Few ingredients occupy quite so central a place in the kitchen as the tomato. It appears in almost every cuisine touched by the modern world, from the simplest sliced salad to the richest slow cooked sauce, and yet its journey to such ubiquity was far from straightforward. For a fruit now so utterly essential to global cooking, the tomato spent a surprisingly long time being viewed with real suspicion. The tomato originated in the Andean regions of South America, where wild v