Pizza in the Old West
In early America, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous because they resembled the deadly nightshade plant. They were planted in Colonial gardens, but only as ornamentals. A few theories have circulated about who turned Americans on to tomatoes (possibly Thomas Jefferson?).
Regardless of the source, the tomato became one of the most canned and cooked products in the nation.As early as the mid-1800s people cooked with tomatoes, but few recipes called for fresh tomatoes. Most of the recipes used cooked or canned tomatoes; salads and fresh tomatoes did not gain popularity until the late 1800s.
By 1850, agricultural farmers in California were producing tomatoes in large quantities. John M. Homer of San Jose cultivated 50,000 pounds of tomatoes in one season. In Missouri, in 1851, Western Spice Mills placed an ad for 2,000 bushels of tomatoes.Cooks used tomatoes to make pickles, jelly, sauces and catsup. Catsup has been a popular condiment for centuries.Besides its use in catsup, tomatoes were also popularly featured in pizzas.
If you think pizza is a fairly new item to the West, think again—the pioneers were aware of it as early as 1861. “‘The pizza! What do you mean by the pizza?’” asked one reader of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. The newspaper responded by describing the Neapolitan Pizza as a delicacy that “is only made and eaten between sunset and two and three in the morning, and it must be baked in five minutes in the oven; at the very moment when it is ordered it is pulled out of the oven and served up piping hot….”
