Tomatoes are small, soft, red fruit that you can eat raw in salads or cooked as a vegetable. Any fruit of the numerous cultivated varieties of Lycopersicon esculentum, a plant of the nightshade family. The plant is generally much branched and has hairy, strongly odorous, feathery leaves. The drooping, clustered, yellow flowers are followed by red, scarlet, or yellow fruits, which hang from the many branches of one weak stem. The tomato fruit varies in shape from spherical to elongate and in size from 0.6 in. (1.5 cm) across to more than 3 in. (7.5 cm) across. The Spanish were bringing tomatoes from South America to Europe by the early 16th century; they were introduced to North America from Europe by the 1780s. Tomatoes are used raw, cooked as a vegetable or puree, and pickled, canned, and sun-dried. The term also applies to the fruit of L. pimpinelli folium, the tiny currant tomato
(tuh-MAY-toh; tuh-MAH-toh) - One of the best things about summer is biting into a sweet, vine-ripened tomato It is believed that tomatoes were introduced from South America to Europe in the 1500s The Aztecs, according to a contemporary account, mixed tomatoes with chilies and ground squash seeds, a combination that sounds a lot like the world's first recipe for salsa Tomatoes arrived in Europe from central and northern America Pietro Andrea Mattioli who gives an accurate description and calls them pomi doro dates the first mention of tomatoes in Italy 1544
A fruit from the nightshade family (like the potato and eggplant) The U S government classified it as a vegetable for trade purposes in 1893 Tomatoes should not be refrigerated--the cold adversely affects the flavor and the flesh
tomatoes
Turkish pronunciation
tımeytōz
Pronunciation
/təˈmātōz/ /təˈmeɪtoʊz/
Etymology
[ t&-'mA-(")tO; chiefly B ] (noun.) 1604. alteration of earlier tomate, from Spanish, from Nahuatl tomatl.