THE LOVE APPLE
By J. M. LAWRENCE
THIS month and next more people than ever before in this island—professionals and amateurs alike—will be turning their attention to what the Elizabethan gardeners and many successive generations pleasantly called the Apple of Love. The tomato is a brisk and business-like modern of a hundred years thriving. The Love Apple was a leisurely, slightly eccentric personality, of a warm amorous southern aspect, with no leanings whatever to a commercial career—though its alternative name was, prophetically perhaps, Golden Apple. "Apples of Love grow in Spain, Italic and such hot countries from whence myselfe have received seeds for my garden where they do increase and prosper," wrote John Gerard, delightful and beloved godfather of English gardens. He introduced the Apple of Love into England in 1596 and never once mentioned the word tomato. Now, three and a half centuries later, necessity and inclination call for a bumper crop of Love Apples. The plant, like its cousin the potato, to which it bears a strong family resemblance, is one of the valuable gifts of the New World to the Old. Lycopersicum Esculentum, the tomato, is a native of Peru, as its early names, Malt: Peruviana, Pomi del Peru, indicate, it. was introduced into Europe by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, the Spanish word tamale later supplanting the Elizabethan Love Apple.
A scrutiny of the Elizabethan woodcut in Gerard's Herbal is of the utmost interest. These woodcuts have a sort of curly formality about them—a touch of the ruff and farthingale and conventionalised embroidery of the period—quite different from ,the loose athletic build of the modern border plant, for horticulture bears to a certain extent the impress of its generation just as the old portraits show 'a period face. The woodcut of the Love Apple displays not a smooth round fruit like the modern tomato, but one grooved and segmented, corresponding exactly to Gerard's description of it as "chamfered, uneven and bunsped out in many places." (What a pity such an expressive word as chamfered should have been allowed to drop out of the English tongue!) The woodcut proves conclusively that the grooved and bunchy tomato met with by growers from time to time is not, as one was inclined to think, a case of pathological deformity, but a throwback to the original Love Apple of several centuries ago— a belated but persistent attempt to defeat the efforts of the plant breeders to "rogue out" all chamfered, uneven and bunched characteristics and promote a smooth and even rotundity. Gerard also noted the yellow variety now being taken up by growers, and Parkinson mentions a "small Love Apple" about the size of a grape which still survives as an ornament in some conservatories.
The tomato is a creature of extremes (perhaps due to its southern temperament) extremes of fame, of reputation for food value, even of details of cultivation. Its biography knows no half-measures. After being graded for centuries (in England, not on the Continent) as an ornamental eccentricity it is suddenly exalted in these latter days td the status of a new and thriving industry, plunging from insignificance to national importance in a manner unparalleled by any other fruit or vegetable. In reputation for food value the tomato has been first nonentity, then hero and, for a short period, at one time even villain. "They yield very little nourishment to the body," commented Gerard, noting, a little wonderingly, that Spaniards and Italians esteemed them a delicacy eaten "with pepper, salt and oyle." "We only have them for ,curiosity in our gardens," wrote Parkinson a few decades later, "and for the amorous aspect or beauty of the fruit. In the hot countries where they naturally growe they are much eaten of the people to cool and quench the heat and thirst of their hot stomaches. The apple also, boyled or infused in oyle in the sunne is thought to be good to cure the itch." Never has our national conservatism in the matter of food and our inability to take a culinary hint from our neighbours been displayed to better disadvantage. It is quite painful to think of so much deliciousness neglected for so long.
0 Love Apples "faire and goodly . . . of a bright shining red colour" (even as love itself), eaten in " oyle " by the amorous Italian and the erotic Spaniard, how art thou become sturdy Saxon sinews of war!
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