5 Culinary Exports from the New World (Part 1)

The New World really spiced up the World’s Cuisine

While Europe, Asia, and Africa are considered the Old World, the lands of the Western Hemisphere, in particular the Americas, are often referred to as the New World.

The benefits that Europeans attained from colonizing and exploring the New World were not only in their attainment of land but also in their exposure to new commodities and in turn culinary exports. The following are five examples of the many New World culinary imports that changed Old World cuisine.

Tomatoes

The MVP of Italian cuisine?

From the annual tomato fight, La Tomatina, in Spain to the ubiquity of tomatoes in Italian cuisine, it is hard to imagine tomatoes being a culinary import that was only introduced to Europe in the 16th century. But this was the case.

Tomatoes were a staple in Mesoamerican diets thousands of years before Europeans arrived in the Americas. The plant was only imported to Europe by Spanish conquistadors in the 16th century. Europeans first considered the fruit as “golden apples” and shortly distributed them throughout the world. It was soon after that many cuisines began including it in their diets.