Customer Reviews

The Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery

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I read this book the month it came out in 1994. I'm not sure how I found out about it but oh well...

Tomatoes are one of god's gifts and if you have the least bit of interest in this amazing fruit, get this book. The history of the tomato and how it arrived on people's plates after centuries of neglect is way more interesting than any Bond film. The author's research is meticulous.

Also, the back of this book has historic recipes from the 1800's that use tomatoes. This of course could spur someone to pursue a career in archeological gastronomy. The bottom line is I love this book and it is one of my top 5 most prized books.

-- Indiana Tomato Lover

I have to say this book was fascinating. I read it cover to cover and was both informed and amused by the content.

While the "great tomato pill debate" could have perhaps been covered in a little less depth for my own taste, I have to appreciate the author's personal insight (at least the benign tomato pills reduced the use of calomel) as well as "just the facts." Of course, the facts are there, too. It's very well researched.

Well worth the read for any vegetable historian or committed tomato grower!

It turns out almost everything I thought I knew from tomato folk-lore was wrong.

Tomatoes originated in Mexico: wrong.

Our early ancestors thought they were poisonous: mostly wrong. Or aphrodisiac: wrong.

That opinions were changed when a man named Johnson ate tomatoes in a public display, where hundreds of people had gathered expecting to see him die: wrong.

The facts, as related in Andrew Smith's "The Tomato in America," are more interesting, although related too repetitively and carelessly edited.

It appears that tomatoes -- or tomatas as the word was usually written up to the 1830s -- were well established as a food in some parts of the English colonies around the time of Declaration of Independence, like South Carolina. They were also eaten in the British Isles, usually with salt, pepper and oil -- novices were instructed that they could be eaten "like cucumbers."

However, the tomato/tomata had a gaudier career in the new republic. It was not just a food but a medicine, and there was a lively war over tomato pills in the 1830s, followed by a tomato mania which, if not as fabulous as the Dutch tulip frenzy, lasted longer.

Smith includes a big selection of early tomato recipes, which for the most part comprised equal parts tomatoes and sugar, cooked to a goo. The results sound gag-inducing to a modern palate.

Smith's book was published by the University of South Carolina Press in 1994, and that press may have been interested because South Carolina was where tomatoes really got established in what later became the United States (although they were eaten in the old Spanish Southwest, too). It was reissued in 2001 by the University of Illinois Press, the only time I have ever noticed one university press picking up a recent title from another.

The author is a hard working person. So it's very convinient for readers to read the aspect of hitory. However, it's merit also is it's weakness. We could not get any personal viewpoint of the author. We could only get the results of author's research.

I would like to purchase this book but I am challenged by all your leads off the subject.