Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad Tomato

Ripley, Ohio
The story of this tomato begins in the mid-19th century with a Black man – whose name was stolen by history – likely escaping slavery from Kentucky to Ripley, Ohio, seeds in hand. Ripley was home to Rankin House, an important safe house on the Underground Railroad, and it was in this town where he shared some of these tomato seeds with a white woman named Lou. Aunt Lou shared this tomato with her great nephew Francis Parker, who shared seed packets with hand-written descriptions far and wide, including with a Mr. Ellis in Sardinia, Ohio, who passed them to tomato enthusiasts Gary Millwood of Kentucky’s Blue Ribbon Tomatoes and seed keeper Mary Stenger in Berea, KY. (1) While we know Aunt Lou’s name, we do not know the name of the Black man who shepherded the seeds. The violence of enslavement and the perilousness of escaping enslavement is a likely reason for this; slavery destroyed not only Black bodies, but names, histories, cultures, and lineages.

We grow this tomato to honor and revive the lineage of this Black man escaping slavery in Kentucky. At the same time, many Black people were also traveling through the Underground Railroad to, and through Florence. Prior to the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, Northampton was seen as a destination, or “terminus” of the Underground Railroad. After that, Underground Railroad helpers ushered people on to Canada for freedom. The land upon which Grow Food Northampton sits today was an important stop. In 1841, Austin Ross built a homestead here (next to the Florence Recreation Fields), and along with other local abolitionists, supported significant numbers of enslaved Black people on their journeys to freedom. The Grow Food Northampton Community Farm was also the site of the Northampton Association for Education and Industry (NAEI) in the 1840s, a utopian abolitionist community that manufactured silk in order to divest from slavery-produced cotton, and grew sugar beets to boycott slavery-produced sugar cane. The society promoted “equality of rights and rank for all,” and attracted free and formerly enslaved Black people such as Basil Dorsey, David Ruggles, and Sojourner Truth, among many others. According to the Census of 1850, Black people comprised almost 10% of the population of Florence. (2) It is important to note that in the 2020 census, that figure was less than 2%. (3)

1. “Aunt Lou’s Underground Railroad Tomato.” Truelove Seeds.
2. “The Underground Railroad in Northampton and Florence.” The David Ruggles Center.
3. United States Census Bureau. www.data.census.gov
   

Benne Sesame

West Africa
Benne is the Bantu word for sesame, an oilseed crop first domesticated in India and cultivated throughout the African continent. While enslaved, West Africans brought these seeds to the West Indies and the American South in the late 17th century and continued to grow patches for their own use. (1) Later, benne oil became the salad dressing of choice in the 19th century southern U.S. As cheaper oils became available, and as sesame was bred to shatter less (and unfortunately taste less too), the flavorful, aromatic benne was all but lost. This low-oil sesame landrace strain was preserved by David Shields and the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation, and listed as an endangered, culturally important landrace by the Slow Food Ark of Taste. (2)

1. Porter, Jayson Maurice. “Benne del Sur: Sesame and Black Agricultural History in Mexico.” Black Perspectives, July 9, 2021.
2. “Benne Sesame.” Trueloveseeds.com
   

Bitter Melon

Grow Food Northampton · Efad Bittergourd

South Asia via Africa
This is a member of the gourd family originating in Africa and was fully domesticated in Southeast Asia. It is widely used in a variety of recipes in East Asia, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. It is one of the few bitter-tasting foods that are commonly consumed so widely, like coffee and cacao.

“This gourd can be quite bitter in taste, hence the name also known to me as karela in hindi. So its not everyone’s favorite and those who love to use it have their own ways of reducing the bitterness if at all using some preprocessing like soaking in salt water before cooking. Its dark green fruit with lots of sharp ridges which grows on a climbing vine. My favorite way to prepare it is fried bitter gourd with potatoes. It comes in two varieties, the Chinese one is lighter in color with blunt ridges while the Indian variety in smaller, darker green in color and sharper ridges.” (1)

“I would also add that customers use both the fruits as well as the leaves, which are made into a tea. Jamaicans call the vines/leaves “cerasee” or “cerasee bush”, although technically that is a different variety of bitter melon grown specifically for the leaves, and produces smaller fruits. Both the leaves and fruits are thought to aid in mitigating high blood pressure and diabetes. (2)

Bottle Gourd

South Asia via Africa
A member of the gourd family, bottle gourd has a light green-colored fruit which grows on a climbing vine. It comes in various shapes ranging from long bottle shape to huge and rounded. We grew up eating many different recipes that use bottle gourd, including savory curries, stuffed breads, and desserts. Its soft white flesh with mild sweetness lends itself to many flavors. I grew up calling it lauki in Hindi or doodhi in Marathi. It’s also known as calabash. It is harvested young to eat as vegetables but can also be harvested dried and matured to make utensils and musical instruments. Many South Asian musical instruments, including sitar and veena, are made using dried bottle gourd. I have also heard of it being used to make water carriers. (1) It’s considered one of the first domesticated plants by humans and it was first domesticated not for food but for making containers, making it one of the ‘utility’ species. (2) It was widely present around the world, including the Old and New World before the colonization of the New World, which started in 1492. Scientists have been trying to figure out how this plant, which is native to Africa, came to be used in the New World so widely. One hypothesis says it was brought to the New World by humans who migrated to the New World from Asia via the Bering Strait. (2) The competing hypothesis is that the wild fruit just floated from the coast of Africa to the Americas via ocean currents and was independently domesticated in multiple places around the world. (3)

1. Memories from Piyush Labhsetwar
2. Erickson DL, Smith BD, Clarke AC, Sandweiss DH, Tuross N. An Asian origin for a 10,000-year-old domesticated plant in the Americas. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2005 Dec 20;102(51):18315-20. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0509279102. Epub 2005 Dec 13. PMID: 16352716; PMCID: PMC1311910.
3. Kistler L, Montenegro A, Smith BD, Gifford JA, Green RE, Newsom LA, Shapiro B. Transoceanic drift and the domestication of African bottle gourds in the Americas. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Feb 25;111(8):2937-41. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1318678111. Epub 2014 Feb 10. PMID: 24516122; PMCID: PMC3939861.
   

Fagiolina del Trasimeno

 

Umbria, Italy
This small, savory, black-eyed pea has been grown by home gardeners in the hills and fields around Lake Trasimeno in Umbria, Italy for centuries. This plant requires harvest almost every day, and so it has been threatened with extinction as Italy moves towards mechanized agriculture and as more people leave the countryside. I choose to cultivate this dry bean because my family left southern Italy two generations ago to escape starvation and disease. They were subsistence farming in the countryside and most likely cultivated a bean like this one. This bean is a reminder, too, that so many of us who live in this country come from immigrants. The idea that this crop is close to extinction compels me to grow enough for seed every year. This creamy, nutritious bean is also a personal favorite of mine because they require no soaking before cooking since they are so small!

Source: Reflections from Erin Ferrentino

Hill Country Red Okra

 

West-Central Texas; originally West Africa
Okra is native to the African continent, and a staple in West African and many other tropical and subtropical cuisines. Enslaved Africans managed to bring okra, rice, tania, black-eyed peas, kidney, and lima beans with them on their harrowing journeys across the Atlantic. (1) Okra and other seeds were braided into women and children’s hair to ensure that they could still survive – culturally and physically – when they were forced into slavery. (2) This variety is said to have originated in the eastern portion of the mostly limestone Edwards Plateau in west-central Texas, also known as Texas Hill Country. Hill Country was unique in the mid-1800s because it was [and still is] home to a very large German population. Germans tended to oppose secession from the union, and a significant number were staunch abolitionists. In fact, in 1854, German political figures in Texas issued a condemnation of slavery and a call for abolition, stating that “slavery is an evil, the removal of which is absolutely necessary according to the principles of democracy.”

In the Hill Country, Germans and Tejanos were the biggest threat to the Confederacy, and both groups faced retaliation and attacks from Confederate soldiers. (3) Many German colonizers were also farmers, and because of the presence of enslaved Africans, okra became an essential crop of the American South. Okra was one of the few vegetables that enslaved Africans were allowed to cultivate in their own gardens, and by the mid-1700s, okra was already famous in white Southern cooking. Gumbo, a dish known to most southerners by the 1780s, comes from the West African word ki ngombo, which means “okra.” While we cannot trace this variety of okra back to the 1800s, there is a possibility that enslaved and later freed Africans grew okra in Texas Hill Country.

1. Holloway, Joseph E. “African Crops and Slave Cuisines.” The Slave Rebellion Website.
2. Osborne, Katheline. “Braid as a Tool of Resistance in Slavery.” nmaahc.si.edu.
3. Texas Historical Association.
   

Wampanoag territory, New England

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