Tag Archives: tomatoes

The Tomato-Chili Nexus: Reconstructing the Mesoamerican Influence on Europe through Taste and Method

By Serin Quinn

The earliest known recipe referencing tomatoes was published in Naples in 1692. This is not simply the earliest European recipe to include the ingredient, but the first written tomato recipe world-wide. The history of the tomato – a foodstuff indigenous to the Americas – is dominated by European sources: our recipes, botanical descriptions and illustrations all stem from either European or post-conquest authors.

How, then, can we use such European recipes to understand the cultural influence of Indigenous American cultures? This blog explores how following taste offers us a means to recreate the unrecorded past and to bring to the fore hidden histories.

I am not the first to note this issue: following Marcy Norton’s 2008 work Sacred Gifts, scholars have begun to reconsider the role of American foods in European cuisines. Nonetheless, studies to date have focused on foods that have distinct paraphernalia (chocolate cups or tobacco pipes) or that have necessary treatments, such as the nixtamalization of maize or de-toxification of cassava. The pre-Columbian history of the tomato is harder to grasp, but its study shows us that even the most ordinary of American foods had a fundamental influence on the food cultures of Europe.

[Xi]tomamolli: Mesoamerican tomato sauces

To reconstruct pre-Columbian tomato-usage (in Nahuatl xitomatl), we must consider the form and taste of food and relationship between ingredients.

The post-conquest primary sources we do have – ethnographies such as the so-called Florentine Codex and government reports such as the Relaciones Geográficas – provide us with two key pieces of information. These sources do not give us a fixed recipe of the type we would find in contemporaneous recipe European books, but there are notable consistencies in their reports that speak to common, repeated practice. Critically, these sources repeatedly tell us that tomatoes were consumed as a sauce or stew and that they were consistently paired with chili peppers: as the Relaciones report from Texcoco (1582) stated, ‘They have tomatoes and tomatillos, which serve as a spice with chilli, from which they make sauces and appetizers to eat’.

Ethnographic work suggests tomatoes and chilis were first charred to remove the skin and then pounded together using a stone molcaxitl (‘sauce bowl’) and a texolotl grinding stone. This sauce-paste was then used to flavour dishes such as tamales and stews of beans, turkey eggs or meat (deer/dog/turkey/fish/newt). As the authors of the Florentine Codex observed: ‘Where [it is] tasty, [it has] chili, salt, tomatoes, gourd seeds: shredded, crumbled, juiced’. This is the quintessential Mesoamerican tomato recipe, as recreated from common practice.

In the centuries following the conquest, tomatoes continued to be eaten in this way by the populations of New Spain. As one chronicler wrote in 1698, tomato-dishes were the ‘be-all, end-all of the stews of the Indies’.

Salsa de tomates: tomatoes in Iberia

Across the Atlantic, in the Spanish-controlled Mediterranean, we see a clear continuation of both these forms of cooking and of the tomato-chili nexus.

The earliest recipe, from Spanish Naples, is for a tomato sauce ‘in the Spanish style’, and sauces and stews/soups also form the bulk of recipes in Spanish and Portuguese. The author of a manuscript Portuguese cookbook (c. 1715) wrote: ‘Tomatoes in all foods, that is, in meat, in stews, or in roast sauces, add a particular flavor to everything’.

Almost all recipes from this period are directions to use tomatoes as a sauce or as the base for stews/casseroles (with one or two recipes directing tomatoes to be pickled or used in salads). If we deconstruct these recipes to their base elements, a consistent method appears that can be expressed as follows:

Take ripe tomatoes; roast them; remove their skins; mince or crush them until fine; mix with chili, oil and vinegar and [onions, garlic, ginger, cumin, oregano, or thyme], serve with [fish, chicken, eggs, beans, or rice].

Some aspects of the flavour profile varied between recipe in the choice of herbs, spices and alliums, but the addition of chili, as well as oil and vinegar, was almost always to be found. The association between the two foods was so strong that they were customarily depicted together in paintings.

Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.
Tomatoes, chili, oil (aceite) and vinegar (vinagre) – the staple ingredients of tomato sauce – in Francisco Barrera, August, 1640, oil on canvas, 102 x 155 cm, Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava. Public domain.

 

Love apple sauce: tomatoes in Britain

The transfer of tomato-tastes to Spanish colonisers and subsequently to their homeland in Iberia is perhaps not surprising. Yet through tomato recipes we can see that the spread of Mesoamerican tomato-chili sauces travelled further, into the early modern British diet.

English recipes for tomatoes – then called love-apples – fall into two categories: pickles and sauces/soups. Recipes for these sauces use the methods seen above: rather than ‘roasted’ they are ‘baked’ and their skins removed by pulping through a sieve rather than peeling, but the result is the same. Importantly, alongside ‘Old World’ ingredients such as onion and ginger, almost all these recipes contained chilis. We see this across both print and manuscript recipes, and usually in the form of ‘capsicum’ or chili vinegar, as in the recipe below.

These sauces came to Britain not through direct colonial contact with Mesoamerica, as in Iberia. Rather, the authors of eighteenth-century encyclopaedias and gardening manuals attested to a different origin of influence: Jewish refugees, specifically Sephardi Jews fleeing the Spanish/Portuguese inquisitions of the 1720s. As one horticulturalist noted, ‘it is agreeable in Soups. Those who are us’d to eat with the Portuguese Jews know the Value of it’. As Iberian consumers once adopted a taste for the tomato from Mesoamericans, so they later brought it with them to their new home.

In both Iberia and Britain, therefore, we see how the tastes of a minority group can have a powerful and lasting impact on the diets and desires of the majority, and how knowledge is spread through a series of incorporations and re-introductions.  

‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.
‘Tomatar Sauce’ from Miscellaneous Household Recipes, Loveden Family, Buscot Park, Oxfordshire, c. 1780-1835. Reproduced with permission from the Royal Berkshire Archives, catalogue ref: D/ELV/Z5/1-15.

The enduring relationship between tomatoes and the chilis illuminates a path of cultural influence from pre-Columbian Mesoamerica to eighteenth-century Britain. While we lack detailed guides on how tomatoes were prepared prior to the conquest, understanding preparation methods and flavours profiles allows us to trace the movement of culinary knowledge over time and space and to reestablish the role of Indigenous American tastes in shaping European cuisine.
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Serin Quinn is an early modern historian, specialising in food, horticulture and global connectivity. Her PhD at the University of Warwick was on the introduction of the tomato to early modern England and was funded by Midlands4Cities. Her article on the early English reception of sweet potatoes recently won the Food & History Best Article Award 2025. As of October 2026, she has a research fellowship with the Society for Renaissance Studies, working on a new project on aphrodisiac-foods in pre-modern Europe.

 

A Recipe for Learning Atlantic World History: Student Contributions

By Zara Anishanslin

Student Jose Hernandez summed up initial reaction to finding a “recipe assignment” on an Atlantic World History course syllabus: “when you first assigned the Columbian Exchange assignment, I honestly assumed that you were giving us busy work.” Once students dove into the assignment, reactions changed. As Hernandez went on to say, “once I started researching, I realized that this was a legit assignment.”

Legit indeed. The project enhanced student understanding of the Columbian Exchange as a truly transformative global phenomenon. It also provided them with new—and at times surprising— knowledge about their favorite foods.

Cow
Stefano della Bella, Cow, Diversi animali, plate 7 (Published by Pierre Mariette, ca. 1641), Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1917 (17.50.17-256), Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

After Europeans introduced them to the Americas, the meat of pigs and cows became staple features of creolized cuisine. Students worked on a number of such recipes. Bryan Howell researched the empanadilla, or little empanada, a pork-based dish created by culinary exchanges among Portuguese, Spanish, Native American, and Caribbean creoles. As he put it, the empanadilla “had to make a lot of trips back and forth across the Atlantic to be what it is. And what it is is freaking delicious.”

Student Cynthia Vera researched another meat-based recipe, one that she termed “a Latin spin on a European croquette.”

Recipe for Rellenos de Papa

2 pounds russet potatoes (Vera prefers the more traditionally used white potato to the sweet potatoes in the linked recipe)

½ cup cooked corn meal, with extra for dusting

1 pound of lean ground beef

¼ cup of sofrito (sauce base)

1 packet of sazon con achote

Canola oil for frying

½ teaspoon of sale

Directions:

Cook ground meat and drain. Add sofrito mixture and packet of sazon con achote. Stir well over low heat to blend flavors and set aside.

Peel and boil potatoes until tender. Mash potatoes with salt and cornmeal, mix well. Place potato mixture in refrigerator to cool.

Once cool, scoop into balls, make pocket in middle of ball with your finger to place meat. Carefully press mixture back into a ball, thoroughly covering meat mixture. Dust in cornmeal, fry.

While the beef was the result of European colonization, corn and potatoes both were essential to American indigenous peoples’ diets. As Vera aptly put it, both were “ingredients of abundance” for Native Americans. And yet, Vera had never thought of the indigenous roots of what was to her a very familiar dish. As she reflected, “Growing up Puerto Rican and Ecuadorian I did not get the sense that my culture was heavily influenced by anything but other Hispanic cultures.” Researching her chosen dish, she found otherwise, and that recipes like rellenos de papa “speak volumes to the original cultures that did not allow themselves to be swallowed up, but instead were reborn into something else that has become a signature for today’s people.”

Students Jose Hernandez and Madeline Mercado also described their recipes—different variations of rice and beans —as edible reminders of how people retained culinary practices in the face of change. West Africans ate rice and beans, enslaved people of African descent were the laborers who tended rice in places like South Carolina, and West African cultivation practices and knowledge were likely integral to the crop’s success in the Americas.

PanDulce
Pan dulce, on display at a Staten Island bakery, Pan con Cafe. Pictured is a type of pan dulce called la concha: “El Borracho,” on the top left and “El Gusano,” top right. Photo by Sonia Martinez, 2015.

Other students found that European traditions were behind what they thought were indigenous recipes. Sonia Martinez researched pan dulce or “Mexican sweet bread,” a treat “sold everywhere, from street food stands to elaborate bakeries in the capital.” Pan dulce is an important part of Mexican holidays like the Day of the Dead, when it is eaten in the form of pan de muerto (pan dulce in the shape of crosses, skulls, angels, or tomb effigies).

Martinez was surprised to find that pan dulce “wasn’t made from native ingredients passed down from generation to generation.” Instead, it relies on wheat, a plant Spanish missionaries insisted on importing to make communion wafers.

Nicolás Enríquez (Mexican, 1704–1790) The Virgin of Guadalupe with the Four Apparitions, 1773 Mexican,  Oil on copper; 22 1/4 × 16 1/2 in. (56.5 × 41.9 cm) Framed: 25 1/4 × 19 7/8 × 1 3/8 in. (64.1 × 50.5 × 3.5 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and several members of The Chairman's Council Gifts, 2014 (2014.173) http://www.metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/635401
Nicolás Enríquez (Mexican, 1704–1790)
The Virgin of Guadalupe with the Four Apparitions (1773), Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest and several members of The Chairman’s Council Gifts, 2014 (2014.173), Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,

Albrecht Dürer (German, Nuremberg 1471–1528 Nuremberg),The Witch, ca. 1500, Engraving, Fletcher Fund, 1919, 19.73.75, Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Albrecht Dürer (German, Nuremberg 1471–1528 Nuremberg),The Witch, ca. 1500, Engraving, Fletcher Fund (1919, 19.73.75), Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Another group of students focused on recipes that used ingredients that traveled east, from the Americas to Europe and, eventually, India and Asia. Some had legends attached to them. Student Ashley Olivetti delved into her grandmother’s Italian tomato sauce recipe. She found that Europeans at first feared tomatoes in part because they are part of the family Solanaceae, which includes “deadly nightshades” like belladonna, a poisonous plant that, according to Germanic folklore, witches used to summon werewolves.

Student Thomas Finn looked at vichyssoise, or French potato and leek soup, and was surprised to find that the ordinary potato has legends attached to it. When Incas from Cuzco fled before Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1476-1541), they lightened their load to travel faster under threat of puma attacks, throwing supplies into Lake Pumacocha to prevent the Spanish from using them. Among these supplies was the Incan staple ch’unu, a freeze-dried, dehydrated potato easy to carry over the long distances of the far-flung Incan empire. The Inca were allegedly on their way to the legendary city of Paititi, a never found place rumored to contain hordes of gold and silver.

Utagawa (Gountei) Sadahide, Foreigners in the Drawing Room of Foreign Merchant's House in Yokohama (9th month, 1861),  Triptych of polychrome woodblock prints Bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005 (2007.49.131a–c), Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Utagawa (Gountei) Sadahide, Foreigners in the Drawing Room of Foreign Merchant’s House in Yokohama (9th month, 1861), Triptych of polychrome woodblock prints Bequest of William S. Lieberman, 2005 (2007.49.131a–c), Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Other students looked at recipes that arose due to another farflung empire: that of the British. Student Remy Rodney researched his grandmother’s “Jamaican soup,” a dish that reflects the global reach of the British in its chicken, pumpkins, yams, and Korean dumplings. Student Harmon Chan looked at Japanese rice and potato curry. First found in Japanese cookbooks in 1872, this now popular standby in Japan had its beginnings not long before, after American Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 visit began a new era of Japanese trade with western nations including Britain.  Among the things the British introduced to Japan were curry from India and potatoes from America.

As one student put it, “food is one way people define their culture.” As students learned by researching recipes of the Columbian Exchange, food is one way people maintain old cultures and create new ones, too.

Contributors’ Bios

Harmon Chan is a History major interested in exploring the history of the United States.

Thomas Finn is a senior History major who is interested in colonial American history. His family has lived in America a long time, and in the same house on Staten Island since 1820.

Jose Hernandez is a senior History major, who is minoring in African American Studies. His interests include the Atlantic World and its importance in world history.

Sonia Martinez, born to immigrant parents, is a first generation Mexican American student. She is a senior majoring in English writing and linguistics, and minors in Spanish.

Madeline Mercado majors in Social Work and minors in Spanish. Her family background is Puerto Rican, and she is interested in the history of rice in the Atlantic World.

Ashley Olivetti is a senior American Studies major. Her family is originally from Italy and now resides in Brooklyn and Staten Island, New York. Her interests include researching and writing about history.

Remiah Rodney is a sophomore of Jamaican heritage. Born in London, England, he plays soccer for the College of Staten Island.

Cynthia Vera is a Latin American senior, majoring in Latin American Studies and Psychology.