The first presentation of the tomato took place on the country estate of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo de' Medici, on 31 October 1548. As is well known, the origins of this plant, now widely used in Italian cuisine, lie in Central America and its importation to Europe by the Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernán Cortés. Cosimo was certainly no stranger to discoveries from the New World: being married to the Spanish Eleanor of Toledo, the Grand Duke of Tuscany frequently saw seeds and plants arriving from the American continent. That evening, however, the reception given to the dish was very lukewarm. No one at the time would have dreamed of using the tomato in cooking - let alone imagined that it would become the key ingredient in Italian cuisine. In fact, in the beginning the tomato was a decorative plant and its fruits, which were originally yellow, took a while to acquire their usual red colour as a result of cross-breeding and hybridisation. Someone who had already praised its culinary qualities was in fact the Franciscan missionary Bernardino de Sahagún, a staunch defender and connoisseur of Aztec culture. Sahagún attempted to show how tomato consumption was habitual in the populations subjugated by the Spaniards, but this all-out defence of the indigenous peoples earned him an acrimony few at the time could boast. After Philip II of Spain ordered the destruction of all his works, Bernardino de Sahagún's bad reputation also affected his works: as Alberto Grandi and Daniele Soffiati write, !if the friar said that the tomato was edible and even good, one should not listen to him". Moreover, it was easy for a crude association to convince itself that the tomato was toxic, since its leaves looked very similar to those of morella grass or belladonna, well-known plants whose leaves were known to be toxic. In fact, it should be noted that another member of the Solanaceae family, the pepper, never suffered the mistrust of the tomato, victim of a "method of investigation that was still far removed from the scientific one". It took a good three centuries before the tomato became a key ingredient in cooking - but that is another story.