigerian stew, the red foundation laid down before any meat or fish is added; the colour and body of jollof rice, the great one-pot dish over which West African nations contend with fierce and joyful rivalry; and a foundation of the thick egusi soup of ground melon seed. The defining preparation is obe ata, the base sauce beneath the great majority of Nigerian home cooking, in which tomatoes are blended with onions, red bell peppers, and the ferociously hot scotch bonnet, then fried down slowly in oil for the better part of an hour until the raw, watery brightness cooks off and the sauce darkens and deepens into a rich, sweet, concentrated red paste. The scale of the appetite is enormous; Nigeria alone consumes some 2.3 million tonnes of tomatoes a year, and demand outstrips the country's own harvest so far that the imported tin of tomato concentrate has itself become a staple of the market and the kitchen. In West Africa the New World fruit found one of its most wholehearted homes.
Guangdong & Shanghai, China — c. 1800
The tomato reached China by sea, carried on the Portuguese and later Dutch trade routes that touched the southern ports of Guangdong, and the Chinese name records exactly how it was understood: fanqie, the 'foreign aubergine', a strange new cousin of a vegetable already known. For a long time it remained a minor and ornamental thing on the edge of Chinese cooking, but in the modern era Chinese cooks adapted it with their characteristic ingenuity into dishes that now belong wholly to the national table. The supreme example is tomato stir-fried with egg, fanqie chao jidan, in which wedges of tomato are cooked fast in the wok with softly scrambled egg, a little sugar balancing the fruit's acidity, to make one of the most frequently cooked of all Chinese home dishes, a comfort food learned in childhood and eaten over rice across the country. In the Cantonese south the fruit found a second classic in tomato beef brisket, fanqie niu nan, in which brisket is slow-braised until tender in a glossy, sweet-and-sour tomato sauce and ladled over rice or served with noodles. The Chinese treated the tomato neither as a sauce base in the Mediterranean manner nor as a raw salad fruit, but as a vegetable to be cooked briefly and brightly, and in doing so gave it a place in everyday cooking quite unlike its role anywhere else.
New Jersey & New York, USA — c. 1820
Early Americans, inheriting the old European dread of the nightshade, long regarded the tomato with suspicion as a probable poison, fit for the ornamental garden but not the plate. The breaking of that fear is wrapped in a much-loved legend: that Colonel Robert Gibbon Johnson stood on the steps of the Salem courthouse in New Jersey in 1820 and ate a whole basket of tomatoes before an astonished crowd that had gathered to watch him die, and walked away unharmed. Whatever the truth of the tale, the prejudice did dissolve in the early nineteenth century, and within a few decades the tomato had become one of the most consumed vegetables in America and the object of an industrial transformation that would carry it round the world. The food manufacturers of the United States turned the fruit into shelf-stable goods of extraordinary reach: H. J. Heinz launched his bottled tomato ketchup in 1876, sweet, tangy, and uniform, and the Campbell company introduced condensed tomato soup in 1897, two of the most successful manufactured foods in history. The tomato wove itself into the American everyday, from the wedge in the BLT sandwich and the slice on the hamburger to the ketchup bottle on every diner table, and the country that had once feared the fruit became one of its greatest growers, processors, and exporters.
Cairo & the Nile Delta, Egypt — c. 1850
The tomato reached Egypt through the Ottoman Mediterranean, the Turkish-ruled trading world of which Egypt had been a part since 1517, and although it arrived comparatively late it was embraced more completely here than almost anywhere else in the region. By the nineteenth century the tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) had become the indispensable foundation of the Egyptian kitchen: the base of the great family of khodar bil lahma, vegetables braised slowly with a little meat in a rich, garlicky red sauce, and the body of the spiced tomato sauce poured over koshari, the national dish of rice, lentils, and macaroni. Amongst the most homely and best loved of these tomato braises is bisella, the everyday stew of green peas cooked with onion, garlic, and tomato around pieces of beef or lamb, served over vermicelli rice and finished with the fried garlic and coriander taqliya that perfumes so much Egyptian cooking. In bisella the New World tomato meets the Old World pea, a Neolithic founder crop grown in the Nile delta since the fourth millennium BCE, in a dish that could hardly be more Egyptian or more domestic.
Punjab Province, British India — c. 1880
In the fertile five-river plain of the Punjab, under British administration in the late nineteenth century, the tomato entered the tandoor-centred cooking of the northwest and there gave rise to one of the most influential of all Indian sauces. Punjabi cooks found that the tomato, reduced slowly with onion, ginger, and the warm spices of garam masala and then enriched with butter and cream, yielded the velvety, glowing, faintly sweet makhani or 'buttery' gravy that would come to define the region's most celebrated dishes and, in time, the whole world's idea of Indian restaurant food. Its supreme expression is murgh makhani, butter chicken, whose origins trace to the tandoor-masters of Peshawar and Lahore in the years before Partition: chicken marinated in spiced yoghurt and roasted hard in the clay tandoor, then bathed in the rich tomato, butter, and cream sauce that tradition holds was devised partly to use up the day's leftover roasted meat and accumulated juices. After the catastrophe of the 1947 Partition, Kundan Lal Gujral, a restaurateur originally of Peshawar, carried the dish to Delhi, where it flourished and from where it travelled out across the globe to become perhaps the single most recognised Indian dish on earth. The same tomato gravy underpins matar paneer, the homely northern dish of green peas and fresh cheese, and a whole family of the spiced, simmered curries that the tomato made possible.
Cape Town & Johannesburg, South Africa — c. 1900
The tomato settled into South African cooking through several converging traditions that the country's layered history brought together. In the Cape, the Cape Malay and Afrikaner kitchens produced tomato bredie, a slow-cooked stew in which mutton or lamb is simmered for hours with onion, chilli, and a great quantity of tomato until the fruit collapses entirely into a rich, dark, jammy sauce around the tender meat, a dish many hold to be the very soul of the old Cape kitchen and a direct descendant of the stews the Malay community carried with them. In the Colony of Natal the tomato did quite different work. The Indian indentured labourers settled there from 1860 onward, brought to cut the sugar cane, used the fruit as the foundation of the Durban curry, in which chopped tomatoes are cooked down with deeply caramelised onion, ginger, garlic, and a fierce blend of aromatic spices to form the characteristic dark, thick, concentrated masala gravy that defines this distinctive cuisine. Durban mutton curry, ladled fiery and red over rice or stuffed into the hollowed loaf of the bunny chow, stands amongst the most fully developed tomato-based curries anywhere in the world, a South African synthesis of Tamil, Hindi-speaking, and Natal British influences that has become one of the nation's defining dishes. From these strands the tomato wove itself into the everyday cooking of every community in the country.
Victoria & Queensland, Australia — c. 1950
By the middle of the twentieth century Australia had become one of the world's heaviest consumers of tomatoes per head, both fresh and tinned, and the fruit had woven itself into the national identity in a peculiarly Australian way. The great institution of the country's relationship with the tomato is the humble pairing of the meat pie with tomato sauce: the hot, flaky pie squirted with the sweet, tangy, slightly thin red sauce that Australians call simply 'tomato sauce', eaten at the football, the milk bar, and the roadside, and reckoned as much a fixture of the national table as Vegemite itself. But the tomato's place in Australia is also the place of the country's post-war remaking. The great waves of immigration from Italy, Greece, Lebanon, and later Vietnam and Southeast Asia brought their tomato cooking with them and transformed the Australian plate, so that the Italian ragù and the tomato-sauced pasta, the Greek salad of tomato, cucumber, olives, and feta, the Lebanese fattoush, and the tomato-tinged broths of the wider table all became ordinary Australian food. Grown abundantly in the irrigated districts of Victoria and Queensland and tinned in vast quantity, the tomato anchors both the old Anglo-Australian pie counter and the exuberant multicultural cooking that has come to define the modern country.
