Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods

by Jennifer A. Jordan

Each week during the growing season, farmers’ markets offer up such delicious treasures as brandywine tomatoes, cosmic purple carrots, pink pearl apples, and chioggia beets—varieties of fruits and vegetables that are prized by home chefs and carefully stewarded by farmers from year to year. These are the heirlooms and the antiques of the food world, endowed with their own rich histories. While cooking techniques and flavor fads have changed from generation to generation, a Ribston Pippin apple today can taste just as flavorful as it did in the eighteenth century. But how does an apple become an antique and a tomato an heirloom? In Edible Memory , Jennifer A. Jordan examines the ways that people around the world have sought to identify and preserve old-fashioned varieties of produce. In doing so, Jordan shows that these fruits and vegetables offer a powerful emotional and physical connection to a shared genetic, cultural, and culinary past.
 
Jordan begins with the heirloom tomato, inquiring into its botanical origins in South America and its culinary beginnings in Aztec cooking to show how the homely and homegrown tomato has since grown to be an object of wealth and taste, as well as a popular symbol of the farm-to-table and heritage foods movements.  She shows how a shift in the 1940s away from open pollination resulted in a narrow range of hybrid tomato crops. But memory and the pursuit of flavor led to intense seed-saving efforts increasing in the 1970s, as local produce and seeds began to be recognized as living windows to the past. In the chapters that follow, Jordan combines lush description and thorough research as she investigates the long history of antique apples; changing tastes in turnips and related foods like kale and parsnips; the movement of vegetables and fruits around the globe in the wake of Columbus; and the poignant, perishable world of stone fruits and tropical fruit, in order to reveal the connections—the edible memories—these heirlooms offer for farmers, gardeners, chefs, diners, and home cooks. This deep culinary connection to the past influences not only the foods we grow and consume, but the ways we shape and imagine our farms, gardens, and local landscapes.
 
From the farmers’ market to the seed bank to the neighborhood bistro, these foods offer essential keys not only to our past but also to the future of agriculture, the environment, and taste. By cultivating these edible memories, Jordan reveals, we can stay connected to a delicious heritage of historic flavors, and to the pleasures and possibilities for generations of feasts to come.

Genres: Food, History, Nonfiction, Gardening, Cooking

328 pages, Hardcover

First published April 14, 2015

Reviews

[R.J. Gilmour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Picking up the book I was hoping it was a narrative in that traced the intersection of memory and food, like Proust's madeline. Sadly, it is not, the book is a really just Jordan's survey of secondary literature and her perusing aggregated online sources for mentions of foods. It seems in a way an excuse for her to peruse these sources and to drive out to a couple of farms then write a book about it. In the end the book is really boring and not at all about heirloom vegetables or foods.

"Based on my observations, edible memory is something people enact with regard to a whole range of foods-including some of the most highly processed foods around. The heirloom varieties I focus on in most of this book are a particularly charged site of the intersections of food, memory, and meaning, but they serve as one rich example of a much bigger process." 5

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought this book ages ago when the author did a talk on it in my city when it was first published. I remember the talk being fascinating and compelling. The whole concept of edible memories that tie us not just to family but also the larger community around us was interesting to think about and explore.

It is still interesting, but the book left me wishing for a slightly different book. This one was very much couched in the writer's personal experience while trying to make sweeping generalizations about edible memories that didn't always ring true.

I got the sense that the author was trying to write two books at once - a social history and a memoir. By trying to write these two books at once, neither was quite as satisfying as it could have been. The memories she shared of growing up in Northern California or moving to Wisconsin were peppered throughout the book, but never gained a narrative structure that left you wanting more. And the social history part of the book felt shallow, with no deep dive into how food traditions become edible memories, why some survive and others do not, what it says about the people who choose to keep one food and drop another, or how the culture that surrounds them impacts what is passed on.

[Samantha Fox · Rating 2 out of 5]

Very repetitive and I was hoping for more in depth stories about certain heirloom varieties. She kept referencing future books when she should have focused more on the current one. I was looking for depth and unfortunately most was of the information was pretty shallow. Edible memory is an interesting concept, but I wish she had done more research about specific varieties of fruits/vegetables. My favorite parts were when she mentioned actual names of apples and tomatoes instead of just 'heirloom'.

[Clivemichael · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting topic but over written and peppered with irrelevance. Needs a better editor.
“That trusty bag had been filled with produce before (not to mention books, wet bathing suits, seedpods, or my lecture notes), but this visit to the orchard was the beginning of the end for it. By the time I got home, it was already starting to ooze syrup onto the car seat, from plums begging to be put into a tart (which I did as soon as possible before they disintegrated). “

[Margery Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

i really enjoyed this

[Katy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting but a little repetitive.

[Tiffany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great exploration of the history and relevance of hybrid vs heirloom foods.

Really interesting to contemplate the part food plays in memory.

Academic but not inaccessible or dry. I had no problem following the text though I've never read anything on, or even thought about these ideas much before.

*Warning: Reading will cause cravings for produce fresh from the garden, orchard,or Farmers Market.

[Mria Quijada · Rating 2 out of 5]

The best part of this book is the bibliography. It's a mishmash of excerpts from other books about real food while she waxes nostalgic for boxed cake mix and jello salad.
But the reading list is great.