NYU Florence

A Dialogue with DAVID GENTILCORE
University of Leicester

The experience of the arrival, reception and success of New World
products in Europe—tomatoes, maize, potatoes, chillies, etc.—is a unique event in the culinary history of the continent. The assimilation of each foodstuff has its own distinct trajectory. My talk explores how the tomato gradually and slowly came to dominate Italian cookery and food exports, after inauspicious beginnings in the 1500s, by following the tomato’s itinerary, both back and forth across the Atlantic and in terms of its different developments in Italy’s regions. I do this through the medium of “taste” -- in the cultural sense of changing food preferences and the biochemical sense of flavor -- analysing the role taste had to play in shaping the different stages of the tomato’s Italian history.

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