Food and drink

Il pomodoro is two words pressed into one. Pomo is an apple and, by extension, any round fruit; d’oro means of gold. The seam still shows in older writing, where the plural is i pomi d’oro rather than the modern i pomodori. The name records a first impression: the varieties that reached Italy in the sixteenth century were small and yellow, and the fruit was described with the words the language already had. English took the other road open to a language meeting a new thing. « Tomato » goes back to tomatl in Nahuatl, the language of central Mexico, borrowed by Spanish as tomate and handed on from there, so the English word describes nothing whatever. It is a label, and a speaker can use it for a lifetime and learn nothing from it. That is what the pair is worth remembering for: faced with the same new plant, one language described it and the other kept the sound it had heard. Pasta al pomodoro is, read literally, pasta with golden apples.