A brief history

My paternal grandmother, born around 1875, had probably heard stories from her elders about the much admired rare plant that produced "golden apples" (chryssomila), as tomatoes were called then—translating the Italian word pomodoro. Tomato plants were introduced to mainland Greece in 1815. That year, the story goes, Paul d'Yvrai, the French father superior of the Capuchins' monastery in Plaka—the old picturesque Athenian neighborhood under the Acropolis—brought some tomato seeds, together with other bulbs and seeds, to decorate the garden of the famous monastery with rare flowers. Incidentally, Lord Byron had stayed in this monastery a few years back, in 1812. The red fruits of the plant were much admired, according to the story, and the seeds were later planted to a French family's vegetable garden in Patissia—an Athenian suburb in those days. According to another version of the story, the tomato seeds were first cultivated in the garden of the French family, which had connections to Marseille. From there the tomatoes found their way to the Capuchin monks' garden. In neither of the stories is there mention of the fruits being used in the kitchen.

Bear in mind that these were difficult years for Greece. The country was still under Ottoman rule until 1821, when the war of independence started. Clearly people had other priorities. In 1833 Prince Otto of Bavaria came to Greece as the first king of the newly created state, after the war and the political unrest that followed. The tiny Greek state ended about 200 kilometers north of Athens, and included only the islands of the Cyclades.

Aglaia Kremezi

Friedrich Wilchelm Thiersch, a Bavarian scholar who visited the country in those days, published in 1833 a detailed account "About the Greek situation." In it, he describes the vast difference between the people who lived in the villages of the mainland, "where families slept on the dirt floor of their homes, by the fire," and the way of life in the homes of the merchant navy marines, in some Cycladic islands. "The (island) homes had lovely Venetian furniture, although slightly outmoded in style, but a complete copy of our own," Thiersch writes. That explains why the first Greek-language cookbook—a translation from an Italian one—was published in 1827 not in Athens but on the cosmopolitan island of Syros.

In that book we find two recipes that use "golden apples." The first is "Fried golden apples": tomatoes are halved, emptied, stuffed with chopped liver and lots of spices, dipped in egg, dredged on breadcrumbs, and fried. We can, therefore, conclude that by 1827 tomatoes were somewhat available in Syros. But, of course, few if any Greek women were able to read that cookbook, so most cooks were trying to figure out what to do with the new fruit/vegetable. Some thought it similar to the eggplant and even called it "Frankish eggplant" for a time. In a kitchen ledger written probably in the early 1900s by a lady from Ithaca—the island of the Ionian Sea, on the western side of Greece—I found a strange version of moussaka that has sliced and fried tomatoes instead of eggplants.