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While its hard to imagine otherwise, Italians have not always embraced the tomato as part of their national cuisine. In a late summer love letter to the tomato the New York Post describes the history of the tomato in Italy as told by David Gentilcore in the book Pomodoro!

Here the Post details the turning point when the tomato went from a strange and horrible killer to a kitchen staple:

While Italian cuisine we think of today would be impossible to imagine without its tomatoes, the historical process of turning the maligned vegetable into a favored edible was slow. Gentilcore discovers that attitudes toward the tomato finally began to change by the mid-17th century when medical books were allowing that the acidity of the tomato could actually help digestion, and recipes from the New World for chopped tomatoes with fresh chiles were making their way to Italy. Italian food writers started paying more attention to flavors and using tomatoes in their cooking.

Elsewhere, the blog The Crispy Cook has a roundtable discussion of Pomodoro! going. They’ve even got recipes!

While some might say “tomato,” and others “tomahtoe,” the Italians say “Pomodoro!”

The tomato is, of course, a staple in Italian food but it was not always that way. As David Gentilcore explains in a recent Boston Globe interview regarding his new book, the aptly titled Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy, the popularity of the tomato in Italy is relatively recent. In fact such canonical dishes as pasta al pomodoro first became popular in Italian immigrant communities in Boston and New York City in the late nineteenth century.

When the tomato first came to Italy in the seventeenth century from the New World, it was regarded with suspicion. Gentilcore explains, “It’s a vine. Anything that grows along the ground was seen as a plant of low status, something you only give to peasants. And the tomato was thought to hinder digestion because it was cold and watery.”

So, what explains the rise of the tomato in Italy? According to Gentilcore:

Tomatoes took off in Italy because they became an industry, mostly for export. Italians were too poor to buy such things. Most of the country’s processed tomatoes are exported. In Italy, up until the 1950s, there was a large part of the country, even where they produce tomatoes, where they wouldn’t eat the stuff.

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From the past to the cutting edge. Earlier this week we tested readers on the history of food with a quiz based on Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb. Today we offer a quiz based on Herve This’s: Kitchen Mysteries: Revealing the Science of Cooking , which is now available in paperback. Find out how well you know the scientific principles involved in cooking and storing food.

(Click here for the answers)

QUESTIONS

1. The microwave is least suited for preparing which food?
a) Chicken
b) Carmel
c) Soufflé
d) Fish

2. Which fruit yields the best jam?
a) Strawberries
b) Blackberries
c) Grapes
d) Apricots

3. What is the secret to combining tea and milk?
a) Add milk to hot water, then add tea
b) Add milk to tea after letting it steep for a few seconds
c) Pour milk first, then add hot tea
d) Add milk to tea after letting it steep for a few minutes

4. Where is the best place to store a banana?
a) On the counter
b) In the refrigerator
c) In the freezer
d) Outdoors if the temperature is below 50 degrees

5. In bread-making, flour how old makes the best bread?
a) A year
b) 2 months
c) 1 week
d) A couple days

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“Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears.”– an Italian proverb

In Cheese, Pears, and History in a Proverb Massimo Montanari explores the background of this common Italian proverb still in use today. Along the way we discover why the diets of medieval monks were so influential in their time; who was allowed to eat pears, and who wasn’t; how cheese and pears came to be eaten together; when “rustic food” became fashionable; how your temperament of hot, cold, wet, or dry determined your meal choices; and when we first became connoisseurs of “good taste.”

The following is a quiz based on the history in Montanari’s book (Click here for the answers):

1. Until the seventeenth century, doctors believed that everything was reduced to the four elements of the universe–hot, cold, moist, and dry–and that medical ailments were cured by eating foods to counteract your out-of-balance elements. Who codified this system?
a. Dr. Spock
b. Hippocrates
c. Galen
d. Julius Caesar

2. In the middle ages certain foods were believed to dispose the stomach to receive the foods that came afterwards—hence aperitif from aprire, “to open” or to conclude a meal with foods noted for their sealing qualities to aid in digestion. Which of these foods was almost always served at the end of a meal to seal the stomach and prevent indigestion?
a. cherries
b. bread
c. chocolate
d. cheese

3. People were obsessed with social class in medieval culture and food was a primary way of distinguishing oneself. Cheese was to be eaten as a main dish only by the peasantry because, coming from beasts of the land, it was considered a low-status food. Pears, on the other hand, grow on trees. Following this logic, who was allowed to eat pears?
a. nobility
b. the king and queen
c. pilots
d. birds

4. Monks, and religious orders in general, were neither of the peasantry nor of the nobility. As a sort of mediating space between the two, foods forbidden to one class or the other could meet and intermingle in religious settings. As the Catholic Church became stricter about the renunciation of meat on holy days and Lent, what food came to replace meat in the monastic diet and then spread into other classes from there?
a. Fish
b. Eggs
c. Cheese
d. All of the above

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With summer fully upon us and with the recent publication of Gastropolis: Food and New York City, we were reminded of an interview on Serious Eats with the editors of the book, Annie Hauck-Lawson and Jonathan Deutsch.

The authors were asked to describe their “dream New York meal.” Their answer offers a perfect evening for these summer months:

Go to the Rockaways on a warm summer early evening with family and best friends. Bring: bathing suits, towels, beach blanket, boogie or surfboards, Katz’s hot dogs, hot dog rolls, good bread and a warm cooked rice dish, big salad from lettuces and tomatoes that you grew at Floyd Bennett Community Garden at the end of Flatbush Avenue (dressed in olive oil, lemon juice and sea salt), ice cold beer, seltzer and a thermos of hot coffee.

… And a surf casting rod. Swim. Cast out in to the ocean. Cross your fingers. Catch a tuna (preferably) or a snapper. Gather drift wood. Make a fire. Clean and filet the fish, grill it, serve with all the other food and drink and enjoy.

For more on the book, you can browse, read the chapter Fusion City: From Mt. Olympus to Puerto Rican Lasagna and Beyond, or test your knowledge of New York City food.

On his blog Frederick Douglass Opie, author of Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America, looks at the history of some culinary traditions observed among African Americans on New Year’s Day and also provides some recipes!

Opie explains the stories behind why such foods as cranberry sauce, hoppin’ john, pork and collard greens and black-eyes peas.

Here’s Opie on collard greens:

Frances Warren was born in Atlanta in 1928, but spent most of her childhood in Miami, Florida. She noted that, during her childhood, most families in the South ate hoppin’ John and collard greens especially at midnight on New Year’s. For an unknown reason, some southerners, and folks from the Caribbean I interviewed in research for my book Hog and Hominy, believed the peas represented coins and the greens dollars which if eaten would bring in economic prosperity for the New Year. In other parts of the world folks have traditionally eaten lentils on New Year’s with a similar rational as eating black-eyed peas. Also, I grew up with mother and maternal grandmother guarding the belief that a man must be the first to enter her house on New Year’s if the coming year was also to go well. God forbid if you were that sister trying to come in before a brother showed up at my grandmother’s house. You’d have a better chance of getting into the White House to see the president…. Below is my own collard green recipe for your New Year’s meal.

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Below is a video of a lecture Herve This recently gave at Imperial College entitled “Molecular Cooking is Cooking: Molecular Gastronomy is a Scientific Activity.” However, don’t let the word “lecture” scare you off, This’s talks, which include several experiments to illuminate his points, are always entertaining and full of surprises. Here is the description of the talk from Imperial College: “If you have ever been surprised and impressed by an unusual serving of emulsion, a helping of frothy foam, or a plate of frozen gases as your meal, the chances are that Herve This and his gastronomic research will be behind them.”

In the chapter “Giving Thanks” from his book Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, Andrew Smith reveals that “the whole idea that the Pilgrims were the first to celebrate Thanksgiving in America was, in fact preposterous.”

The myth of Thanksgiving first took hold in 1841 when Alexander Young, a Unitarian minister in Boston published Chronicles of the Pilgrim Fathers of the Colony of Plymouth, in which he added a footnote to a description of a feast by one of the settlers in Plymouth. Young claimed that this was the first instance of Thanksgiving but in fact as Smith describes, “it was an insignificant event and the Pilgrims took no notice of it in subsequent years.”

A few years later, the popular poet and writer Sarah Josepha Hale campaigned to make Thanksgiving a national holiday even writing to Abraham Lincoln, who in 1863 declared the last Thursday of November to a national day of Thanksgiving. As the century wore on the religious character of the holiday faded and food, and especially turkey became a focal point? Why turkey?

While many other main dishes had been tried, it was turkey that thrived, mainly because it was less expensive than the alternatives….The traditional side dishes—stuffing, gravy, sweet potatoes, succotash, corn bread, cranberries, and pies—were inexpensive as well, so that Thanksgiving dinner was affordable to all but the poorest Americans.

Thanksgiving did have its skeptics, most notably John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes. Kellogg “believed that the large meal was a tragedy in the making that could cripple digestive ‘organs completely and produce a fatal uremia.’”

However, Thanksgiving’s status in American culture was cemented with the massive influx of immigrants in the early part of the twentieth century. Thanksgiving was a story that could help Americanize immigrants and the myth was far less complicated than the settling of Jamestown or the Civil War. Smith writes:

The absurd Pilgrim fathers, with their floppy hats and mythical blunderbusses, and the newly invented first Thanksgiving dinner at which colonists and Indians feasted together, were ideal elements for the story of America’s beginning. The tale gave legitimacy to the colonists’ settlement of the land and suggested friendly relations with the Native Americans. Few educators and textbook publishers could resist the temptation to use these attractive images.

In an interview on Heritage Radio Network’s show The Main Course Andy Smith discusses some of the 30 turning points in American food from his book, Eating History.

In the interview he touches on topics as varied as the invention of canned food, the rise of snack foods, the beginning of national marketing and advertising campaigns to create demand for a product, the use of food as a weapon during the civil war, the rise of organic gardening, how and why hamburgers became so popular in America, and the advent of the TV dinner.

Here’s what Andy has to say on how advertising and food marketing took off in America:

The problem with canned food was you can’t see inside, the glass jar you can look inside and see if it’s good or not. When you have a tin can you really can’t do that, so they began advertising and putting the types of things that should appear inside the can so that when you bought the canned food you would think you were eating or drinking the food that was labeled. But the real advertising, it starts with Quaker Oats. Here’s a food that no real American would eat. It was animal food. Oats were grown here for animals and they had a problem. How do you promote oats, in this case, Quaker Oats, as a product to the public? At the time when they began their advertising, in the late nineteenth century, normally you had to sell to each local grocery store and there were 50,000 local grocery stores in America. So the goal was to hit the customer and have the customer demand Quaker Oats from the local grocery store.

In a recent interview with Serious Eats New York, Jonathan Deutsch and Annie Hauck Lawson, co-editors of Gastropolis: Food and New York City, talked about the history of New York City food and some of their favorite New York City foods and restaurants.

Not surprisingly they identified hot dogs, street pizza, bialys and bagels with cream cheese and lox or smoked salmon as the iconic foods of New York. However, they say that halal lamb over rice should also now be considered one of New York City’s quintessential dishes. In the interview Hauck-Lawson and Deutsch also recount Brooklyn’s former status as the beer brewing capitol of the United States.

Finally, for those who might be missing summer or already planning for Summer 2010, the editors describe their “dream New York meal”:

Go to the Rockaways on a warm summer early evening with family and best friends. Bring: bathing suits, towels, beach blanket, boogie or surfboards, Katz’s hot dogs, hot dog rolls, good bread and a warm cooked rice dish, big salad from lettuces and tomatoes that you grew at Floyd Bennett Community Garden at the end of Flatbush Avenue (dressed in olive oil, lemon juice and sea salt), ice cold beer, seltzer and a thermos of hot coffee.

… And a surf casting rod. Swim. Cast out in to the ocean. Cross your fingers. Catch a tuna (preferably) or a snapper. Gather drift wood. Make a fire. Clean and filet the fish, grill it, serve with all the other food and drink and enjoy.

The Brooklyn Book Festival, one of the best, most interesting and most fun literary events in New York City is happening on Sunday (September 13.) The event is from 10:00 am to 6 pm in Brooklyn Borough Hall and Plaza.

For those of you in New York City, please stop by an pay us a visit, we’ll be at table #92. In addition to the many publishers at the festival there are also a plethora of great panels and speakers. Some of the participants at this year’s festival include Thurston Moore, Paula Fox, Nicholson Baker, Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Steven Millhauser, Colson Whitehead, Pete Hamill, Gary Shteyngart, Melvin Van Peebles, Keith Gessen, Maud Newton, Lewis Lapham, Walter Kirn, Johathan Lethem, Oliver Sacks, Ben Marcus, Breyten Breytenbach and DJ Spooky.

There will also be a panel on New York City food, which will include Jonathan Deutsch, co-editor of Gastropolis: Food and New York City. The panel will be at 1:00 pm (just in time for lunch!) at the North Stage in Borough Hall Plaza.

Needless to say, with the release of the film Julie & Julia, Julia Child is once again very much in the news. Child and her wildly popular show The French Chef are also one of the “thirty turning points in the making of American cuisine,” as identified by Andrew F. Smith in his forthcoming book Eating History.

In the chapter, Julia Child, the French Chef, Smith recounts the story of Child’s introduction to French cooking, Knopf’s initial reluctance to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking (too expensive to print and Child was an unknown at the time), and her eventual success. Smith discusses how Child’s “energy, pedagogical abilities, sense of timing, informal, chatty manner, and her humor all contributed to the program’s success.” He also argues that the show’s evening time slot, a break from the traditional daytime airing of cooking shows, helped to attract a more upscale viewer who would be more predisposed to be interested in French cookery.

As mentioned above Knopf was initially reluctant to publish Mastering the Art of French Cooking and as Smith reveals had it not been for a cookout the book might never have become a success:

For promoting the 726-page tome, Knopf allocated limited funds for a few advertisements in newspapers and magazines. The book’s chances for success were minimal, it was thought, so why waste precious marketing dollars on it? On the other hand, without promotion, such a cookbook was unlikely to find its audience. Then Judith Jones [Child's editor at Knopf] had an idea. A few months before the book was to be published, she called Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food columnist, asking him to review the book. Claiborne proposed a deal: if Jones and her husband would host a cookout for him on their Manhattan terrace, he would review the book once it was out. The Joneses upheld their end of the bargain, and, a few days after Mastering the Art of French Cooking was released, Claiborne’s review raved that it was “the most comprehensive, laudable and monumental work” on French cookery and that it would likely “remain as the definitive work for nonprofessionals.”

For more on Child, you can watch a video of a panel discussion held at the New School in 2008 and moderated by Andrew Smith. Panelists include the aforementioned Judith Jones, Alice Waters, Molly O’Neill. Below is a clip and you can watch the full discussion here.

Eating History: Thirty Turning Points in the Making of American Cuisine, by Andrew Smith, is not due until October, but with Michael Pollan’s article in the New York Times Magazine, published on Sunday, on the way Americans now eat and how cooking is becoming a lost skill, we thought it would be a good time to preview the book’s video.

In the article, Pollan quote food industry expert, Harry Balzer, who says, “The next American cook is going to be the supermarket. Takeout from the supermarket, that’s the future. All we need now is the drive-through supermarket.” Andrew Smith’s book provides a kind of historical backdrop to how we got to this potential future. As Smith suggests in the video his book explores the ways in which “history is connected with the way we eat today,” and his book explores the various historical choices and moments that brought us to our industrialized, packaged, fast-food world of today.

Noted French chef and chemist (and inspiration to Keanu Reeves), is coming to North Carolina for a unique collaboration between him and folk musicians Al Petteway and Amy White. The program, entitled Note-by-Note Cuisine will be held at Mars Hill College on Saturday, July 11 at

Note-by-Note is just one of the stops This will be making on his North Carolina swing. If you are in the area, you can also catch him at Malaprops Bookstore Cafe in Asheville on July 9; Dinner with the experts at The Market Place, July 10 at 7 pm; and the Swannanoa School of Culinary Arts at Warren-Wilson College on July 12 at 7 pm.

And for those not around the Tar Heel state, we are re-posting this great video of This discussing his new book, Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism.

It is not every day that a Columbia University Press title is cited by a movie star but in a recent article in The Independent, Keanu Reeves talked about his new-found interest in cooking which has been inspired by Hervé This and his book Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor.

From the article:

“In his spare time he [Reeves] has been busy learning to cook. He reveals that he’s been reading Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor by the popular French television chef Hervé This. ‘I’m dabbling in it and looking at becoming a chef. He is fantastic. I didn’t really cook before but this book may be changing my life.’”

Can Hervé & Ted’s Excellent Adventure be far off?

On Sunday, June 21st at 1:00, the editors of and some of the contributors to Gastropolis: Food and New York City head out to Governor’s Island to read from and discuss their personal and historical perspectives on food and New York City. A book signing follows the panel.

For more read the book’s introduction, Fusion City: From Mt. Olympus Bagels to Puerto Rican Lasagna and Beyond. And, you can also test your knowledge of New York City food, with this quiz based on Gastropolis:

1. During the early nineteenth century in New York City, one of the most difficult beverages to have was?
a) Drinking water
b) Milk
c) Beer
d) Liquor

2. In the late 1700s, this food was one of the most popular things to eat in the city. It was one of the few foods consumed by both the upper and lower classes, and most establishments sold all you could eat for 6 cents.
a) Apples
b) Gruel
c) Oysters
d) Cranberries

3. What food started in a German immigrant’s restaurant in New York City but today has become a worldwide symbol of American cuisine?
a) Hot dogs
b) Hamburgers
c) Apple pie
d) Corn-dogs

4. Which of the following countries are represented in New York City’s “Chinatowns”?
a) Thailand
b) Pakistan
c) Bangladesh
d) All of the above

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We’re a little bit late with this but along with their excellent accompanying photographs (see above), showcasing the beautiful interior and exterior design of Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, Eat Me Daily also provides a very thoughtful and provocative review of This’s latest.

The review, by Paula Forbes, is entitled Strict Interdisciplinarian, and focuses on This’s emphasis on looking beyond traditional gastronomic practices and looking to science and elsewhere for new ways to think about cooking and food. From the review:

This’s explorations of the perfect hard boiled egg, scientifically interesting as they are, pale in comparison to his fascinating take on the interactions among the different disciplines that affect the gastronomic world. Whether or not you agree with This’s philosophy of molecular gastronomy (in short he thinks the more the better, and the sky’s the limit), his passion is seductive in its intensity. This makes the case that the culinary world has been changed forever, and the more we’re willing to look beyond the kitchen for culinary inspiration, the more extraordinary things we can be capable of. This uses science, Grant Achatz uses theater and psychology, Heston Blumenthal has begun to delve into history. This thrills at the idea of what other disciplines could be used to change the food world, and to what degree.

As a reminder, you can watch a video of This discussing his book or read an excerpt.

The Web site eats.com recently reviewed and praised Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, by Herve This.

In addition to commenting on This’s wonderful writing and his ability to make science accessible, the review also highlights his attitude toward classic culinary techniques:

“This does not seek to raze the school of culinary classicism; rather, he believes in its betterment. ‘We must listen skeptically to the claims of…how good life was in the old days,’ he writes, ‘even if…we harbor a nostalgia for a past that never really existed.’ To hold fast to the tenets of classicism because they are classic does not hold water with This. He encourages respect for past technique but also promotes healthy criticism of what was once deemed the apex of culinary achievement. Indeed, extensive work is already being done throughout the world in answer to This’ call. His own excitement is palpable as his authorial style transcends the world of molecular science, touching upon each branch of the arts with wonderful simplicity and coherence.”

For more on the book, you can watch a video of This in his lab, read an excerpt on the scientific principles behind a simple consommé, or read Herve This’s blog.

A recent article in the Times of London discusses how Herve This, author of the recently published Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism, and legendary chef Pierre Gagnaire have created the first entirely synthetic gourmet dish.

Created from chemical compounds, the recipe entitled le note à note is a starter of jelly balls tasting of apples and lemon; creamy on the inside and crackling on the outside. The ingredients? Tartaric acid, glucose, and polyphenols.

In what is seemingly a movement that goes against the grain of our current obsession with everything natural and organic, This believes that chemistry and the use of pure compounds is the future of haute cuisine: From the article:

If you use pure compounds, you open up billions and billions of new possibilities,” Mr This said. “It’s like a painter using primary colours or a musician composing note by note.”

He says compound cooking will enthral our taste buds — or, rather, our trigeminal nerve — and help to end food shortages and rural poverty because farmers could increase profitability by “fractioning their vegetables”.

Critics will complain that none of the ingredients in le note à note is what they might call natural.

Mr This has little time for such thinking. “Sugar is not natural. Chips are not natural. They are both artificial. And if you tried to eat a wild carrot, you’d find it disgusting.”

Man has refined, modelled and selected these foodstuffs into edible commodities, he argues — so why not go a stage further and break them down into chemical compounds, which are “better allies for chefs than brute vegetable and animal products? It is a question of common sense in terms of culinary technique”.

Mr This is hailing culinary constructivism, as he describes the discipline, as the next stage in the appliance of science to the kitchen after molecular gastronomy. His earlier work involved the input of chemistry and physics into cuisine.

As the article mentions, not everyone is on board and there is an interesting response to This’s embrace of synthetic compounds on Chadzilla, an excellent food blog.

Well-known food author and cooking expert Michael Ruhlman was recently in New York City and wrote about and quoted from Hervé This’sBuilding a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Constructivism.

The post begins with a recipe for Vanilla sauce in black and white and then includes the following update from Ruhlman:

UPDATE POST MIDNIGHT, 4/17: It is the irony of fate that i was to join a conversation at NYU this afternoon hosted by a group called Experimental Cuisine Collective, in itself a lucky situation, and so had requested an early copy of a new book by French chemist and gastronomer Hervé This, because I thought it might be interesting fodder. The book is Building a Meal: From Molecular Gastronomy to Culinary Conservatism. I found it on the bed of my hotel room in a padded yellow envelope. The next day, yesterday, I found myself, one hand on an overhead bar, rattling back and forth on the F train from 57th to W 4th, reading this, exactly while the below comments were being written. Coincidence? Yes. But still:

The curious thing is that in the realm of cooking the question of preservation should be posed by scientists and not by cooks themselves, who have blithely gone about changing it in various ways, following their own aesthetic tastes. No one today any longer makes custard, for example, the way people did a hundred years ago. The number of egg yolks per quart (as many as 16) seemed excessive, and it was reduced without anyone wondering whether there was a law against changing the proportion. Cooks fixed up this or that room of the ancestral home without trying to form an overall idea of it, without imagining the long-term consequences of what they were doing.
The time has come to ask what we can renovate and what we ought to preserve. …–Hervé This