The next recipe is adapted from my mother's, which she used to make as a concentrate and preserve for winter. It's the best thing possible for a sore throat!Tomato is originally from the Americas, and evidence points to it first being grown as a household edible plant by the Aztecs in Mexico. It belongs to the nightshade family and is closely related to tobacco, potatoes, eggplants, chillies, eggplant and belladonna. The name "tomato" comes from the Nahuatl language, which has been spoken by the Nahua people since the 7th century who lived in Central Mexico and was originally "tomatl". The Pueblo people - traditional communities of Native Americans living in the southwestern USA, believed that eating the seeds gave them the power of divination.
After the Spanish colonisation of South America the tomato found it's way initially to the Caribbean, then the Philippines, South West Asia and Europe. Mediterranean cultivation began in the 1540's and Spain by around 1600. It was only incorporated into the Italian cuisine, initially in Naples, in the late 17th or early 18th centuries. Until then, it was used as a table decoration. In 1598 a publication by an English "barber/surgeon" appeared and is one of the earliest known references to tomatoes in England. A chap called Gerard, an "authority" on the subject, believed the whole plant was poisonous and not for human consumption and therefore was not eaten by Britain or it's colonies in the Americas for some years to come.
Tomatoes did however surface as a consumable food by the mid 1700s in Britain and later that century featured in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as being used in soups and garnishes.
In the USA, in 1887 the ambiguity of the tomato's status (fruit vs vegetable) caused controversy due to tariffs being imposed on vegetables, but not fruit. In 1893, the Supreme Court defined it as a vegetable , strictly for the purposes of being included in the tariffs, because it was eaten as a savoury rather than a desert (Nix v. Hedden) and was only referenced in this manner for the interpretation of the Tariff Act of March 3, 1893.
