Champagne and Sparkling Wine or Tomato in America

Champagne and Sparkling Wine: Grape Goddess Guides to Good Living

Author: Catherine Fallis

Learn the basics with your very own, very straightforward grape goddess, Catherine Fallis. No boring history lessons ("Yawn") or wine geek speak ("Don't make me send out the Wine Police!") here. Put your palate to the test with Sensual Experience Exercises. Get the inside scoop on getting the best deals. Learn from a pro how to select the best bubbly for two--or for two hundred!

Everyone yearns for la dolce vita, the sweet life. Grape goddess Catherine Fallis demystifies, clarifies, and charts out a course for immediate results--a richer, more visceral, sensually charged daily life.

Book review: Iris and Her Friends or 100 Questions and Answers about Hysterectomy

Tomato in America: Early History, Culture, and Cookery

Author: Andrew F Smith

From the Americas to Australasia, from northern Europe to southern Africa, the tomato tickles the world's taste buds. Americans alone devour more than twelve million tons annually of this peculiar fruit, which has variously been considered poisonous, cutative, and aphrodisiacal.

In this first concerted study of the tomato in America, Andrew F. Smith separates myth from historical fact, beginning with the Salem, New Jersey, man who, in 1820, allegedly attracted spectators from hundreds of miles to watch him eat a tomato on the courthouse steps (the legend says they expected to see him die a painful death). Later, hucksters such as Dr. John Cook Bennett and the Amazing Archibald Miles peddled the tomato's purported medicinal benefits. The competition was so fierce that the Tomato Pill War broke out in 1838.

The Tomato in America traces the early cultivation of the tomato, its infiltration of American cooking practices, the early manufacture of preserved tomatoes and ketchup (soon hailed as "the national condiment of the United States"), and the "great tomato mania" of the 1820s and 1830s. The book also includes tomato recipes from the pre-Civil War period, covering everything from sauces, soups, and main dishes to desserts and sweets.

Now available for the first time in paperback, The Tomato in America provides a piquant and entertaining look at a versatile and storied figure in culinary history.

Library Journal

Did you think that tomatoes were not in this country before the 1880s? And did you think that this was because they were considered to be poisonous or aphrodisiacal? Since 1987, writer and lecturer Smith has been researching references to tomatoes. After examining 50,000 sources, which he says does not by any means exhaust the material, Smith traces the history of this most popular fruit/vegetable-one that is now grown by more home gardeners in this country than any other food. The evidence he presents, drawn from newspapers, letters, diaries, and cookbooks, refutes the popular myths and supports his thesis that the tomato was cultivated for culinary and medicinal uses from early Colonial times and was introduced to the American colonies on numerous separate occasions. Smith also includes a selection of recipes from early cookbooks and magazines. Chapters are supported by extensive references. The book concludes with a classified bibliography and a list of heirloom seed sources and tomato organizations. While lacking the narrative appeal and readability of other books about individual plants, this is a thorough and useful reference, making available masses of material not otherwise available. (Index not seen.)-Carol Cubberley, Univ. of Southern Mississippi