The San Marzano tomato is rightly famous. This is the perfect paste tomato with deep red, rectangular plum shaped fruits. The healthy looking plants are 4 to 5 feet tall. This is a mid-to-late season tomato and we suggest bringing in any unripe tomatoes you have at the end of the season to ripen indoors. They will ripen nicely on your kitchen counter and make a wonderfully rich and savoury pasta sauce.
A bit of history:
Since its introduction in the late 1880s, the San Marzano tomato has transformed the tomato industry. (Picture One: ‘San Marzano Lampadina’ tomatoes on the front cover of the 1963 catalog of the Italian seed company Fratelli Ingegnoli.) Its history traces to the Italian canning company, Circo, who provided the first seeds of the ‘San Marzano’ tomatoes to farmers in the Campania region of Italy. The family of Michele Ruggiero, in the town of San Marzano, was one of the first to grow the tomato in the late 1880s. William Alexander explains the tomato’s history in his book ‘Ten Tomatoes that Changed the World’:
“The seeds that Circo had given Michele were of a new type of canning tomato, a cross between three southern varieties: the Fiascone and the re Umberto, both widely grown Campania, and the Fiaschella, a favourite of Puglia…that grew prolifically in large clusters of small fruits…This new canning tomato seemed to have the best qualities of each of its progenitors. Its slim profile, more elongated than pear-shaped, was ideal for canning: it had few seeds, a very small core, a thin skin that could be easily removed, and it held its shape, not collapsing into mush after peeling and processing…But most importantly, the tomato tasted great out of the can, noticeably sweeter and less acidic than its contemporaries.”
All went well for many decades, until the 1990s. In the 1990s the San Marzano tomatoes in Italy were hit by a devastating virus, which effectively wiped out the country’s original San Marzano strain. When you see ‘San Marzano 2’ on a seed package, the ‘2’ indicates the newer 2.0 version that was created by Italian agronomists after the virus struck. William Alexander explains what happened:
By the 1990s, the San Marzano, a victim of disease and genetic weakening, was hanging on by a thread, as were its farmers. The Slow Food movement, founded in Italy just a few years earlier, had heightened awareness of the need to preserve traditional farms and foods, and local Sarno farmers [the area in Italy where San Marzano tomatoes are traditionally grown], assisted by agronomists at Circo, set out to rescue–and protect–the historic and important tomato.
[A]gronomists from the Circo Research Centre went out to the remaining farms and fields in the Sarno in search of the original San Marzano. Identifying twenty-seven possible cultivars, they grew tomatoes in test fields for two years before anointing not one, but two “official” San Marzano varieties that they christened San Marzano 2 and Kiros.”
Today, these two “official” San Marzano varieties are grown in the D.O.P. (Designation of Origin), which is the Sarnese-Nocerino district in Campania, Italy. This is the area where San Marzanos have traditionally been grown since Michele Ruggerio planted the first seeds (see Picture Two).
What about the Lampadina part of the name? Lampadina is a strain of San Marzano tomatoes, one reference we found suggests they have historically been grown in the Naples area. This strain derives its name from its elongated, light-bulb like shape; lampadina means light-bulb in Italian. Today, they too are a strain from the 2.0 version of San Marzanos that were developed in the 1990s. For instance, Fratelli Ingegnoli, the Italian seed company featured in Picture One selling ‘San Marzano Lampadina’ tomatoes in 1963, now sells ‘San Marzano Lampadina 2’ tomatoes.
Picture Three: We have somehow lost (mistakenly deleted) the pictures of the ‘San Marzano Lampadina 2’ tomatoes we grew. So the third picture is of the awesome tomato sauce we made!
How to Plant: Start seeds indoors 6-8 weeks before the last frost. Plant seed 5mm (¼ inch) deep. Keep moist. When true leaves appear, transplant to a larger container if needed. Transplant outside after the danger of frost has passed/later spring.
