Tomatoes: India
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History
How tomatoes entered Indian kitchen c.1836
Vikram Doctor, July 3, 2023: The Times of India
On December 14, 1836, Calcutta’s Agri-Horticultural Society of India (AHSI), set up to introduce useful plants into India, heard from JW Masters on “cultivating some of the most approved European and native vegetables in Bengal”. Among them was “Love Apple, annual, native of South America”, whose detailed planting notes suggest it was uncommon in Calcutta then.
This may be one of the first mentions of tomato cultivation in India. Love apples was an early name for them and another early mention, in a catalogue printed by AHSI’s Madras outpost in 1853, lists it as "Tomata or Love Apple". George Watt, in his A Dictionary of the Economic Products of India (1883) uses both terms, noting that “the natives are beginning to appreciate the fruit, but the plant is chiefly cultivated for the European population”.
In Colonel Kenney-Herbert’s Culinary Jottings for Madras (1878), he noted it grew well in the Madras Presidency, though disappeared during summers. He seems to be trying to persuade readers when he writes “the tomato never fails to be a welcome friend. In Italy, Spain and southern France, it forms the staple part of the daily food of all classes and I believe I am right in saying that it is a very wholesome vegetable in a hot climate.”
An old recipe
Older Indian cookbooks have relatively few mentions of it. EP Veerasawmy’s Indian Cookery (1936) has its first mention of tomatoes on page 70 in a recipe for "Hyderabad Chicken Curry with Sliced Cocoanut" (old spelling of coconut).
The real name of the author was Edward Palmer, an Anglo-Indian gentleman born in Hyderabad, so this was possibly a family recipe. Several other recipes call for: “1 heaped tablespoon of tomato paste or ½ lb of fresh tomatoes peeled and chopped well,” but the fact is that this was a book mainly meant for British readers, so it doesn’t quite reflect what native Indians were cooking.
In Samaithu Paar (Cook and See , 1968), S Meenakshi Ammal’s authoritative compilation of Tamil Brahmin cooking, the first mention of tomatoes is in a footnote to her recipe for rasam: “When tomato is used, decrease the quantity of tamarind accordingly.” Through the book, and in many other recipes from this era, tomato is mostly an infrequent alternative for tamarind.
One of the few specific recipes that Meenakshi Ammal gives for tomatoes is for tomato-beetroot jam. Many early Indian tomato recipes are, in fact, for condiments, like the "Hot Tomato Jam for Roast Mutton" in J Bartley’s Indian Cookery General for Young House-Keepers (1923). The tomato-date chutney that has a special role in Bengali cuisine, often served as a course in itself to stimulate flagging palates, is possibly a descendant of these recipes.
Magic sauce
The tomato boom established it as an important crop, and helped fix its name, which Americans had always taken from the original Nahuatl tomato, over the European love apple. But its wider success in the kitchen seems to stem from the recognition by Auguste Escoffier, the doyen of chefs in Europe, of its special value in cooking.
Escoffier seems to have recognised that the tomato’s quick collapse into a puree helped it serve as flavouring, rather like fruit purees which were added to dishes to give a sweet-savoury taste. The sourness of tomatoes perked up stodgy stews and doughs to life, while also adding a special savour the scientists would later explain came from its abundant umami taste, especially when cooked.
Escoffier’s insight can be seen in the critical change he made to classical French cooking. Haute cuisine depends on a range of sauces to give flavour to a dish. There are a few essential ‘mother’ sauces, and many ‘daughter’ sauces that are made by adding different ingredients to the ‘mother sauces’. The ‘mother' sauces usually included Béchamel (milk, flour, butter), Velouté (clear stock, flour, butter) and Espagnole (dark stock, flour, butter). To these, in the 1902 edition of his Guide Culinaire , Escoffier added tomato sauce and also specified that Espagnole should include tomatoes. At a time when French cooking was seen as the peak of Western cooking, this endorsement of tomatoes was a game-changer. Chefs across the world started adding tomatoes in their food and this eventually would have percolated to Indian restaurant kitchens.
Tomato offered advantages over other souring agents. It was mostly seen as an alternative to dried tamarind, which requires soaking in hot water and then annoying cleaning out of seeds and strings. Tomatoes, by contrast, just needed to be chopped and then cooked down to mush. The paste, when cooked with onions, added both flavour and body to a dish, helping create the all important gravy. Tomatoes were cheaper than yoghurt, another important souring agent, and less trouble to store.
Influences flow back and forth between professional and home kitchens. The taste of a base sauce of slow cooked onions and tomatoes, with added ginger and garlic, became typical of restaurant cooking but in time, and as tomatoes became cheaper and widely available, was picked up by home cooks as well. It was easy to start dishes by making the tomato-onion base, or adding that in the final tadka.
Our dependence on tomatoes flows from this, but this history shows a way out. When tomatoes get scarce there are always the earlier options, like tamarind or dahi, to fall back on. But a further solution might also be with cooks. Rather than using cold storages for tomatoes, a better choice, with more potential for value addition to farmers, is to semi process them from the start.
Tomato offered advantages over other souring agents. It was mostly seen as an alternative to dried tamarind, which requires soaking in hot water and then annoying cleaning out of seeds and strings. Tomatoes, by contrast, just needed to be chopped and then cooked down to mush. The paste, when cooked with onions, added both flavour and body to a dish, helping create the all important gravy. Tomatoes were cheaper than yoghurt, another important souring agent, and less trouble to store.
Influences flow back and forth between professional and home kitchens. The taste of a base sauce of slow cooked onions and tomatoes, with added ginger and garlic, became typical of restaurant cooking but in time, and as tomatoes became cheaper and widely available, was picked up by home cooks as well. It was easy to start dishes by making the tomato-onion base, or adding that in the final tadka.
Our dependence on tomatoes flows from this, but this history shows a way out. When tomatoes get scarce there are always the earlier options, like tamarind or dahi, to fall back on. But a further solution might also be with cooks. Rather than using cold storages for tomatoes, a better choice, with more potential for value addition to farmers, is to semi process them from the start.
