The most active Williamsburg resident in the 18th century transAtlantic plant exchange was John Custis who purchased a four acre lot on high ground on the outskirts of town in 1715. In 1734 Custis began a 12 year correspondence and plant exchange with Peter Collinson, a well known and widely respected London merchant and plant collector. In 1742 or ’43, apparently in response to a question posed by Mr. Custis, Collinson wrote: “Apples of Love are very much used In Italy too putt when Ripe into their Brooths & soops giving it a pretty Tast. A Lady Just come from Leghorn sayes She thinks it gives an Agreeagle Tartness & Relish to them & she Likes it Much. They Call it Tamiata. I never yet Try’d the Experiment but I think to do It.”
However, Custis left no record of “Apples of Love,” in his voluminous correspondence and, instead, Dr. John de Sequeyra is credited with bringing the tomato to Williamsburg. He arrived in town from England around 1745 and may have brought tomato seed with him. A portrait of de Sequeyra currently housed at the Winterthur Museum in Delaware has a note on the back signed by E. Randolph Braxton that reads: “Dr. Seccari…was family physician to my grandfather Philip Ludwell Grimes. He first introduced into Williamsburg the custom of eating tomatoes, until then considered more of a flower than a vegetable.” It is of interest to note that de Sequeyra was a Sephardic Jew of Portuguese descent. In John Hill’s, Eden: or, A compleat body of gardening (1757) it is recorded: Few eat this; but it is agreeable in Soups. Those who are us’d to eat with the Portuguese Jews know the Value of it
The English name for the fruit, “Apples of Love,” comes from the French Pomme d’amour which, in turn, derived from the Italian Poma amoris first listed in an herbal attributed to Francesco Petrollini compiled before 1560. Petrollini’s name may have been a mistaken translation of the first European description of the fruit by another Italian, Pietro Matthioli who called it “pomi d’ oro” or golden apple. The area of domestication for the tomato is not known. Candolle (1886) using linguistic evidence proposed a Peruvian origin and postulated that the cherry tomato (cerasiforme type) was the parent of the modern cultivated tomato. Recent DNA analysis has shown that the cerasiforme type contains both wild and cultivated genetic material suggesting that the modern tomato is the result of a cross between several ancestral forms. Jenkins (1948) suggested Mexico as the area of domestication due to the wider variety of domesticated forms based on the theory of crop evolution first proposed by Vavilov (Report of the Tomato Genetics Cooperative, Peralta, et al, 2006). By unknown means the tomato made its way from South America to Central America (perhaps by way of birds) and it was there that the Aztecs domesticated the tomato. The first tomatoes introduced to Europe all have Mexican or Central America origins.
The original multi cell tomato looked like bunch of cherry tomatoes all stuck together but by the 18th century a more regular shaped tomato, looking much like the modern beef steak, began to appear. In 1773 William Hanbury recorded in A Complete Body of Planting (1773): “The names Love Apples or Mad Apples are now grown useless, especially when talking of the Kitchen Garden produce: The fashionable term to express them is Tomatoes.” Tomato is a Spanish word and is clearly a case of mistaken identity. It was borrowed from the Nahuatl word “tomatl,” which was actually the Aztec word for the husk tomato (Physalis ixocarpa).
Of all the New World crops that were introduced to Europe by the Spanish and returned to North America by the English, the tomato was one of the last to be accepted into the American garden. Nonetheless, the often repeated legend that Americans shunned the tomato because they believed it to be poisonous or the many accounts of one brave soul standing on the steps of some public edifice and eating the tomato to the astonishment of the gathered multitudes and not dying, thereby giving the assembled onlookers license to consume tomatoes themselves, are greatly exaggerated.
By the beginning of the 19th century the tomato was well established in the Middle Atlantic States and in the south. McMahon recorded in The American Gardener’s Calendar (1806) in Philadelphia: Tomato, or Love-apple, is much cultivated for its fruit, in soups and
sauces, to which it imparts an agreeable acid flavour; and is also stewed and dressed in various ways, and very much admired. The tomato quickly moved inland and by 1828, the English traveler, Frances Trollope recorded in Cincinnati: From June till December, tomatoes (the great luxury of the American table in the opinion of most Europeans) may be found in the highest perfection in the market at about six pence the peck and by 1861, Robert Buist recorded in Philadelphia: In taking a retrospect of the past eighteen years, there is no vegetable on the catalogue that has obtained such popularity in so short a period…In 1828-9 it was almost detested; in ten years more every variety of pill and panacea was “extract of Tomato.” It now occupies as great a surface of ground as Cabbage.
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