Italian Food Did Not Have Tomatoes Until 1548

The first written reference to a tomato in Italy is dated October 31, 1548 — a household ledger from the Tuscan court of Cosimo de' Medici, recording the arrival of a basket from his country estate. Italians treated the fruit as a curiosity for another century, and most thought it was poisonous because the leaves and stems are. The first surviving Italian tomato recipe appears in 1692. The first Neapolitan pizza topped with tomato shows up in the 1700s.

The broader pattern is what historian Alfred Crosby in 1972 named the Columbian exchange. After 1492, plants, animals, microbes, and people moved between the Old and New Worlds in volumes and speeds that had no precedent. The exchange wasn't symmetric, but the menu shifts went in both directions and they were enormous.

From the Americas: maize, potatoes, cassava, sweet potato, tomato, peppers (sweet and hot), beans, peanuts, vanilla, cacao, pineapple, sunflower, tobacco, and rubber. Without American maize and cassava, sub-Saharan African agriculture is unrecognizable. Without American potatoes, Northern Europe could not have grown its 19th-century population. Sichuan cuisine acquired its chili in the 1500s; Indian curry got the same chili at the same time.

From Eurasia and Africa to the Americas: wheat, rice, sugar, coffee, bananas, citrus, olives, grapes, cattle, pigs, sheep, horses, and chickens. The horse, extinct in the Americas for ten thousand years, came back via Spanish colonies and reshaped Plains Indian life within four generations.

The microbial side of the exchange was the most violent. Smallpox, measles, and influenza moved west and killed an estimated 80–90 percent of the Indigenous population of the Americas within a century. Syphilis appears to have moved the other way; the first European epidemic was recorded in Naples in 1495.