[Sca-cooks] Period Tomatoes

[Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius]

Also sprach Pat:
>I've run into a character on another list who insists that the Turks 
>were using tomatoes for thousands of years before the rest of 
>Europe.  Claims his Turkish Language teachers in the '60's taught 
>him that the English word 'tomato' comes from the Turkish 
>"domatesli" and that he has recipes from the Seljurk Empire.  When 
>asked for a recipe he came up with one from the Turkish embassy that 
>is obviously modern.  When faced with the research material I have 
>on the subject, he insisted that American sources were clueless 
>about Old World botany. He's one of these people that refuse to be 
>relieved of their delusions, so I've quit arguing with him.
>Problem is, he's in a forum where a lot of SCA cooks are, who are, 
>and we know that sometime in the future this recipe is going to show 
>up at a feast or as an A&S entry.
>Oh well, I did my best.  Any more would be wasted breath.

There's a movie from the '80's called "Foreign Body", in which the 
main character, who is Indian, is attempting to make polite 
conversation with the father of a young English girl he's interested 
in, and he mentions in passing the number of words in common English 
usage that come from Hindi, such as pajamas, bungalow, and I forget 
the others. The Englishman gets angry, tells him he's full of 
something, and that those are all perfectly good English words, 
introduced to Hindi during the Raj.

As you say, there's just no reasoning with some people. I had an 
almost identical conversation with a Chinese guy who told me chili 
peppers originated in the North of China.

Now, at least in favor of the tomatoes-in-Turkey argument, there's 
some evidence to suggest some New World foods were being grown by the 
Turks on a large scale before such foods were widely accepted in 
Europe. But that's not "thousands of years" ago, nor is the emergence 
of the Seljuk Turks as a recognizable empire earlier than the 12th 
century [approximately].

Show him a copy of Abdul-Hassim's Tacuinum Sanitatis and ask him to 
explain to you again about how American sources get it all wrong.

Adamantius
-- 




"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la 
brioche!" / "If there's no bread to be had, one has to say, let them 
eat cake!"
	-- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques 
Rousseau, "Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
	-- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry 
Holt, 07/29/04