Consider the tomato

Thousands of varieties and a million uses make the tomato the most useful fruit in the kitchen
Ripe juicy tomatoes
Ripe juicy tomatoes. Photograph: Garry Gay/Alamy

A few times each summer I start the day with a fat ripe tomato, perhaps a jack hawkins, chomped and sucked like a dribbly peach or sliced, salted and lightly olive oiled. Bread almost seems de trop at times like these, and coffee or OJ would jar. Such a breakfast has a simple clarity of purpose, offering a pure tart jolt.

We associate tomatoes most often with the Mediterranean but nowadays they seem almost as English as apples. Until the appearance of the Dutch mega-greenhouses and their uniformly abysmal product, the UK grew excellent tomatoes for the home market. Many private gardeners still do. The Victorians built vast greenhouses, most famously at Worthing. And though that industry peaked before the second world war, the Isle of Wight still produces a very good and well-marketed tom.
In any case, the Italians and Spanish only started enjoying the fruit relatively recently. Tomatoes seem to have evolved in Peru, and the Aztecs were cultivating them by about 700AD. Cortés, Columbus or some other pioneering European brought the plant or seeds back to the Old World around 1500. At first the fruits were grown as ornamentals and (somewhat counterintuitively, as we shall see) as medicine. The first surviving cookbook to include tomato recipes was published as late as 1692 – it's Genoese, but claims its recipes are Spanish. Early specimens were yellow and about the size of cherry tomatoes, hence their poetic Italian name "pomodoro", golden apple.

Tomatoes took a while to gain acceptance for a couple of reasons. The plant is a member of the nightshade family, the frequently toxic group that also includes tobacco, henbane and mandrake. An early German word for tomato translates to "wolf peach": witches were then believed to use nightshade to summon werewolves. John Gerard, author of an influential 16th century herbal, conceded the Spanish and Italians to be tomato eaters but believed the fruits to be "of ranke and stinking savour", offering "very little nourishment to the body, and the same naught and corrupt". Many modern sources still claim that the leaves and stalks of the tomato plant are toxic like the potato's, though at least one Californian chef cooks with them anyway, apparently with no ill effects.

Gerard's views gained widespread acceptance in England and, latterly, in its north American colonies. In days when the well-to-do ate from plates made of pewter, the acid in tomatoes may have caused lead to leach from the metal. This really was poisonous, of course, and it likely helped confirm people's beliefs that tomatoes were dangerous. It's also one of the reasons that tomatoes are seen as a rustic, "peasanty" food: the poor of Spain and Italy tended to eat from wood (or trenchers of bread, hence pa amb tomàquet and bruschetta), and so theirs are the dishes to have reached us.

Once the British were travelling extensively in Europe it became obvious that tomatoes were not poisonous, and by the middle of the 18th century the fruit had established itself in the national repertoire. Successive waves of Italian emigration made the tomato an essential part of American cuisine. Somewhat remarkably, however, the first extant recipe for spaghetti with tomato sauce ("vermicelli co le pommodoro") only dates to 1839.

Unlike most fruit and veg, tomatoes have found great success pulped and squeezed and cooked in factories. Like most of you, no doubt, I eat tinned ones through the winter. I think I may actually prefer the best Italian tinned toms in some stewier dishes such as spag bol. (Ragu purists restrict the sauce to a squirt of tomato purée: their loss.) A bloody mary made with fresh tomato juice is wholly inferior to one from a Tetra-Pak, and I do wish restaurants would give up trying to make their own tomato ketchup and just serve Heinz.

Year-round "fresh" tomatoes, picked green and ripened under ethylene gas, have a texture suggestive of tannery by-product and taste of nothing but clammy sourness. But a ripe tomato in midsummer is a complete and perfect dish. One of the loveliest, simplest ways to start a warm June lunch is tomato consommé, a dish that enjoyed a spurt of popularity a couple of years ago. Roasted or stuffed, in salad or salsa, blitzed in gazpacho, in curries, gratins, panzanella and with pasta, pasta, pasta, it's the most useful fruit in the kitchen. Just don't put it in the fridge.