You may be disappointed to learn that the plot concerns not a tomato but the Judgment of Paris, with the prize of the Golden Apple. And the basket was opened and they looked at one another with much thoughtfulness. Remarkably, it would be well over years before the tomato gained widespread favour among the Italian population in the pasta sauces we now know and love, belatedly becoming a national symbolβfor Italian emigrants abroad, during the Fascist period, and later.
Other New World imports such as maize, potatoes, tobacco, American beans, chillies, cocoa, vanilla gained acceptance more quickly. So audiences in Italy may even have been denied the opportunity of a good giggle, although word must have spread. Still, in Italy, over a century after the tomato was first recorded there, one might suppose that the word pomodoro the pomo referring generally to fruit, not to the apple at least had become part of the vocabulary of the elite who were the audience for such spectacles.
But then, they would also be familiar with the ancient storyβalthough from the simple synopsis one might not imagine that it called for elaborate stage machinery to depict tableaus like shipwrecks and collapsing towers:. The gods ask the Trojan prince Paris to decide which of the goddesses Venus, Juno, and Pallas Minerva is the most beautiful and thus deserving of the Golden Apple.
Paris gives the prize to Venus. But confusingly, the term also continued to denote the fruit in the ancient myth of the Hesperides.
Gentilcore notes the early association of tomato and eggplant or aubergine, splendidly advertised by British greengrocers as OBOS. The latter, incidentally, reached Europe from Persia by way of Andalucia.
