The Columbian Exchange in the Italian Kitchen: Tomato, Maize and Potato

The plants that now seem most Italian arrived from the Americas after 1492 and reached the peninsula through Spain, which ruled Naples, Sicily and Sardinia and held Milan for long periods. Waverley Root, in The Food of Italy, treats the tomato, maize and the potato as latecomers to a cooking that had existed for centuries without them, and the regional cuisines he describes bear the mark of their slow adoption.

The tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) came first in time and last in acceptance. Root records that it was regarded for a long while as a curiosity, and in some quarters with suspicion, as a plant of the nightshade family that might be harmful. It was grown as an ornamental or a botanical specimen before it was cooked, and its entry into the kitchen was gradual. The south took it up earlier than the north, and Naples, under Spanish rule, became the place with which it is most closely associated. The pairing of tomato and pasta, so fixed in the foreign imagination, belongs to a later stage of that history, and Root is careful to show that the dishes now taken as ancient are of comparatively recent standing. Maize (Zea mays) altered the diet of the north more profoundly than any other newcomer. It suited the damp soils of the Veneto, Lombardy and Piedmont, and it yielded more per field than the wheat, millet and other grains it came to rival. Polenta had existed before it, made from other grains and from pulses, and the new meal took over the name and the place. Root presents it as the staple of the rural poor in the north, a food of abundance in the bowl and of poverty in the dietary sense, and he notes the illness of pellagra that followed when maize became almost the whole of a diet. The dish that now appears on restaurant tables with refinement was for generations a necessity. The potato (Solanum tuberosum) met a more reluctant welcome still. It was long considered fit for animals or for famine, and its place in Italian cooking is smaller than in the northern European kitchens that made it a pillar of daily food. It found its footing in the mountains and the north, and in the dough of gnocchi, where it replaced or supplemented older mixtures of flour, bread and semolina. Root's account shows a pattern common to all three plants: the introduction came from above and from abroad, but the adoption came from below, from cooks and farmers who found what suited their soil, their climate and their table. What the exchange left was not a single national cuisine but a set of regional ones, each taking from the new plants what its own land and habits could use. The south built on the tomato, the north on maize, and the potato settled where cold and altitude favoured it. The older ingredients, wheat, olive oil, cheese, pulses and the fish of the coasts, were not displaced; they were joined, and the dishes that resulted carry both inheritances. To read Italian cooking as ancient and unchanging is to miss that its most familiar flavours are the product of a few centuries of adaptation.

At the table the exchange is tasted in the contrast between regions: the acidity and sweetness of cooked tomato in the south, the mild, sustaining grain of polenta in the north, and the soft starch of potato gnocchi in the mountains. Root's account suggests that these flavours should be read as recent and local, each belonging to a place and to the plant that suited it.