[Sca-cooks] OT - A little history

[Terry Decker]

>   In England,Gervase Markham's THE ENGLISH HUSWIFE gives instructions for
raising
>tomatoes in his section on kitchen gardens. (At least according to
>foodways historian Karen Hess).

>From the Best edition, the reference is to "apples of love" in paragraph 5
of section II.  No other references or recipes.

>
>    There are by then quite a few references to tomato use in Spain
>which Gerard states is common place in the 1590s.
>
>--
>Ron Carnegie <r.carnegie at verizon.net>

The Spanish observed the natives in the New World using tomatoes  and
probably were using them fairly early on.  Mattioli's work places them in
Italy by 1544, but they don't appear in Fuch's Herbal (1545), which makes me
think they had not reached further into Europe by then (Fuchs contains
plates and text for maize, peppers and squash).

Durante makes it obvious tomatoes were being used in Italy by 1585 (by
observation).  Gerard is less reliable due to the "it is said" nature of his
information and the fact that as an Elizabethean Englishman, he has a
natural bias against anything Spanish.

Bear