There is a widely known story about how a cook sent by the British tried to poison George Washington with tomatoes, which at that time were considered poisonous berries. We checked if this is true.

This is what this funny story looks like: presentation Radio Sputnik columnist Olga Bugrova: “The thunderstorm was strong, but usual for the beginning of summer. No one would have remembered her if lightning had not struck the old oak tree. It burned out. It turned out that an iron can with a note had been lying in his hollow for 43 years. It followed: tomatoes can be eaten. The jar was found on June 28, 1820. In the USA. This was the suicide note from George Washington's personal chef. The cook was an English spy. In 1777, he was assigned to poison Washington, an American general in the War of American Independence from Great Britain. The spy chose the poison he read about in the Gardening Guide: “Tomato fruits drive those who eat them crazy.”

The poisoner's name was James Bailey. Until the beginning of the 19th century, he was not the only one in Europe and North America who still considered tomatoes poisonous. They were grown "for beauty." And if they tasted the small green berries, they suffered from vomiting and diarrhea to the point of convulsions. Bailey decided to play it safe. I took the largest tomatoes (already red), stewed them in a roast and watched George Washington eat. The general had a severe runny nose. He felt neither taste nor smell and indifferently ground the portion. The cook's conscience woke up. I went behind an oak tree, near which Washington’s camp tent stood (military operations took place in the vicinity of Philadelphia). He began to write a note of repentance: “In a few hours the general will not be alive, he will die in agony. I do not want to wait for revenge and intend to take my own life.” After this, Bailey stabbed himself with a kitchen knife, which he sharpened himself. And the one who found his message in 1820 understood: ripe tomatoes can be eaten, since George Washington not only did not die, but did not even go crazy and became the first president of the USA!..”

The story has been circulating in books and periodicals for many decades. Among these, for example, is the book by Andrei Makarevich "I grew up listening to your songs", publications in "Kommersant" and magazines such as "Knowledge is power" (No. 7, 2005), "Science and Life" (No. 3, 2003). In an older room "Science and Life" (No. 2, 1970) it is presented in some detail. They write about this case on West.

Let's start with the fact that homeland Tomatoes are just America - really, South America. The Aztecs and other peoples of Central America were the first to domesticate these fruits (“tomatl" - an Aztec word meaning a green variety), and the seeds were brought to Europe by the conquistador Hernan Cortes in 1519. And while in the south of Europe, in particular in Italy, exotic berries quickly took root and were periodically consumed as food, in the more northern countries of the continent the attitude towards them remained wary. The work of Englishman John Gerard is largely to blame for this. "The Herbalist, or General History of Plants" (1597), which gained great popularity in Foggy Albion, although it was not a very skillful copy of the work of the Dutch Doduns and Clusius. Gerard, a barber and surgeon by primary profession, was not without an error even in the word lycopérsicum, which is part of the scientific name of tomatoes, and called the fruits themselves “fetid, with poisonous leaves and stems.” The tomato's dubious fame, shaped by Gerard, prevailed in Great Britain and then the North American colonies for the next 200 years. And although William Salmon in his work Botanologia (1710) mentions the cultivation of tomatoes in Carolina, and in a number of other American regions, by the middle of the 18th century the fruit was considered quite edible, but we must remember that the colonies were then very scattered and each lived its own life.

In some places, the myth about the toxicity of tomatoes was fueled by news of real poisonings. The fact is that aristocrats used plates made of pewter - an alloy with a high lead content, the danger of which was not suspected at that time. Tomato juice, due to its acidity, reacted with lead on the surface of the plate, the latter was released from the alloy, which actually led to deaths. It was lead, not juice, that killed people, of course, but only enlightened people knew about such details, like the future third US President Thomas Jefferson, who in the early 1780s tried it tomatoes in Paris and, being delighted, sent the seeds home, and since 1809 he himself grew the fruits in his Monticello estate.

Thus, it is quite possible that one particular cook may not have known about the safety of tomatoes for the human body. However, if we try to find a story about a treacherous worker and his curious plan in the sources of the 18th–19th centuries, we will end up with nothing. Because she appears for the first time only in 1959 - in the April issue of the detective magazine Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine called "The Assassination of George Washington" by Richard M. Gordon.

The story is a letter from a loyalist cook to his distant boss. In it, the attacker claims that he took advantage of Washington's cold, which greatly weakened his sense of taste, and added "the scarlet pulp of one of the deadliest fruits" to the stew. Having placed the dish in front of the future victim, the cook adds a postscript to the letter in which he vows to commit suicide: “As a cook, I have a prejudice against death by poison, I am too fat to hang myself, but by virtue of my vocation I am a master of the carving knife.”

That's the whole truth, just artistic. The documents do not reveal a cook named James (in the original story, the beginning of the name is Jas.) Bailey in the service of military leader and later President George Washington. Some details, like an oak tree with a note, could appear in subsequent transcriptions. It can be assumed that the author of the story was familiar with the older legend about Phoebe Frances, the 13-year-old daughter of an American restaurateur, who in 1776 allegedly learned of the poison placed in George Washington's peas and threw the plate out the window, resulting in poisoning the local chickens. However, this legend is considered fiction.