[qsi]

Hm, that's an interesting thought which never occurred to me until now. I didn't know about the Austrian German expression, but paradicsom in Hungarian can mean either tomato or paradise! Please chime in if you're familiar with other languages of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

Edited to add: According to Wikipedia [0], the original Hungarian expression was also "apple of paradise," which then got shortened to just paradiscom. It also points out that the Italian pomodoro is literally "apple of gold." I guess the far-flung origins were thought of as paradisical...

[0] https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradicsom_(n%C3%B6v%C3%A9nyfa...

[phreeza]

https://64.media.tumblr.com/d6de5bcddb77eae9d76d370e5f62bce7... the "paradise" area seems to roughly align with the extent of the Austro-Hungarian empire.