Love apple

The tomato is the only entry in this guide to have reached the ocean from the Americas by way of a French kitchen. In Mauritius it is pomdamour, from pomme d’amour, and the word usually refers to the island’s own varieties²; satini pomdamour, tomato chutney, is on every table.

The name is the French one. In the south of France pomme d’amour still means tomato; Marcel Pagnol wrote of watering “les pommes d’amour (which the French flatly call tomatoes)”³. The name has wandered, though: Furetière’s dictionary of 1690, quoted by Le Robert, describes a plant “that they call pommes d’amour, and in Latin mala insana”⁴, and the “mad apples” of that Latin name are usually taken to be the aubergine, a sense history the atlas has only sketched.