How Tomatoes Went from an Object of Suspicion to India’s Souring Agent of Choice

Sohel Sarkar examines the impact of the beloved tomato as a souring vegetable within India’s culinary tapestry.

In March 1938, a convention in Pune presided over by one of India’s first female physicians, Dr Tara Chitale, saw doctors trying to convince the gathered men and women about the benefits of consuming tomatoes. Barely a decade ago, scientists had discovered vitamin C and tomatoes were found to be a crucial source of the micronutrient, which was known to cure common cold, scurvy, and iron deficiency. But even as Chitale and her colleagues waxed eloquent about the tomato’s nutritional importance, their appeal to people to include it in their diets found few takers, writes columnist Chinmay Damle.

This lukewarm response to what is today a pantry staple may seem surprising, but for most of those present at the convention, the tomato was a relatively obscure ingredient. Few people knew about it, others did not consider it edible, and yet others carried the prejudices that often accompany new foods. Its popular use among locals at the time was that an infusion of its leaves was used to kill certain insects. Little surprise then that the tomato was also believed to be poisonous and eyed with suspicion, Damle writes. Yet, less than half a century later, this botanical fruit — or culinary vegetable — would become ubiquitous in Indian pantries and cuisines. The story behind its assimilation is a culmination of colonial encounters, the global growth in nutritional sciences, and the economic imperatives of a newly-independent nation and a collective ‘taste-making’ exercise.

A New World crop in the Old World

Like potatoes, chillies, beans, and many other ingredients that are inseparable from Indian cooking today, tomatoes are not indigenous to India. This native of South America entered the subcontinent in the 1600s through Portuguese explorers but rarely appeared in India’s culinary lexicon till two centuries later, when the British coloniser became its early adopters.

The first commercial cultivation of tomatoes in India started with the consolidation of the British empire. In 1832, the Scottish botanist William Roxburgh observed tomatoes being widely grown across the subcontinent while colonial administrator George Watts pointed out that they were mostly grown for the use of Europeans.

An illustration of tomatoes. Picture credit: Digital Public Library of America

Back in Europe, the British had remained wary of consuming tomatoes for a long time because of their classification under nightshades, many of which were considered poisonous. But by the 1700s, they had begun to incorporate them into soups, salads, stews and Italian-style macaroni dishes. In India, the British passed on these recipes to their native cooks, Lizzie Collingham writes in Curry.

The early days: Tomato’s British and elite associations

Anglo-Indian cookbooks of the 19th century, such as Wyvern’s Indian Cookery Book (1840), categorised tomatoes under ‘English vegetables grown in India’, and advised cooks on how to use them in gratins, sauces and relishes. But few colonial cookbooks with tomato-based recipes addressed Indian cooks. One exception was the Nuskha-i Ni’mat Khān, an 1801 Persian translation of an unknown English cookbook, which was intended to introduce Indians to British cooking and was also one of the earliest texts to prescribe the use of tomatoes in cooking. Its recipe for tomato soup or shorba described tomatoes as ‘wilāyatī baigan,’ or foreign eggplant, presumably to elicit some recognition among Indian readers who were familiar with the indigenous eggplant, of which the tomato is a close cousin. But this book too was meant for the kitchens of elite Mughals.

The foreign (and elite) association of tomatoes held on well into the 20th century even as a few agricultural manuals, such as JF Duthie and JB Fuller’s Field and Garden Crops of the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1889-1893), noticed the vegetable “coming more into favour with natives as an article of food on account of its acid taste”. Its sourness was “particularly well suited to the Bengali style of sweet-and-sour cookery,” Lizzie Collingham writes in Curry, suggesting that the South American import may have found some takers in Bengal. In 1926, the widely popular Hindi cookbook Pak Chandrika published a recipe for tomato chutney and a 1914 diasporic cookbook by Savitri Chowdhuri used tomatoes liberally in gravy-based dishes.

With the exception of tomato-based relishes, such as this Bengali tomato chutney with dates and mango leather, tomatoes are seldom the star ingredient in any dish. Picture credit: BongEats

But these were exceptions in a culinary landscape that otherwise stayed loyal to pre-existing hyperlocal souring ingredients. The food writer Vikram Doctor attributes the tomato’s staggered uptake to ingredients such as tamarind, kokum, pomegranate seeds, curd, amchur, raw mango and vinegar that were widely used in local cuisines to lend acidity to dishes. It’s the lack of access to these ingredients in Britain that likely prompted the London-based Chowdhuri to seek out a replacement in tomatoes, which were widely available to her at the time.

A Reversal of Fortunes

It was only in India’s post-independence years that the fortunes of this New World vegetable started to change. “The twentieth century saw the global recognition of tomato as a highly profitable crop because of its versatility and amenability for industrial processing and ability to be selectively and scientifically bred to grow in varied environments,” Sucharita Kanjilal writes in a recent paper for Gastronomica. Long before the focus on hybrid high-yielding rice and wheat during the Green Revolution, one of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IRRI)’s most profitable projects was the development of hybrid tomatoes, she adds. These varieties could grow in diverse climatic conditions, provided higher yields, and could be planted in rotation with legumes, factors that incentivised farmers to dedicate more land to tomato cultivation. As availability increased, more people became aware of the vegetable.

But availability alone could not ensure its assimilation. For that to happen, tomatoes needed to shed their foreign and elite trappings and find acceptance among the masses. That shift was aided by the global growth in nutritional sciences. The 1920s and 30s witnessed the discovery of vitamins, and in particular, vitamin C. With memories of the 1943 Bengal Famine still fresh in national memory, India’s postcolonial government sought to harness these advances with an eye on improving the health of the nation and the productivity of its workforce. Scientists were urged to investigate which vegetables and food products contained vitamins and other micronutrients, and the findings were publicised through newspapers and interventions by medical professionals.

While Chitale and her colleagues may have had relatively less success in convincing their audience to eat tomatoes, in most instances, public awareness around the vegetable as a source of vitamin C “endeared it to bourgeois consumers, even as its economic viability as a crop grown in abundance all year kept its prices low enough to be consumed through the middle and lower-middle classes,” Kanjilal writes.

Vernacular cookbooks like Pak Ratnakar joined the collective exercise to inculcate in Indians a taste for tomato by promoting it as an integral part of a nutrient-rich diet and familiarising households on how to use it in pulses, curries, raitas and pulaos. Together, these efforts reversed the tomato’s ‘English’ or ‘vilayati’ status and turned it into an indispensable part of Indian pantries and cuisines. “When Madhur Jaffrey wrote the canonical Invitation to Indian Cooking in 1973, tomatoes had made it to the book’s cover image” and “Moti Mahal restaurant was serving up tomato-based curries by the bucketful”, Kanjilal quips.

By the 1970s, tomatoes had made their way to the cover of cookbooks.

Tomatoes seamlessly fit into local understandings of taste and flavour, adding a sauce-like quality and tartness to dishes like butter chicken. Picture credit: Chris Pope_Flickr

Their widespread assimilation is also partly the result of how seamlessly tomatoes fit into local understandings of taste and flavour. With the exception of tomato-based relishes, such as chutneys, thokkus and pachadis, tomatoes are seldom the star ingredient in any dish and are Instead “relied on to hold fort with the onion-ginger-garlic trinity and lend a sauce-like quality and tartness to curries”, writes Jehan Nazir. Elsewhere, such as in south Indian rasam and Assamese tenga, tomatoes replace pre-existing hyperlocal souring ingredients such as tamarind and elephant apple.

A few reluctant takers

That said, certain cuisines took to the culinary vegetable with greater enthusiasm than others. According to Doctor, the thick base gravy produced by cooking a mixture of onion, ginger, garlic and tomatoes at high heat was “particularly useful in North India where rotis need something to hold on to.” In contrast, “rice eating regions like South India are fine with thinner gravies that don’t need tomatoes,” he adds. Doctor cites the example of Meenakshi Ammal’s Samaithu Paar (1951), a book on Tamil Brahmin cooking, which gives cooks the choice of using the traditional tamarind in sambar or incorporating tomato as a souring agent by reducing the amount of tamarind, suggesting that it is one of several options.

For communities whose cuisines have been shaped and transformed by displacement or migration, like the Saraswats, the adoption of tomatoes was likely an “act of ingenuity, born out of the need to adapt” when community-specific produce became hard to find, Nazir writes. In micro-cuisines, such as the food of Konkani Muslims, the loyalty towards traditional souring ingredients is as much an outcome of the desire to preserve traditional aspects of the cuisine as a result of limited access to tomatoes, she adds.

But these are exceptions in a culinary landscape that is otherwise unimaginable without tomatoes. The surest evidence of this is the national anxieties that surround periodic spikes in tomato prices. Last year, as prices rose to over Rs 200 per kg, the fact that many households — and even McDonald’s — had to forego or reduce their use of tomatoes made it to national headlines. Later, farmers were hit hard when prices crashed to Rs 10 a kg, many of them choosing to simply dump their produce on the roadside. The subject of skyrocketing prices frequently appears in Parliament debates and, in 2017, the opposition Congress set up a State Bank of Tomato as a parody and a form of protest.

Unlike other New World foods which found ready acceptance in India, the tomato witnessed a longer period of anonymity before it was accepted in local cuisines. But if its current reception is anything to go by, it has well and truly become, as food historian KT Achaya put it, “an aggressive colonizer in the Old World”.

Sohel Sarkar is a Bangalore-based independent journalist, writer and editor. Her work has appeared in Sourced Journeys, Feminist Food Journal, Eaten Magazine, Himal Southasian and Locavore, among others. Find her on Twitter @SohelS28 and on Instagram as @sarkar.sohel10.

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