Sunday June 17, 2007
On a day when I plan to make much of the summer glut of really tasty tomatoes ‘on the vine’, I had to do the ‘well, darn my hide’ when I discovered this:
Although Europeans - especially Italians - were eating tomatoes raw and including them cooked in recipes by the 18th Century, Americans had to be convinced that they would not be poisoned by them as late as the 19th. A certain Robert Johnson, about whom nothing at all else is known, supposedly achieved a degree of celebrity when he ate a tomato publicly on the steps of the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey in 1820, to prove it would do him no harm.
Source: BBC News
Well done, Mr Johnson. It’s a somewhat tenuous connection, but I shall think of you today when I have baked tomatoes stuffed with feta for my lunch and a simple bean and sausage cassoulet for our dinner. Neither would be possible without the humble tomato.
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