Brownielocks and The 3 Bears
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The Apple Á The Tomato, The Love Fruits?

Why did I put the apple and the tomato in the same category? The reason is because the ancients did because they resembled each other. So both were called "The Love Apple" and both were believed to be the fruit from the Garden of Eden that Eve tempted Adam with.   But, you ask, they don't even look alike or taste alike. How can that be?  

First of all, this goes way back to before Columbus discovered America. At this time the Old World was basically divided into two sections.  South of the Italian-Austrian border were the darker complexion race of the Mediterranean people, who were really into grapes and fermenting (this gets explained in the ketchup area later). And, north of this line lived the Celts, who were considered barbarians.  For thousands of years, the Greek Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church were bitter enemies.  But, as we all know from the History of St. Patrick's Day, it was the Catholics that were going into the Celtic lands and trying to civilize them according to their terms.  

Around the 8th Century, the Celts believed that apples contained divine wisdom, and when you ate an apple you were taken to a kind of paradise.  This is because the Celts associated apples with the sun.  The connection is that the Celtic word for apple is "abal" which is said to be a derivative of the Greek word for the sun god, Apollo.  On the other hand, the Christians felt that the wisdom you got from the apple led you to Hell.  (I won't go into the sexual symbols  that the Greeks had about the apple!)   The Celts also had a story that Christ was crucified on an apple tree.  But, it's the Christians who kept associating the apple with lust, going to the extremes of even claiming it caused venereal disease!  We know today this is not true.  But, during this time, the Christians were just against anything delicious.

Now, how does the apple connect with the tomato?  When Columbus was on his way to discover America, he got lost and landed in South America.  It was there that he looked at the Orinoco River in Venezuela and assumed it was the gateway to the Garden of Eden.  When Columbus returned back to Spain, he brought with him this really delicious new fruit, called the poma amoris or the love apple.  Today we  just call it the tomato!

The Hungarians called the tomato, Paradice Appfel, aka The Apple of Pardise.  Why? Well, for some strange reason, the bright red color was considered rather lusty in those days. The tomato was also oozing with juices and exploded with a zing of flavor. This was to the people back then an obvious aphrodisiac.  After all, didn't it get discovered in the Garden of Eden?

Well, the Italians had a different idea where the Garden of Eden was.  Apparently the scholars decided that the Greek Garden of Hesperides, a walled enclosure supposedly guarded by spirits, was the real Garden of Eden. And, that it's magical fruit, golden apples, that grew there were the real temptation of Eve.  Since the tomato  that Columbus brought back, looked a lot like these golden apples from that garden, the Italians call the tomato, pomadoro  (golden apple) and connected the two with the same biblical belief.

Although Christians ate apples, they still remained cautious of eating the tomato for 150 years or so, until the 1700's when they started to gain some acceptance, mainly in Italy. But they weren't eaten whole and in their natural state. They were made into a garnish or a puree. In the early 1700's, a Jewish-Portuguese immigrant named Dr. Siccaary brought the tomato to North America.  He advertised them as coming from the Tree of Eternal Life from the Garden of Eden and said that anyone who ate a lot of these would never die.  But, most of the western world remained cautious about eating tomatoes, claiming that they made your teeth fall out.

So, the tomato first gained popularity, not in its natural state, but as a sauce.  In fact, Abbot Chiari, a Catholic moralist in the 1700's wrote that there was " nothing more evil than putting the tomato sauce on foods that are covered with drugs (spices) from America." Why? Back then, sauces were considered satanic because they glorified eating, which then led to gluttony which then led to every one of the other seven deadly sins like lust, greed, etc.

Below is a funny anecdote from the book that I think you will enjoy:

"The hero of the tomato was named Robert Johnson, and when he announced in 1820 that he was publicly going to eat one of the devilish fruits, people journeyed  for hundreds of miles to his town in New Jersey to watch him drop dead. He mounted the courtyard steps  around noon and turned to the throng. "What are you afraid of?" he snarled. "I'll show you fools that these things are good to eat!"  Then he bit into the tomato.  Seeds and juice spurted forth. Some spectators fainted. But he survived and, according to local legent, sup up a tomato-canning factory."

In the old days, ketchup wasn't what we think of today.  The ancient Romans defined ketchup as a fermented fish sauce called garum.  They made it by leaving salted fish, intestines, heads and blood in the sun to ferment about two months.  In Europe this garum evolved into an anchovy sort of pickle juice.  I guess because these two versions of garum aren't exactly appealing, someone finally tossed in a few tomatoes around 1800 to help the flavor!  A lot of variations of this garum remained, until the U.S. government outlawed all fermented ketchup in 1906.  As a result, the thick, super sweet stuff we know today as ketchup or catsup came to be.

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Source: "In The Devil's Garden. A Sinful History of Forbidden Food"
By Stewart Lee Allen
Ballantine Publishing Group © 2002