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153 creole tomato salad Susan Tucker and Karen Trahan Leathem Most New Orleanians have a certain amount of hubris about all their foods. Yet, for none but the Creole tomato do they claim world standing. Cookbook writer Lee Bailey qualifies his love of this vegetable/fruit stating,“I was born in Louisiana so I guess it’s okay for me to say that Creole tomatoes are the best in the world.” Writing of his family’s restaurant and their recipes, Leon Galatoire makes much the same statement but doesn’t worry that his reasoning needs any justification of birthplace:“We have the absolute joy of having what some consider the best tomato grown in the world, the Creole tomato.” But what really is a Creole tomato? It is easiest to begin by defining what it is not: it is not a variety called Creole tomato. Though there is such a type sold in many catalogs, it is not Louisiana’s tomato at all. It is not even the one called Creole that was introduced by the Louisiana State University Agricultural Experiment Station in 1989. Instead, a Creole tomato is any tomato planted along the Mississippi River from the St. Bernard and Plaquemines parish lines through Jefferson and Orleans and no farther north than St. Charles or St. John the Baptist parishes. Or, more widely defined, to be a Creole tomato, a tomato must be grown in the river parishes of southeast Louisiana: Plaquemines, St.Bernard,St.Charles,andSt.JohnparishesandalongtheriverinJeffersonand Orleans parishes. Even if grown from the same seeds in other parts of the state, the tomatoes would have a different flavor and would not be Creole tomatoes. Today, Plaquemines Parish reports the largest acreage of Creole tomatoes. Food writer Gene Bourg, in one of the most loving of all descriptions of the Creole tomato, recalls his visual memory of them as “not pretty . . . some were almost as big as grapefruit, and most were gnarled, lumpy, and splotched creole tomato salad 154 with reds, yellows and greens.” With cracks or with a corona, these tomatoes call forth statements describing them as “imperfectly shaped” to cushion what other people call “downright ugly.” On the other hand, according to some, Creole tomatoes are bright red, or tinged with green, and absolutely just what a tomato should be. Regardless of the individuality that all these opinions announce , New Orleanians long for the Creole tomato in almost any size or shape and eat them every chance they are presented. To Bourg, they remain“the juiciest , most luscious tomatoes I can remember eating.” Both Bourg and fellow food writer Marcelle Bienvenu name the Becnel family of Plaquemines Parish among the best known of growers and the purveyors of choice for the Creole tomato. Speaking to these food experts in 2001, Johnny Becnel Sr.specified two deciding influences on the taste: “the alluvial soil and the climate.” In addition, according to Becnel, any tomato planted in southern Louisiana is a Creole tomato. Becnel reminisced that his father called anything grown in Plaquemines Parish a Creole: Creole cucumbers, okra, corn, and a host of others.“Everything grown in this soil has a totally different taste from anything else in the world whether it’s eggplant, squash, or even an Irish potato.” This is an interesting observation since, until the 1940s, no cookbook called a tomato specifically a Creole tomato.The first two books to show the name Creole tomato in print were Eugénie Lavedan Maylié’s Maylie’s Table d’Hôte Recipes (1941) and Mary Land’s Louisiana Cookery (1954). It seems, therefore, that Creole tomato was a term used in the vernacular first. The tomato, Lycopersicon esculentum, is a tropical perennial and a member of the Solanaceae family, a group that includes potatoes, tobacco, eggplant, and red and green peppers. To make it all the more confusing, this family also includes petunias and a few other flowers. All of these are members of what is called the nightshade family, some of whose species are poisonous. This may have been one reason that well into the nineteenth century some people considered tomatoes poisonous. Botanically, the tomato is a fruit, but in both usage and horticulture, it is treated as a vegetable. A perennial plant, it is grown most often as an annual. Its ability to find sustenance in a variety of soils and climates has helped propel it into one of the most popular vegetables...

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