Anderson, E.
In tracing origins of cultivated plants one may work both with the history of the plant itself and the history of its use. These two lines of research need to go together.
Around the Mediterranean there is a distinctive use of the tomato in daily cooking: in sauces, meat dishes and the like. An important part of this complex of tomato use is various ways of drying or concentrating tomatoes for winter: drying on roof tops in the sun, boiling down to a concentrate which is covered with olive oil and kept through the winter. Quite naturally, meaty varieties are favored. It was from this area that Northern Europe and the United States gradually took over the use of the tomato. It spread a century ago from a few French families in Boston and Italian and French families along the Atlantic and Gulf Seaboards. Meaty-fleshed varieties were also introduced through these same people and have been of much importance. This much was reported in the monograph published in the Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden by McCue.
The introduction of this complex into Northern Italy is a matter of historical record which indicates that it came to them from the Moors and the Turks. Investigations show that this area of intensive use and winter conservation of the tomato extends through the Balkans, all through Turkey, and even into Northwestern Persia where it stops quite abruptly. When the Turks over-ran this area they were a scarcely literate people and there are few scholars who know anything about their literature. It will be difficult, but not impossible, to find from Arabic and Turkish literature some indication of the routes and the times at which the tomato reached this area. It is the same area in which Vavilov found the center of variation for North American squashes. We now know it to be the European center for Caribbean type popcorns. It is apparently the center of variation for American cultivated sunflowers. It is also one of the world centers for red pepper and certain tobaccos. The concentration of so many distinctive North and Central American plants in this area deserves more careful consideration and objective, scholarly analysis than it has previously received.