Today, tomatoes are so common and ubiquitous that some of us have no qualms sacrificing the juicy produce by chucking them at subpar performers. Yet prior to the early 16th century, tomatoes existed exclusively in their native South America. This all changed when Spanish colonizers began taking tomatoes home to Europe; the seeds of the tomato plant grew quite well there, and it was soon being cultivated throughout the continent. This unfamiliar, exotic fruit from the New World fascinated Europeans, not least of all in France, where tomatoes were referred to as “pomme d’amour,” or “love apples,” because they were believed to be an aphrodisiac.

The exact reason the French developed this belief in the tomato’s libidinous power is not known, but there’s at least one explanation often offered by historians. One of the earliest Europeans to write about tomatoes, Italian naturalist Pietro Andrea Mattioli, classified the tomato as a member of the nightshade family, and referred to it as a “mandrake” (another nightshade plant). Mandrakes were widely considered an aphrodisiac in 16th-century Europe — in fact, they appear in the Bible as the key ingredient in a love potion, and their name in Hebrew translates to “love apples.” It’s possible the French assumed that the novel “mandrake” the Spanish brought from the New World shared the same erotic potency as its biblical counterpart.

While forks are now a mundane and commonplace item at most dining room tables, they were once quite controversial. In the Middle Ages, many Christian Europeans considered the act of eating with a fork to be a sinful affront to God. According to some clergymen of the time, God had already given human beings 10 natural forks, in the form of the fingers on their own hands, so daring to use an artificial accessory to spear food was an offense to the Lord and his divine gifts. Not only did using a fork insult the fingers that God gifted to humanity, the thinking went, but it also insulted the food God had provided: To use a fork meant you thought the Lord’s bounty was unworthy of being touched by your hands. Forks were so frowned upon in medieval European society that when a Byzantine princess living in Venice died of the plague, her death was said to be God’s punishment for her ostentatious and hubristic custom of eating her food with a fork.

The supposedly sinful nature of forks is likely one reason it took so long for the utensils to become widely accepted by European society. While forks had existed since the days of ancient Egypt and ancient Greece, they were predominantly used for cooking, and rarely, if ever, appeared for personal use at the dinner table. Using forks for eating wasn’t a regular practice in Europe until the 17th century, and even then their popularity was limited largely to the aristocracy. It wasn’t until the late 19th century that forks became widely accepted at all levels of European society as the everyday eating utensils we know today.