>
>As I said in my earler post, tomatoes are common in southern Italian
>cooking - from Campania down. But there's a wild fallacy that southern
>Italians put it in everything. This just ain't true. I've spent a lot
>of time working with the food in Basilicata, traditionally a poor area,
>with a wonderful simple cuisine. But have a look at this site on the
>food of this area - right down in the south
>
>http://www.bancadati.it/basilicata/b-ricette.html
>
>You'll find tomatoes in a number of the recipes, but it's far from
>ubiquitous - probably less common than parsley or chillies. and
>remember, in southern Italian cooking the tomato is often used just
>like parsley, in quite small quantities.
>
>And the fact that it's popular in some parts of the south can't be made
>to apply to the whole country. I spend a lot of time in Tuscany, and
>there you'd hardly notice tomatoes. ..
>
>

It seems to me that we have several interesting threads within this discussion.
First, there are empirical ones-- how many tomatoes do Italians eat? How does
this compare with others? I maintain that, pound for pound, Italians eat more
tomatoes than any other fruit or vegetable, including parsley or chillies. In
fact, parsely and chillies are not even close. In addition, Italians eat more
tomatoes on a per capita basis than do other Europeans.

Second, there are the culinary myths that you and others have raised-- not all
Italians eat gobs of tomatoes at every meal, and even in the south where tomato
consumption is highest, tomatoes are certainly not used in every dish. And
Italian-America food (based, incidently, largely on southern Italian
immigrants) is not the same as the food eaten in Italy today. These are indeed
myths, it seems to me.

Finally, we're back to what is a national cuisine. Do the Italians have one? Or
alternately, do Italians have a national cuisine and tomatoes are just not a
component?

Andy Smith