Seasonal Star of the issue...
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All About Tomatoes!
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ou can’t think about summer in the Mediterranean and not think about tomatoes. Tomatoes have become a staple ingredient in Maltese, southern Italian, Spanish and French cuisine, however this hasn’t always been the case. Tomatoes along with their cousins potatoes and chillies only made their way to the Med from the New World a few hundred years ago and they were vastly different to the tomatoes we eat today. The tomato plant and berry (yes tomatoes are actually berries), are native to central America, more specifically Mexico and come in hundreds of strange and wonderful varieties, colours and flavours. So when Columbus and his crew arrived in Mexico they were so impressed at how well these crops grew they decided to bring a few of them back down to Europe, just a little add on, they also brought with them potatoes, corn, pumpkin, squash, chillies, vanilla, chocolate and a bunch of other exotic fruit and veg. At this point the tomato plant had shaken up Europe. People were petrified of it as we only had a few edible nightshade species in Europe at the time, mainly aubergines. The rest of the nightshade that grew, like Belladonna and deadly Nightshade, were, and still are, very toxic and were known to kill those who ate them.
