Purple Hull Peas
Summer Howlings
“Cantaloupe” in the Deep South mostly sounds something like “canna-lope,” without a hint of ‘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”.
The name comes from 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. An early popular variety, ‘Rocky Ford’ was developed in Colorado, but ‘Ambrosia’ and ‘El Gordo’ have largely come to dominate the markets.
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.
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 into a local market.
My grandfather Jess kept a small country store that supported an endless series of banana stalks from the Cockrell Banana Company in Tupelo as well as any number of worthless relatives and other such riff-raff. 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.”
Drying Cayennes
Select the ripest peppers without bruising, mold, or tears. Wash, drain, and remove stems and husks. Spread in a single layer on a sheet pan and place in a very low oven, no more than 200 degrees. Vent slightly by propping the door open with a wooden spoon. Toss and turn every half hour or so until crisp. Store in a vented container until ready for use. This process works for most thin-skinned peppers, and depending on the size takes three to five hours.
Get Cereus
Just the other day, a neighbor told me that his night-blooming cereus—which of course was heavy with buds—was given to him by his grandmother, who got her start from Chestina Welty at a garden club gathering in Jackson.
Since moving to Jackson twenty years ago, I’ve heard variations of this story ad nauseum from every Tom, Dick, and Harriet I run into. Most will tell you that Eudora gave a cereus cutting to their mother/aunt/sister/nelly uncle, or to some hitchhiker she picked up on the Trace. To admit—as I often do, with characteristic tactlessness —that your “Queen of the Night” is of dubious lineage puts you in a dim, refrigerated social limbo next to a browning head of iceburg lettuce.
The proliferation of Welty night-blooming cereuses mimic the properties of the True Cross, whose fragments once proliferated throughout Christendom to profit the papacy, but we can’t fault the Mississippi Department of Archives and History for peddling the Welty cereus rather much like Borgias did Holy Splinters: MDAH must get those museum roofs plugged up somehow.
In the end, nobody can possibly certify that their beautiful Mississippi blossom is a blue-blood Welty or just some pass-along white trash epiphyllum somebody stole from off the porch of a double-wide in Scott County.
Smith County Watermelon Stack
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 as 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 a pupil’s of Magnol (Tournefort,) 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.
It’s almost certain Linnaeus never saw a specimen of Plumier’s Magnolia, if one even existed, and left with a scribbled description and a scrawled drawing, must have taken it—rather 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.
About Limas
All butter beans are limas, but not all limas are butter beans.
Actually, it’s a lot more complicated. While lima beans and butter beans are usually thought of as two different types of beans, they are both varieties of Phaseolus lunatus (literally “moon bean”), which has a very complicated history of domestication in Meso- and South America.
During the Spanish Viceroyalty of Peru (16th-19th centuries), when limas were exported to North America and Europe, the boxes of beans were stamped with their place of origin (“Lima, Peru“), and the beans got named as such. But of course, when referring to the bean, the word is pronounced LY-mah, while the Peruvian capital is (as you all know) pronounced LEE-mah.
As a rule, large, yellow/white/speckled limas are generally known as butter beans, while the smaller, green varieties are called, well, limas. The smallest may even be called “baby” limas. However, I have been told that “they call butter beans limas up North,” which puts another spin on it.
Limas are a warm-weather crop and come into season sometime around mid-June and, with the planting of second crops in late July and early August, stay in season well into October.
Among the most popular varieties grown in Mississippi are ‘Thorogreen’ and ‘Henderson,’ both small green bush types; ‘Jackson Wonder,’ also a bush variety, is small and brown or speckled; ‘Florida Speckled’ is a larger pole variety, and the hard-to-find ‘Willow Leaf,’ also a pole variety, has something of a cult following. Butterpeas are a type of lima beans.
Fresh beans should be smooth and plump, somewhat tacky to the touch. Fresh beans should be washed and picked over for damage, dirt, or detritus, washed, and set to cook in water 2:1; fresh beans don’t need as much water as dried, and they don’t need pre-soaking. As with most beans, hambone is a classic addition, but many people use stock.
Bring beans to a boil, then lower heat to simmer and cover until beans are soft. I always use white pepper instead of black to season, and rarely use anything more until the beans are cooked, at which point they become the basis for any number of wonderful dishes.
Every summer I make baked limas in sour cream. For a pound of cooked limas with about a half cup of the liquid, add a quarter cup of brown sugar, and a cup of sour cream mixed with a teaspoon corn starch to keep it from separating. Flour will work in a pinch. Mix well. Bake in a low oven until set. This dish goes with anything at all but is open to any number of frivolous variations.
Yellow-Meated Watermelons
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 locale in California: “Jala Meadad”. He even wrote it down that way on his order forms.
While yellow-meated watermelons aren’t widely known, early texts written by European botanists have been uncovered depicting images and descriptions of watermelons of various shapes and sizes as well as varying flesh colors of red, white, yellow and orange. In fact, the original watermelons in South Africa were most likely yellow or white fleshed.
Here in the Deep South yellow-meated season is short; you’ll rarely find them marketed before July or after August, and you’ll almost never find them sold in supermarkets, usually only at roadside produce stands.
Yellow meateds can vary greatly in size, shape and color; the most common variety here in Mississippi has broad dark green stripes and narrow light green ones, 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 and may contain large brownish black seeds or be completely seedless. While their succulent and crisp texture is comparable to red watermelons, their flavor is usually much sweeter, offering notes of honey and apricot.
Do tomatoes ripen off the vine?
Yes, they do. Tomatoes are a climacteric fruit (tomatoes are berries, stupid).
Climacteric fruit produce ethylene, which triggers and promotes ripening, a complex process that softens and–more importantly—sweetens.
Others are apples, bananas, pears, apricots, peaches, plums, avocados, nectarines, and blueberries.
Citruses, raspberries, strawberries, and cherries, grapes, pineapples, melons, and pomegranates are non-climacteric.
Fry green tomatoes, but you can ripen half-green tomatoes in a sunny window with the stem end down.
