Romance of the old kitchen garden

Considerable areas of our memory are taken up with food: it might be the taste of Mother’s sponge, the melting texture of an aunt’s buttery pastry or something recent, like the flavour of the first spoonful of a sour and nutty south-east Asian dish. Especially good meals are recalled with the same clarity as revolting school dinners and the stench of stale fish — we can conjure aromatic memories with ease thanks to the olfactory nerve, the brain’s cache of stored eating experience that helps us to tell good from bad when choosing what to eat.

Jennifer A. Jordan, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin, believes we should be remembering more than just the sensual pleasures of eating, however. Odd as it may seem, there are individual types among species of foods that are now forgotten. A little-discussed side effect of the last century’s seismic changes in both agriculture and eating habits is the loss of ‘heirloom’ produce. Gone, for example, are Granite Beauty and Newton Pippin apples, Cherokee Purple tomatoes and Hoekurai turnips.

The very thought of a forgotten turnip is enough to get me thoroughly ensconced in Edible Memory. Jordan, struck by the sight of knobbly tomatoes in various colours at her local farmers’ market, wonders where they have been and how it was possible to bring them back from the dead, as it were — and also why we now love these new-old breeds so dearly. She writes from the perspective of American farming and food history, but the similarities to European are close.

How can a tomato get lost? Before agri-business took hold in the 1930s tomatoes were very much the produce of the family vegetable plot. A vast array of tomatoes, giant, small, pear-shaped, lobed, every shade of red, green, striped and yellow, made way for a few hybrids that could grow successfully in conjunction with agri-chemicals; these new tomatoes had thick skin and travelled well, they had shelf life.