Category: Gardening

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The Existential Tomato

If you’ve never enjoyed the sensation of going out to the garden, picking a beautiful, ripe tomato (of whatever variety) and eating it right there on the spot atop of our good earth with the tang of that tomato plant in your nose and the warm sunshine on your face, then you’ve never had a tomato at it’s best. If you have, then you can truly say, “I know what a tomato is,” for then you have achieved an existential union with tomato-ness.

Vegetables prepared for the table straight from the soil are a hallmark of great Southern dinners; a luscious home-grown tomato, simply sliced and served on a plate, usually with a fragrant cantaloupe and maybe a good, dewy cucumber is a signature of any summer meal. I consider a ripe tomato the crowning glory of Southern vegetables, but everybody has their own favorite; some advocate summer squash, others favor fresh beans and peas, and still others extol sweet corn. Some souls champion okra or eggplant. But even back in the Bad Old Days when most of the country ate out of a can or from the frozen food section, people in the South knew to get their vegetables from gardens, and if they didn’t have a friend or relative they could help out by weeding and hoeing for some of the returns, they could get fine vegetables from the truck gardens and produce stands along the byways.

So when you’re out on the road this summer and you see little produce stands with signs written on brown cardboard with a magic marker, do yourself a favor by stopping by and spending a little time and a little money getting to know the foods of the South and the people who love them.

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Welty’s Gay Cereus Club

Eloquence and concision are rare in academic writers, but Suzanne Marrs achieves it with aplomb in her passage about Eudora’s gay circle of the ‘30s.

Though she would join the Junior League in deference to her friends who were already members, Eudora’s interests were rather different and her circle of friends more wide-ranging. Four young men were particularly important to her, and all were iconoclastic sorts. Nash Burger had returned to Jackson from the University of the South and had become a teacher at Central High School, Lehman Engel summered in Jackson while he was studying at Juilliard, Hubert Creekmore was back in residence after attending the Yale School of Drama, and Frank Lyell visited during his summer vacations from Princeton.

During summers of the early thirties, the group gathered frequently at the Welty house to drink and talk and laugh and listen to music—literature and the theater and the New York scene filled their conversations, and they loved hearing both classical music and jazz. They also engaged in activities that Lehman eventually labeled “camp.” When Jackson ladies, for instance, advertised that their night-blooming cereuses would be in flower on a given night and invited one and all to witness the annual bloomings, Eudora and her friends attended.

They went on to name themselves the Night-Blooming Cereus Club and took as their motto a slightly altered line from a Rudy Vallee song: “Don’t take it cereus (sic), Life’s too mysterious.” Years later, in The Golden Apples, Eudora would use the “naked, luminous, complicated flower” as an emblem of life’s beauty and its fragility, and she would have a character repeat what one Jackson lady had said about the cereus bloom, “Tomorrow it’ll look like a wrung chicken’s neck.”

But at the time, none of the Night-Blooming Cereus Club members anticipated such symbolic implications of their activities. For them the cereus was and remained an emblem of good fellowship, of the pleasure imaginative individuals could share if they embraced the world around them.

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Wolf Songs

“Cantaloupe” in the Deep South mostly sounds something like “canna-lope,” without a hint of a ‘t’, but Bill Neale saw it spelt “CAN’T ELOPE” on a roadside sign in North Carolina, and a buddy of mine calls them “Romeos and Juliets”. This appellation brings us to an Italian communi near Rome, one of several Italian towns called “Cantaloupo,” (“song of the wolf” or literally “sings wolf”) where this variety of melon arrived in Europe from (of all places) Armenia in the early 18th century. The cantaloupe didn’t become a commercial crop in the US until the early 20th century. The earliest popular variety was ‘Rocky Ford’, but nowadays  ‘Ambrosia’ and ‘El Gordo’ dominate the market.

Incidentally, the European cantaloupe, Cucumis melo var. cantalupensis, is lightly ribbed with a gray-green skin; the American cantaloupe, C. melo var. reticulatus, has a webbed skin. It’s worth noting that the name “musk melon” comes from the pronounced aroma of the uncut fruit; a related group of scentless  melons including honeydews, Canary, and Santa Claus are termed inodorata.

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Docteur Magnol

Pierre Magnol was born in 1638 to an apothecary’s family in Montpellier. He enrolled as a medical student at the University of Montpellier in May 1655.

By Magnol’s time, Montpellier was an important, long-established commercial and educational center. Montpellier was the first university in France to establish a botanic garden for medicine and pharmacology. After receiving his degree (MD) in 1659, Mangol’s attention shifted to botany. In 1687, he became Demonstrator of Plants at the botanic garden. Magnol was appointed Director of the Montpellier botanic garden in 1696, later Inspector of the Garden until his death in 1715. Magnol’s most important contribution is the concept of plant families. He developed 76 tables, which not only grouped plants into families but also allowed for easy and rapid identification, an important step towards a tree of life.

Magnolia in botanical nomenclature first appeared in Charles Plumier’s Genera (1702) for a flowering tree in Martinique. Much closer to home, William Sherard, who studied botany under Tournefort, a pupil of Magnol, adopted the name Magnolia in the taxonomy of Mark Catesby’s Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (1730) for another flowering tree. Linnaeus likely never saw a specimen of Plumier’s Magnolia, if one even existed, and took it—quite despite the yawning geographic disparity—for the same plant described by Catesby.

Things eventually ironed out. Initially, Linnaeus described a monotypic genus, with the sole species being Magnolia virginiana—which we know as the sweetbay magnolia—and assigned it five varieties. He later raised these to species status. The Madagascan plant Plumier described is now known as Magnolia dodecapetala. The name Magnol now adorns a genus with anywhere from 210 to 340 species (we have 8 in the southeastern US), a family (Magnoliaceae) with two genera, Magnolia and Liriodendron (tulip trees), and division (Magnoliids) with more than 10,000 species.

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Yellow Meats

While working in a Florida restaurant, I kept having trouble ordering a yellow-meated watermelon from my produce guy. He said he could never find one, even though I’d seen them in local markets. Finally it came out that with my heavy hill country Mississippi accent he thought I was ordering a melon from some mythical specialty locale in California: “Jala Meadad”. He even wrote it down that way.

Here in the Deep South yellow-meated season is short; you’ll rarely find them marketed before late June or after early August, and you’ll almost never find them sold in supermarkets, usually only at roadside produce stands. The variety of yellow meats I find most often here in central Mississippi has broad dark green and light green stripes, though over in Clay County, Alabama, where they have the Clay County Yellow Meated Watermelon Festival, the eponymous variety is an almost uniform light green.

The flesh can range from pale yellow to deep gold. The best contain large brownish black seeds, seeds being an essential ripening agent for the fruit, whose flavor I find sweeter than the reds, offering notes of honey, apricot, and vanilla.

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Adam’s Banana

During his famously quoted expedition in search of Livingston, Stanley also said, “If we run out of food, we’ll eat bananas.”

Sir Henry’s flippant dismissal of this vital foodstuff in lieu of boiled beef sums up the Brit empiricist mind; millennia before Stanley’s split second of Victorian condescension, bananas had been a staple in Asia since Homo erectus. While European versions of the Expulsion have Eve offering up an apple (probably a Winesap; the Granny Smith is theologically impossible) as the principle instrument of temptation, many African, Asian and Oceanic interpretations depict Adam as succumbing to a nice banana instead (Eve had a rough cut, why not Adam?). These accounts also describe our primal DNA donors as masking their shame with banana leaves, which makes far more sense to me than that fig drag, even for Eve.

Before Chiquita and other mega-growers began shipping bananas in chemically sterilized bunches, stores would impale whole untreated stalks on ceiling hooks to ripen. Given the number of nooks and crannies in these masses of vegetation, it’s unsurprising that the occasional tropical creature would piggy-back its way across the Gulf of Mexico into the rural South. My grandfather Jess kept a small country store that supported an endless series of banana stalks from the Cockrell Banana Company in Tupelo on a hook from the ceiling as well as any number of worthless relatives and other such riff-raff from the cash box under the counter. Jess checked out produce before he put it up for sale, and occasionally he’d discover some sort of exotic fauna cowering deep amid the bananas.

He’d usually find a spider big enough to scare the bejesus out of any little old lady getting a couple of bananas for pudding to take to a homecoming. These he fed he to the chickens, but once, to his great delight, he found a small boa and kept it in a glass gallon jar with some hay in the bottom for everyone to ogle before he he sent it to the University of Mississippi, where it enjoyed a long, happy career as a desensitizing agent for people with snake phobias.

He once told a slacker cousin that he could get a snake into Ole Miss, “But I can’t get your ignorant ass into a decent barber school.”

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The Cryptid Creole

The Creole tomato has long enjoyed a storied reputation in the South. Here is a typical paean from Howard Mitcham’s Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz:

“The large, vine-ripened Creole tomato is one of the glories of Louisiana cooker. Creole tomatoes have a pronounced acid flavor and are used to make delicious sauces, stews, gumbos, and so on. In fact, the very term, “à la Creole” usually denotes a tomato sauce of some sort, and when it’s made with fresh Creole tomatoes, its flavor will be distinctive.”

In addition to a rich, distinctive flavor, the Creole tomato has a reputation for being able to produce fruit in the intense heat and humidity of summers in the Deep South, when nighttime temperatures in excess of 70 degrees make most tomato varieties subject to blossom drop and unable to bear fruit.

Traditionally, farmers in St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes marketed their tomatoes as Creole, claiming that tomatoes grown in the rich alluvial soil created a unique flavor that et their tomatoes apart from others. But these farmers didn’t plant a single variety, and the seeds they saved and passed along to other gardeners as “Creole” were a mélange.

In 1969, LSU AgCenter researcher Teme Hernandez released a tomato variety named Creole, but it was not a variety commonly grown in St. Bernard and Plaquemines. Hernandez described his Creole tomato as having a medium-sized, deep red fruit with some resistance to fusarium wilt. But likely because of its poor production—less than six pounds per plant—the AgCenter did not maintain a seed stock of Hernandez’s Creole.

To demonstrate the variations in Creole tomatoes, LSU AgCenter researchers grew a demonstration plot of “Creole tomatoes” in spring 2015. Creole tomato seed was sourced from 11 companies. Only seed named “Creole” or described as the 1969-released Creole was purchased. Seed was sown on January 14, 2015. Seedlings were hardened off outdoors one week prior to trans­planting.

On March 24, 2015, the Creole tomato seedlings were planted at the AgCenter Botanic Gardens at Burden. The plants continued to produce beyond July; however, data collection ended in late June in order to present information to the Louisiana Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association members at the annual field day. The top three producing Creole tomatoes were sourced from Organic Seeds Direct (Amazon), Naylor’s Hardware in Baton Rouge, and TomatoFest.

Seed sources had 88 percent, 74 percent and 82 percent marketable yields, respectively. Marketable tomatoes were free from cracks, bruises and evidence of disease, insect, or environmental injury. Individual fruit size ranged from 4.2- to 7.8-ounces. Yield per plant was poor, ranging from three to six pounds.

Though Creole has become a marketing term for any tomato grown in Louisiana as well as for many tomatoes that claim to be tolerant of high temperatures, tomatoes labeled Creole are not of the same variety, and almost certainly not sourced from St. Bernard, Plaquemines, or LSU for that matter.

And yes, I went to Ole Miss.

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Boiler Onions

Here in the middle South, most small rural and urban supermarkets will feature what are often called “boiler onions” in their produce bins during March and April. Also called “bulb onions”—which is admittedly somewhat confusing—these are early sweet onions—often  Vidalias, but also Bermudas, Texas Sweets, and what are called Spanish onions—that are harvested when the bulbs have yet to “cure,” while the leaves are still green. Grocers and customers alike claim that at this stage the onions have an unsurpassed sweetness, and many home cooks will buy these to chop and freeze for use in their late-year holiday cornbread dressings.