e-portfolio of Serin Quinn
Project Overview
From Xitomatl to Love Apple: The Introduction of the Tomato to England, c. 1500-1800
This PhD was funded by Midlands4Cities and supervised by Professor Rebecca Earle and Professor Beat Kümin. It successfully passed the viva examination in December 2024.
Abstract:
Over the course of the early modern period, the tomato – known as xitomatl by the Nahua – was spread from the highlands of Mexico across the globe and introduced to a number of new environments as a novel plant. One such introduction was to England, where tomatoes gained a new name – love apples – and were assimilated into various facets of English life. This thesis examines the processes of naturalisation in five distinct settings, divided into two case studies.
The first study centres around the early receptions of tomatoes in Continental Europe. It begins by establishing the use of the tomato in Indigenous Mesoamerican culinary culture and examines the subsequent reception of the new food by consumers in Iberia. It then turns to botano-medical understandings of the plant in sixteenth-century texts, and the dynamic developments in botany and taxonomy across the century. The second case study focuses on the naturalisation of the tomato plant in England, in three different contexts. Chapter Four investigates the incorporation of the tomato into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century culture of pleasure gardening and its appreciation as an object of beauty by English elite and middling consumers. The thesis then turns to consider the material conditions of tomato cultivation during the period known as the Little Ice Age, and how developments in horticultural technologies intersected with and enabled tomato cultivation. The final chapter studies the culinary consumption of the tomato and follows the different global influences that altered English cuisine in the early modern age. In so doing, it brings together the diverse strands of inquiry established in the previous chapters, to show that the naturalisation of tomatoes – and other American foods – cannot be understood through a monocausal framework but must instead be seen as a complex system of intertwining stimuli.
Themes and Interests
My work tackles a number of key themes in the study of food and consumption, namely the reception of novelty and the integration of new cultural items; the global nature of the early modern world; and the transfer and exchange of cultural ideas and knowledge. The history of food and drink is my primary research interest, but others include environmental history, garden history, the history of animals, and material culture studies.
Groups and Engagement
I am a co-founder and convenor of the Food and Drink History Reading Group at Warwick, which meets monthly to discuss various themes and issues in the study of food and drink.
I am also a member of both the Early Modern and Eighteenth Century Centre and the Global History and Culture Centre at Warwick, and have participated as a discussant in the departmental research seminar.
Public engagement
Talking turnips with Tony Robinson on Tony Robinson's Cunningcast, available now on Spotify,Link opens in a new window Apple PodcastsLink opens in a new window and all good podcast sites!
Author of a number of articles for The Conversation, including:
Turnips: how Britain fell out of love with the much-maligned vegetableLink opens in a new window
Part of the Coventry City of Culture/Warwick Resonate 'FEAST!' program, helping to organise the Berkswell Feast Food Fair event, as part of which I have spoken about festive drinks and the history of hot chocolate, video available here.
Guest post on the GHCC Blog, '"The Most Delicate Rootes": Sweet Potatoes and the Consumption of the New World, 1560-1650Link opens in a new window', June 2021.
Publications
*Winner of the Food & History Article Award 2025* '"The Most Delicate Rootes": Sweet Potatoes and the English Consumption of the “New World” reassessed, c. 1580-1650', Food & History, vol. 21, no. 2 (2023), 55-80.
Link opens in a new windowReview: 'Roberta Cevasco, Valentina Pescini, and Robert Hearn (eds), Situating Foodways and Foodscapes: Dalla Tavola al Terreno (Genova University Press, 2023)', Agricultural History Review 72, 2 (December 2024), 315.
'D 1.6 Genealogishe Rolle der Könige von England', 'D 1.8 Illustriete Handschrift des Leben des HI. Eduards "des Bekenners"', and 'D 4.1 Chronicon ex chronicis', in Die Normannen, ed. by Viola Skiba, Nikolas Jaspert, Bernd Schneidmüller and Wilfried Rosendahl (Schnell & Steiner, 2022), pp. 170-1, 173-4, 216-8. Exhibition catalogue of the Reiss-Engelhorn Museum, Mannheim, exhibition Die Normannen, 18.9.2022 – 26.2.2023.Link opens in a new window
Conferences and papers
'Preservation and Innovation: The Rise of Vinegar-Pickling in Early Modern England' at the IEHCA Tenth International Conference on Food and Drink Studies, Tours, France, June 2025
‘Transferring Tomatoes: Early Modern Spanish Recipes and the Incorporation of Indigenous American Knowledge and Practices’ at the conference Global Recipes in the Early Modern World: Ingredients, Actors, Exotica, University of Cambridge, May 2024.
'Xitomamolli to Salsa de Tomates: Tomatoes and the Incorporation of Indigenous American Knowledge and Practices in Early Modern Spain' at the Histories of Global Recipes: A Workshop on Sources and Methods, Warwick IAS, October 2023.
'Exotic luxury or dangerous novelty? Conflicting narratives in the reception of ‘New World’ foods in Europe', at the BrIAS Workshop Dietary Dilemmas: Influences on Consumer 'Choice' in Pre-Industrial Societies, Université libre de Bruxelles/Vrije Universiteit Brussel, April 2023.
'Edible vs Ornamental? What the Reception of the Tomato in England Reveals about Exotic Foods and Beauty, c. 1500-1800', at the FOOD! Workshop, Medici Archive Project, Florence, January 2023.
'Red and Gold: Tomatoes, Ornamental Plants, and Knowledge in Europe, 1544-1750', at the 7th International Conference on Food History and Food Studies, in Tours, France, June 2022.
‘"The Most Delicate Rootes": Sweet Potatoes and the English Consumption of the New World, 1560-1650' at the Newberry Multidisciplinary Graduate Conference in Premodern Studies, January 2022.
'Red and Gold: Tomatoes as Ornamental Plants, 1500-1800' at the Warwick Early Modern History Workshop, November 2021.
'“The Spanish Potato, he holds as a bauble”: New World Foods and the Early Modern English Body' at Warwick's History Post Graduate Conference, May 2021.
'Consumption as a Point of Contention: Aphrodisiacs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Print' at the Dresden-Warwick Workshop 'Media and Public (Dis)order', March 2021.
Co-organiser of the virtual conference 'You Are What You Eat: Food and Identity from the Middle Ages to the Modern', June 2021.
Academic Profile
2020-2025: PhD, University of Warwick
2019-2020: MA, Early Modern History, University of Warwick (Distinction)
2014-2018: BA (Hons), History and Italian, University of Manchester (First-class)
Awards and Funding
2020/24 – Midlands4Cities AHRC Doctoral Studentship Award
2019/20 – History Department MA Studentship
– Warwick Taught Masters Scholarship Scheme
– History MA Best Overall Performance Prize
Teaching
Seminar tutor for:
Caravans and Traders: Global Connections, 1200-1500 (HI2B8), Autumn 2021 term
Galleons and Galleys: Global Connections 1500-1800 (HI2C1), Spring 2022 term
