[Sca-cooks] Officially Period...the tomato

[wheezul at canby.com]

So Mattioli also mentions tomatoes boiled in oil, followed by instructions
to use sun softened tomatoes as medicines, which made me wonder when the
habit of drying tomatoes in the sun became common.  Could they have been
stored/preserved that way?  It seems to me that tomatoes did not travel
well, needed southern European climate to grow and if they were hard to
preserve then they would have been some sort of seasonal diet variation in
the locales that may have accepted them.  Where that may have been seems
to be the mystery, although that the first sauce recipe is "Spanish". 
Spanish and Italian are not my first choice of languages to study, but I
would think inventories and accounts might show something.  Are there any
extant feast/celebration accounts from the court in Naples?  Were tomatoes
dried in the new world?

Katherine


> And also on my website:
> http://www.medievalcookery.com/helewyse/files/newworld.pdf
> Helewyse