Saveur Article: Page 1
by Robert Ragaini
I'm folded into an old-fashioned barber's chair, a striped sheet fastened around my neck and draped down to my knees. Nick Soccodato wields the scissors while his Italian nephew Savino Zuottolo lounges on a banquette under the blue neon sign proclaiming "Nick's Hair Stylists" in the window of the Greenwich Village barbershop. "The san marzano is the best tomato in the world for making pasta sauce," says Nick, as he clips away at my few remaining strands. "You ought to write about it." I respond with more than a touch of skepticism, since Savino is about to export said tomato to America, and Nick is involved in the enterprise. Savino, who is short, compact, taciturn-Bob Hoskins, Italian-style-speaks no English. When I ask why the san marzano tomato is so superior, Nick listens to Savino's lengthy response and translates: "It has less sugar."
This may not be easy, I realize. "Does that mean it has a higher acid content?" I hazard.
Another discussion. "No, it has less acid."
Now I'm confused. If a tomato's sugar content is lower, wouldn't the natural acid be more pronounced? And if so,why would more acid make a better sauce? I persist with my questions, trying not to annoy Savino. (I'm not certain I succeed.) "The fields are near Mount Vesuvius," Nick translates. "The volcanic soil acts as a filter. The water goes down a couple of feet and...... Nick's hands describe the shape of a circular pool. "So the impurities are filtered out?" I venture. "But how does that make the tomato both less sweet and less acidic?" Nick and Savino chew the apparent contradiction over. "It's bittersweet," says Nick.
Still wary about this tomato that Nick and Savino are seducing me with, I begin to track down the san marzano tomato in the U.S.-not a simple task. I discover that the San Marzano legend on an imported can of Italian plum tomatoes may refer to San Marzano the town, not to san marzano the tomato variety, and that the can could therefore just as easily contain roma tomatoes, which are also grown and canned in the San Marzano region but are quite different in taste. Subsequently, using a recipe (at first glance, much too simple) provided by Nick's wife, Rose, I make a basic san marzano tomato sauce that turns out to be absolutely delicious. When made with a can of Progresso roma tomatoes, the results are markedly inferior. I then speak to no less an expert than the produce manager at Balducci's, Manhattan's legendary Italian market. Yes, he says, only the best of several brands of imported plum tomatoes bears the varietal name san marzano.
Savino Zuottolo insists that even the san marzano tomatoes grown outside San Marzano wouldn't have the same grate taste "I think that's a lot of hogwash," says Professor Charles Rick, a tomato geneticist at UC Berkeley, when I tell him this. "The genetics of the thing is much more important than the environment," declares the man acknowledged to be the reigning American tomato expert. Next, I talk to plantsman Shepherd Ogden, who grows san marzano tomatoes in Vermont and offers the variety's seeds in his mail-order catalogue, Cook's Garden. He dissents strongly: "Speak to a wine person," he suggests. "Ask what they think about the importance of the soil." Suddenly, the idea of writing a profile of a tomato doesn't seem so far-fetched.
I was aware that in the distant past, Lycopersicon esculentum (the designation translates literally as "edible wolfpeach") had been viewed with alarm. The first Italian reference to it, by Pier Andrea Mattioll in his Erbario of 1544, calls it both toxic and an aphrodisiac. Almost two centuries later, a Dutch herbalist asserted that the "seeds cause faintness and a sort of apoplexy." What I didn't know before visiting the New York Horticultural Society was that until the 1500s, the tomato was a stranger not only to Italy but to most of the world. "The pomo d'oro, commonly named for its intense deep yellow color," wrote naturalist Costanzo Felici in 1572, was a "singular and mysterious berry" brought home aboard their caravels by Pizarro's conquistadores. Clearly, this tomato, which had already been cultivated in southern Mexico, had changed considerably from the tiny, bright red fruit growing in the northern Andes, its place of origin. By the next century, the red variety had become preeminent throughout Europe, but only as a vine-prized for its ability to enhance arbors and camouflage outhouses.
Despite the mysterious berry's bad press, the common people of Spain and southern Italy insisted on eating it. Then, in 1797, Francesco Leonardi, chef to Empress Catherine 11 of Russia, included a tomato coulis in his gastronomic encyclopedia, Apico Moderno. Was it this entry, or, perhaps, the first published recipe for pasta with tomato sauce that appeared in Naples in 1839, that finally conferred respectability upon the fruit that everyone loved to hate? We'll never know. But in the country whose cuisine is unthinkable without them, tomatoes didn't become truly popular until they were processed and bottled in glass in the late 1800s. The rage began in the south, not just because of the climate, but because of the potent Spanish influence on Italian cuisine.