Remember, it took time to embrace tomato

Rahul Verma

Rifling through the pages of a cookbook, in search of an interesting recipe for a chicken dish, I found something that I thought would be just right for some foodie friends who were coming for dinner. But when I started going through the list of ingredients, I promptly turned the page. The dish needed four plump tomatoes — and we had none at home.

Tomatoes are like truffle and caviar these days — they cost an arm and a leg. So, it’s been decided — albeit with a heavy heart — that the lycopersicon lycopersicum shall not enter our house till the prices drop. The chicken, therefore, was cooked not with tomatoes, but with pepper and curd. And let me say, it wasn’t bad at all.

The high price of tomatoes has evoked some concern — and quite a bit of satire as well. There are memes and videos that show tomatoes being stashed away in lockers, and of masked gunmen robbing people who are furtively carrying tomatoes home. After all, despite the cost, people have no choice but to buy tomatoes because they do pep up our dishes. They are such an essential part of our cuisine that it is difficult to believe the tomato actually came to India only in the 18th century — and history tells us that Indians took a while to embrace it.

Food historian KT Achaya writes that the lycopersicon lycopersicum is believed to have originated in Mexico or Peru. The tomato reached Europe in 1550, and first captivated hearts in Italy, he writes in ‘Indian Food: A Historical Companion’.

Elsewhere, however, the vegetable didn’t have much of a reputation to begin with. In England, it was considered poisonous for its relationship to the toxic belladonna plant. Folklore had it that it was used in a “witches’ brew” and to summon werewolves.

In the United States, till 1893, they weren’t sure whether it was a fruit or a vegetable. The US government had imposed a 10 per cent tax on imported vegetables to protect American farmers. In 1887, a tomato importer went to court, pleading that tomatoes were fruits, and thus should be exempted from the tax. The case went to the Supreme Court, where it was finally defined as a vegetable. The court’s logic was simple: tomatoes were served at dinner like potatoes, carrots, turnips, cauliflower and so on, but not as a fruit for dessert. Ergo, they were a vegetable, and not a fruit.

In India, we had no such confusion. It was always seen as a vegetable that added colour and taste to food. Before tomatoes, sourness in food came from different agents such as curd, tamarind or lemon. Even now, there are many dishes where tomatoes are used sparingly, if at all. There is a long list of vegetable dishes in the North that are cooked with just, say, cumin seeds and a pinch of asafoetida. Bengal boasts of several fish and meat curries — apart from vegetable dishes — which are cooked without tomatoes. South Indian dishes are often flavoured with tamarind, and parts of west India make good use of the tart kokum. But make no mistake — the tomato has its place in the sun, too. In the US, a popular pizza form is called the tomato pie. And a good pizza is all about a good tomato sauce that covers the base. The Italian master chef Antonio Carluccio used to prepare a delicious tomato sauce by heating olive oil and frying finely chopped garlic in it till the garlic turned golden. Then he added tomatoes — fresh pulp or fresh whole tomatoes, skinned — and capers, and cooked it together with herbs such as oregano or marjoram.

Then, of course, we can’t have tomato rasam — so good for a sore throat — or stuffed tomatoes with a filling of potatoes or minced meat without tomatoes, can we? The tomato chutney — sweet-and-sour in the East, tangy in the South — can perk up any meal. Keema needs tomatoes for colour and flavour, too. And what about good ol’ butter chicken? How do we get the essential taste of North India’s signature dish without tomatoes?

I like my tomato and cucumber sandwiches, and can’t think of a juicy meat burger without an onion ring and a slice of tomato in it. And I must confess that I am a ketchup fiend: I doused my prawn-fried rice with tomato ketchup in what was possibly my first visit to a Chinese restaurant when I was a wee lad. Even now, when I have samosas or chicken patties, I add generous dollops of ketchup to the snacks.

I was reading somewhere that restaurants and others are using pumpkins now in place of tomatoes in sauces and gravies. There was a time when the slogan of a ketchup brand was: ‘Is mein kaddu nahi bhara’ (this is not full of pumpkin). I am waiting to hear the slogan again.