Tomatoes, originally an underused agriculture product of the South, came to the fore of American culinary attention beginning in the 1820s. At this time, a number of forces converged to give the tomato the popularity in American cooking that is generally assumed when thinking of this fruit/vegetable. Various publications began lauding the tomato as, “‘a desirable object with most of our gardeners,'” politicians began proclaiming the tomato as, “a delicious and healthy vegetable,” and a renowned New York writer went so far as to say that tomatoes were, “‘an invaluable article of diet, or, if you please, as of medicine, or of medical dietetics.'” After Dr. John Cook Bennett proclaimed various medicinal properties of the tomato, a great debate began to rage among well-read newspapers, thus ensuring the public’s knowledge of the fruit. Later, as patent medicines claiming to use a tomato base were developed, at least six thousand advertisements for tomatoes found their way into public. The good press given to tomatoes by physicians was coupled with the publishing of tomato recipes in several large newspaper and the almost constant discussion by horticulturalists of the delicious and healthy aspects of tomatoes. Thus, within 30 years (by 1851) more than a thousand pounds of tomato seed were sold in Boston alone (while in 1833 a “remarkable” year would have seen one pound of tomato seed sold). As seed sales increased, so did the sales of fresh tomatoes, and consumption spread from the South to New England and the Frontier.
