گوجه

What it means

گوجه (gojeh) is the spoken word for “tomato.” The full formal name is گوجه‌فرنگی (gojeh-farangi), which literally means “European plum.” گوجه on its own means “plum,” and فرنگی is the old Persian word for “European” (from Frank, the medieval Arabic and Persian term for Western Europeans). The fruit reached Iran via Ottoman and European trade routes around the 17th-19th century, and Iranians named it after the closest local thing they knew: a plum, but the foreign kind.

How to use it

• یک کیلو گوجه بخر (yek kilo gojeh bekhar) “buy a kilo of tomatoes”
• گوجه رو خرد کن (gojeh ro khord kon) “chop the tomato”
• این گوجه نرسیده (in gojeh narside) “this tomato is not ripe”
• سس گوجه بزن (sos-e gojeh bezan) “add tomato sauce”

Tomato versus actual plum

Be careful: گوجه‌سبز (gojeh-sabz), “green plum,” is a different fruit entirely. It is the small, round, sour green plum that Iranians eat as a spring snack with salt. They are sold by the bag at street fruit stands during a short season (April-May), and Iranians wait for them. They have nothing to do with tomatoes despite sharing the گوجه name. Context and the modifier (سبز vs فرنگی) keeps them apart.

In Iranian cooking

Tomato shows up in many Iranian dishes but rarely as the main flavor. It is a backbone ingredient: chopped into salads (سالاد شیرازی pairs gojeh with cucumber and onion), stirred into stews (gheymeh, qormeh-sabzi sometimes), the base of رب گوجه (rob-e gojeh, tomato paste) which is in nearly every Iranian fridge, and the foundation of dishes like کوکوی گوجه (kuku-ye gojeh) and آب‌گوشت تیپو (a tomato-rich variant of dizi). Iranian home cooks often make their own رب in late summer when tomatoes are cheap and at peak ripeness, slow-cooking kilos of fresh tomatoes down to a deep red paste and storing the result in jars for the rest of the year.

The classic Iranian breakfast scramble is املت گوجه (omlet-e gojeh), eggs scrambled with chopped tomato and a pinch of salt, served on bread. Quick, cheap, present in every household. The dish has a higher tomato-to-egg ratio than what most Westerners expect from “omelet,” sometimes closer to a tomato-egg stew on bread than a folded French omelet.

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab