Tomato-based sauces are the epitome of Italian pasta dishes. Astoundingly though, tomato sauces have only been with us for a few hundred years.
One little fruit has a lot to answer for.
Think of an image of a plate of pasta and the chances are it'll be covered in a red sauce. Millions of people. all around the world ONLY cook one sauce for pasta, and for 99% of those, that one recipe is based on tomatoes.
I've even done some (really basic) polling recently about this myself on my own social media. When asked how many different pasta sauces they regularly cooked, 10% of respondents admitted to cooking just one, 'red' pasta sauce regularly. Whichever way you look at it, that's takes a little processing. 10% of people are either that obsessed with tomatoes or that unadventurous that they don't cook ANY other type of pasta sauce. Wow. And bear in mind that my followers on social media are firmly identify as foodies. I'm going to assume that if I took a broader sample of home cooks the percentage that only made '1 red sauce' would be even higher.
But on reflection is all of that so surprising? Thinking back, my own late mother (born 1935, Tuscany), only really ever cooked pasta with 3 condiments; a red ragù, a pasta al pomodoro and a butter and parmesan condiment - not because it was an 'alfredo' but because it was 'convalescent' food..... 'mangiare in bianco' for those with stomach ulcers or other gastric complaints, who'd been warned away from the evils of acidic tomatoes. My grandmother (born 1910, Tuscany) added one other sauce to this repertoire; a cream and sage sauce that she'd serve with spinach and ricotta ravioli. Exciting times.
and then there was red
Tomatoes found their way to Europe form the New World in the 16th Century, along with other foods and plants that hadn't been seen in Europe before. You'll often see reference to the fact that the early tomato varieties introduced into Europe were ony grown as ornamental fruit - they picked up the name 'pommo d'oro', golden apple, becuase many of those varieties were yellow, but they were thought to be toxic. There are a number of surviving records of 17th century writers warning agianst the consumption of tomatoes, and it wasn't really until tomatoes found their way through the Spanish trade routes to the Kingdom of Naples that they began to be seen as a food. This was in the mid 18th century!
the universal sauce
From their early adoption in Naples and the south of Italy, tomato use gradually but relatively quickly spread though the Italian regions. In a few hundred years, where once butter and cheese ruled supreme, red became the de facto colour for pasta dishes, and it's remained in a dominant position ever since.
