the sex of tomatoes

LOVE APPLES

This short (I'm sure it will be short) article is not about cooking with tomatoes. It came about because of two things - my Italian lessons and wondering what to do with the tomatoes I have in my fridge.

In my Italian lesson we read an article on the sex of various nouns. As you know - like many, maybe most (I don't know) languages, Italian nouns are either masculine or feminine. The article stated that as latin was gradually discarded - or evolved into modern Italian, whether a noun became masculine or feminine was fairly random. The neuter that had existed in latin was abandoned. Which is interesting - the Germans still have it though I don't think any of the Romance languages do. English, of course, has abandoned sexualising nouns altogether. Other than when referring to the female of a species or an occupation - though this is changing too - whatever happened to actress?

Then I had my daily questions of what to cook for dinner and what to write in this article and my thoughts turned to tomatoes, because I have quite a lot of them in my fridge at the moment. Still on Italian I wondered why the Italians had decided that tomatoes were masculine - il pomodoro. And then I realised that in French it is feminine - la tomate. Two different words as well even though they are both based on Latin, so I thought to look into it a little more. Let's deal with the sex thing first.

I have not done a thorough investigation but have come up with the following very interesting things. The Spanish are very confused - the fruit (el tomate) is masculine, but the plant (la tomatera) is feminine. The Germans are equally confused. In Germany it is 'die tomate' (feminine) but apparently in Austria it is the masculine 'der Paradeiser'. So is a tomato masculine or feminine do you think? I must admit I would have leaned towards the feminine - soft and squashy and voluptuous but the Italians, who are, of course the ones completely besotted by it, think of it as masculine. Maybe because it's so important - although it would not have been to begin with. I actually cannot begin to speculate on why one or the other but I'm sure some linguist has done a study on why particular nouns end up as masculine or feminine. And why doesn't English have masculine and feminine when everyone else close by does? (Well to be honest I don't know about the Scandinavian languages.) English is at least half derived from French and Latin after all.

Then there are the differences in the words themselves. And here a little history comes in. As we all know the tomato comes from the Americas and was unknown and unused in Europe until the sixteenth century. According to Jane Grigson it was not popular in England until after WW1. What on earth did we all eat before that? Tomate and tomata come from the Mexican (Aztec) word tomatl. So that explains the origins of those words. Pomodoro is a little more complicated - and here I turned to one of my favourite cooks, Bert Greene, now dead alas, and his book Greene on Greens.

Initially the tomato was not eaten - it was considered an aphrodisiac and therefore might lead to sin and perdition if eaten. This may come from it being related to Deadly Nightshade, but then again maybe not. It's reputation as an aphrodisiac may have something to do with it having been called 'love apple', although there is also another explanation. The apple part comes from the conquistadors mistaking it for an apple - 'manzana' and then a Borgia chef concocting a sauce with 'pomo d'oro'- apple of gold. For the first tomatoes were gold in colour - and now in the twenty-first century - golden tomatoes are making a comeback. So - pomodoro is apple of gold.

Mind you these days the Italian for apple is 'la mela' (feminine you will note), so I'm not quite sure what happened to 'pomo'. The French still say 'la pomme' (feminine) for apple though. A further complication according to Bert Greene - who does say that this all may be apocryphal - is that because of the tomato's bad reputation (the aphrodisiac thing), the name was changed from 'pomo d'oro' to 'pomo dei Mori' or apple of the Moors and this was misheard as 'pomme d'amour' (apple of love). Hey presto. So it's not just the case that is associated with sex with the tomato, but it's name and it's reputation as an aphrodisiac.

I was going to say that maybe that Greek legend about the golden apples was really about tomatoes but then I realised they didn't know about tomatoes so this was not relevant.

And going back to the language thing - the Austrians call it 'der Paradeiser'. Masculine and presumably something to do with Paradise. Aren't words wonderful? And aren't tomatoes beautiful?