Ratatouille Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Ratatouille is a peasant, home-kitchen dish that took root in Provence in southern France, and around Nice in particular. Eggplant, zucchini, tomato, and pepper—vegetables that ripen at the height of summer—are stewed slowly in olive oil. It needs no special tools or technique: it was the wisdom of the farmhouse hearth, a way to use up the flood of vegetables that a scorching field yields all at once.

Olive oil had long been the fat of the Provençal kitchen, pressed from the trees of the region's own hillsides, and the slow stewing of summer vegetables in that oil was an old and settled habit of the local table. Into this Provençal pot came two vegetables from across the sea. In the late eighteenth century, around 1790, the tomato entered the kitchens of southern France by way of Marseille, Corsica, and Provence, and the pepper took its place beside it as a summer regular; Provence was one of France's early adopters of the tomato, and the salade niçoise was born of this same ground. Alongside the native eggplant and zucchini, these New World vegetables settled into the region's fields and gave the dish the colors we now picture.

The word ratatouille carries an old-fashioned ring. In fact it first appeared at the end of the eighteenth century as a disparaging term in French for poor, unappetizing food. Its roots lie in the French verb touiller, "to stir up," and the Occitan ratatolha. The word does turn up in military records of 1831 and 1839, but what it names there is a sloppy vegetable stew with a little scrawny meat floating in it—an unappealing ration, not the vegetable dish served today.

So when does the modern ratatouille—a ragout of vegetables alone: eggplant, tomato, pepper, and zucchini—first appear by name in print? Following the food-history reporting of National Geographic and the etymological dictionary etymonline, it is in Henri Heyraud's La Cuisine à Nice, of 1903. French cooks did not take up the tomato until roughly two hundred years after it first arrived from the New World.

In other words, the age of the name "ratatouille" and the age of the present dish are two different things. The name was used from the eighteenth century for a poor stew, and it came to mean the colorful vegetable dish of today only after the style was fixed in Nice at the start of the twentieth century. The theories about its origin are still several, and no single one has won out; but tracing the word and the dish together, the present version stands out clearly as a product of modern Provence.