"Tomato sauce?"
By the campfire, Little Ox eyed the potatoes and tomato sauce in front of him with some hesitation and asked Xu Yun:
"Is it a sauce made from tomatoes?"
"That's right."
"But aren't tomatoes poisonous?"
At Little Ox's question, Xu Yun couldn't help smiling.
"Mr. Newton, people say tomatoes are poisonous, and there really have been people in history who died after eating them.
But think about it carefully. What kind of people—or, rather, what social class—were those who got into trouble after eating tomatoes?"
"People? Social class?"
Little Ox was taken aback by Xu Yun's words. Then, as if he'd realized something, he tossed out a quick remark and ran back into the house:
"Wait here. I'll go get a book."
A little while later.
Little Ox returned with a book about three centimeters thick, flipping through it as he walked.
"...William Potter, an agricultural tycoon from Leeds City. Milton Bridges, a Spanish nobleman. Hissaly Wyatt, an Italian noblewoman."
The book in Little Ox's hands was The Herball, written by John Gerard. It was also the main culprit behind tomatoes being shunned in modern Europe.
The book explicitly stated, "Tomatoes are poisonous and must not be eaten." As a result, no one in Britain dared to eat them throughout the seventeenth century.
It wasn't until the mid-eighteenth century that the British gradually began using tomatoes in everyday cooking, and even then, they had to be boiled for a long time to remove the toxins.
The book recorded numerous cases of people being poisoned after eating tomatoes, and those cases became powerful evidence for John Gerard's argument.
Snap—
After reading more than ten of the examples, Little Ox snapped the book shut and murmured thoughtfully:
"Social class."
A few seconds later, his eyes suddenly lit up.
"Right. It is strange. These people all seem to be wealthy merchants or nobles. How come there isn't a single commoner?"
A faint smile tugged at Xu Yun's lips as he continued to lead him along.
"Mr. Newton, think about what kind of tableware they used."
"Tableware?"
Little Ox's gaze drifted toward the sky as he recalled what he knew under the moonlight.
"Usually pewter, I think. I've seen it at school banquets a few times. When Uncle William still had some money, he went to a few upper- and middle-class gatherings too."
"Then think about whether there's anything in pewter that could react with tomatoes."
Little Ox had already begun to suspect the answer. Even before Xu Yun offered a hint, he was thinking along the lines of dissolution and chemical reactions.
"Pewter's usually an alloy. Mostly silver, tin, lead, and so on. Lead?!"
He gripped the book tightly in one hand and jerked his head up, staring fixedly at Xu Yun.
"Are you saying the acid in tomatoes dissolved the lead in the pewter, causing people to be poisoned and die?!"
Xu Yun shrugged and said nothing. Everything was understood without a word.
Tomatoes were among the crops brought back from the Americas by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century.
They reached Britain toward the end of the sixteenth century, but for a long time people treated them only as ornamental plants and didn't dare to eat them.
One reason was that tomatoes belonged to the nightshade family, and most nightshades contained poisonous alkaloids. Belladonna and jimsonweed, for example, were both poisonous.
So people at the time believed tomatoes were poisonous too and that they should be avoided.
In reality, the toxins in tomatoes were mainly found in their stems, leaves, and unripe fruit. Ripe tomatoes contained very little alkaloid and posed almost no danger to people's health.
The second reason was the quack John Gerard mentioned above. His 1597 book, The Herball, declared tomatoes poisonous—but that section had actually been plagiarized from an article by Dodoens, and he had even copied the name of the tomato, "lycopersicum," incorrectly as "lycoperticum."
Unfortunately, there were no public channels for debunking rumors in Europe at the time. And since the cases John Gerard cited had genuinely occurred, tomatoes were excluded from people's diets for a long time, despite growing everywhere in the wild.
Not long ago, for example, Xu Yun had casually searched around outside and found plenty of ripe wild tomatoes. No one was willing to eat them at all.
This misunderstanding about tomatoes had given Xu Yun the idea for tomato sauce, a secret weapon for making money.
Tomato sauce might not look like much, and it might seem a far cry from things like soap and antibiotics.
But in modern Europe, tomato sauce was practically the equivalent of Lao Gan Ma in China, if not even more popular.
French fries, hamburgers, afternoon tea, bread, steak—tomato sauce went with just about anything.
Speaking of tomato sauce, there was another little-known story worth telling.
Everyone probably knew that the English word for 番茄酱 was ketchup, but the name didn't come from English itself. It was borrowed phonetically from another language.
And that language wasn't some other foreign tongue. It was Chinese!
The earliest recorded use of the word ketchup in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, dated to 1690 (Ketchup - Wikipedia), but it didn't refer to a tomato-based condiment.
The word came from the Chinese ke-tsiap, which originally referred to the brine produced by pickling fish and was used as a seasoning in cooking.
Stanford University professor Ren Shaotang once wrote a blog post called "The Language of Food," in which he argued that ketchup could be traced back to a type of fish sauce from eastern Fujian Province:
"In the Minnan dialects of the eighteenth century, this fish sauce was called 'ketchup,' 'ge-tchup,' or 'kue-chiap' in different regions.
"Anyone who speaks Minnan or Cantonese can recognize the final syllable of the word's American pronunciation: 'chiap' or 'tchup.' It means 'sauce'; in Mandarin, it's pronounced 'zhi.'"
He also wrote that the 1982 edition of the Dictionary of Mandarin and Minnan Dialects confirmed that "蕃" was an archaic character pronounced "gue" in spoken Minnan, meaning preserved fish.
So "蕃茄酱" was an archaic Minnan term for "fish sauce." (Two papers, DOI: 10.1515/bz-1969-0202 and DOI: 10.2307/2852096—the latter was from Cambridge, too.)
Of course.
As it had evolved over time, modern tomato ketchup had little resemblance to the tomato sauces of the seventeenth century.
The connection was one of ancestry, like cats and their ancient ancestor, Proailurus.
Xu Yun glanced around. As time passed, the temperature outside was dropping further.
"Mr. Newton, why not give it a taste? It's a very common condiment in the East. Not only is it completely harmless, but some people have even become one of the Central Plains' five white—cough, I mean, become tycoons after eating it!"
Hearing this, Little Ox studied the tomato sauce in front of him again, looking uncertain.
He didn't want to admit it, but ever since this Eastern man called Fat Fish had appeared, he'd brought him plenty of good things and helped him a great deal.
With that in mind, Little Ox made up his mind and picked up a potato.
He wouldn't die from it, so he might as well try a little.
The baked potato's skin was still hot. Little Ox quickly shifted it back and forth between his hands, blowing on it all the while.
With the help of the chilly air, the potato's surface soon cooled down.
Little Ox deftly pinched a slightly indented spot and pressed gently.
As a wisp of steam rose, the potato split in two.
He took the smaller half, dipped it in some of the tomato sauce Xu Yun had prepared, and popped it into his mouth along with the potato.
After a moment, Little Ox gave a small exclamation.
"Hmm? Not bad. Tasty!"
Seasonings in Britain at the time were extremely limited. Bread with butter was about the most common fare. Aside from that, people pickled vegetables with salted meat, then mixed them with pomegranate seeds and peeled sour oranges to make a simple early salad.
Tomato sauce filled the gap between "sweet" and "sour." Its popularity had been proven countless times in later generations. It was no exaggeration to say that this condiment and Europeans were practically made for each other.
Seeing Little Ox take a second bite, Xu Yun smiled faintly and said:
"Then, Mr. Newton, what do you think? If we set a modest price for tomato sauce and sold it, would anyone be willing to pay?"
"Sell it? Pay?"
Clatter—
At those two key words, Little Ox suddenly froze in place, like a plug had been pulled on a vibrating toy.
He didn't even notice the potato slipping from his hand and hitting the ground.
A few seconds later.
A light suddenly flared in his eyes, as if two gold coins had been embedded in them, gleaming brightly.
Yesterday, the ratio of people who disliked the title to those who liked it had already reached ten to one. Fuck me.
Before you continue