BOTANICAL NAME: Solanum quitoense
FAMILY: Solanaceae
Try taking fresh apricots and yellow tomatoes and cooking them to make jam. This combination creates a rather sultry tropical flavor that adds an unusual culinary dimension to the palate. This essentially is what it is like to eat a naranjilla (pronounced naran-HE-ya), as apricot tomatoes are commonly known in South America. The Spanish name naranjilla means “little orange,” but in fact there is little resemblance, except perhaps in color. Most apricot tomatoes are fuzzy, so they seem to have more in common with the physical appearance of a kiwi fruit than with an orange. On the other hand, the inner meat is tart, which is probably the reason it is likened to sour oranges. If they are like sour oranges, then they ought to make good marmalade. They do. But imagine mixing them with mangoes and aji limón (page 4) to make an exquisitely flavored salsa for venison or beef. This is a vegetable that can be treated like a fruit in many of the same ways that we use common garden tomatoes.
South Americans have long used the spiny stems of the apricot tomato in folk remedies for hypertension.
The Incas of South America were well aware of this culinary specialty centuries ago and called the plant llullu in their native Quechua, a word meaning “tender or soft”—the same word they used for tomatoes. Quechua llullu became lulo in Spanish, the common term used in Colombia today for apricot tomatoes. The Incas did not cultivate apricot tomatoes as much as gather them from the wild, for this is a plant that thrives in the jungle. It grows anywhere from six to ten feet tall and produces fruit continuously for about three years. Because of its small size, large, furry leaves, and purple stems, the apricot tomato makes an ideal potted plant for the terrace, both as an ornamental and for its fruits. In fact, tree tomatoes (Cyphomandra betacea) and nipple fruit (Solanum mammosum) can be grafted to apricot tomatoes to yield a spectacular three-way ornamental. Just picture tree tomatoes with their large, fluffy leaves and fruit resembling small red persimmons side by side with nipple fruit, an eggplant with yellow fruit that is shaped like a cow’s udder. All of this on one bush!
South Americans have long used the spiny stems of the apricot tomato and its close cousin, the cocona (Solanum sessiliflorum), in folk remedies for hypertension. The fruits of both are common in farm markets throughout the Andes. Yet North Americans were not introduced to the apricot tomato until the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The Ecuadoran exhibit served it as juice, the most common way of eating it, but importation was later banned due to the danger of fruit flies. The imported fruit did not fare well in any case because it lost flavor when transported in ships. Since the 1970s it has been possible to ship by air and there are numerous plantations in southern Florida.
Many American gardeners grow apricot tomatoes in tubs and in spite of the claim that the plant needs twelve hours of sunlight to set fruit, the plants will indeed yield a crop if they begin to flower by mid-June. Even if the quantity of fruit is small when grown in a tub—perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty per plant, the large rose-pink flowers, the furry purple stems, the pinkish cast to all parts of the plant, not to mention the fuzzy bright orange fruit, all conspire to make this one of the handsomest vegetables for the terrace.