Rome s Newest Museum: Kitchenware and Cookbooks insidethevatican.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from insidethevatican.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
It was seen as an interesting fruit but potentially dangerous, so they didn t dream of using it as a food, he says. Not until medics discoved that if you had a skin ailment and took an unripe tomato and passed it over your skin, the ailment improved presumably the effect of vitamin C.
The earliest recipe for tomato sauce was published in 1694, by Neapolitan chef Antonio Latini in his book Lo Scalco alla Moderna The Modern Steward. It mentions that if you mix onions, tomatoes and some herbs you get a very interesting sauce that can be used in all sorts of things on meat, especially boiled meat and things that aren t so tasty become more interesting with the acidity of the tomato, says Zancani.
How this fruit became the star of Italian cooking
Paolo Gramaglia loves tomatoes. The owner and chef of the Michelin-starred President restaurant in Pompeii, his link with the fruit is so strong, he says, that he and it are intrinsically entwined.
Not that he thinks he’s special he thinks all Italians have the same relationship with the pomodoro.
“Tomatoes are in our DNA,” he says. “We grow up with tomato in our recipes. They’ve become the symbol of our gastronomy.”
And he’s right. Whether it’s a scarlet-slicked pizza or a red-sauced spaghetti al pomodoro, Italy’s most instantly recognizable dishes both include tomato. Even the emoji for pasta isn’t just pasta it’s a steaming plate of spaghetti heaped with tomato sauce on top.