Like everything in New Orleans, the Creole tomato is not what it seems

According to science, it doesn't exist!

The Crescent Park Bridge and Dr. Bob Art! are our two big landmarks on Chartres. But we’re also fond of this ghost sign on the AJ’s Produce building.

For a few months, I thought it was a true ghost sign, a remnant of a long-gone business. But AJ’s is a third-generation produce wholesaler. It’s the main supplier for all those flying cabbages and carrots you see during St. Patrick’s parades.

Flying cabbages would make a pretty good mural, but there is a reason AJ’s chose the “world-famous Creole tomato” as its calling card. Creole tomatoes aren’t just popular here; they have a mythos. People talk about them like they taste like the color red itself. They send people into Proustian reveries filled with checkered blue picnic blankets, summer birthdays, and legendary jambalayas. The French Market throws a two-day Creole Tomato Festival every June (this weekend marks year 37). You can get Creole tomatoes loose, along with 10,000 things made with them: jambayla, gazpatcho, salsa, friend green tomatoes, Bloody Marys…

I snagged a couple of Creole tomatoes at Robert Fresh Market a few weeks ago, admittedely because they were captioned “Creole tomatoes.” They tasted, to me, like slightly better-than-average grocery store tomatoes; Thomas agreed. I grew up in a gardening family, and the first time I tasted a grocery store tomato, it shocked me down to my tiniest nerve endings. So bad! Last summer, when I flew home from Utah, half my suitcase was full of carefully packed tomatoes from my parents’ garden. I try not to choke down out-of-season tomatoes unless I have to be polite at someone else’s house.

With all this sparkling backstory, as well as the fact they apparently actually taste like tomatoes, I was dying to try Creoles. This underwhelming experience made me suspicious about whether we’d actually encountered true Creole tomatoes.

So turns out, at least according to science, there’s no such thing as a Creole tomato. Just shy of a decade ago, scientists at the LSU AgCenter picked up 11 different seed packets labeled as Creole tomatoes, planting them in the fields at LSU’s research farm.

"There was tremendous difference in the germination rate, and when we put them in the fields, the growth rates were also drastically different,” professor Kathryn Fontenot of the LSU AgCenter told 225 Magazine. “Now we’ve started to get a lot of different sizes of fruit, from an extra large cherry to a five- to six-ounce tomato.” The only unifiying trait they could find, she said, was “green shoulders” that remained after the fruits ripened.

Fontenot’s colleague, Dan Gill, explained this last year in his Times-Picayune gardening column that the term “Creole tomato,” is a marketing term. “Any locally grown, vine-ripened, red, medium to large tomato is a Creole tomato, regardless of the variety,” he wrote.

The Louisiana Weekly, June 21, 1969. Maybe this Creole tomato is LSU’s official variety?

Gill said that when he first joined the Ag Extension in the 1980s, what farmers called “Creole,” was most ofen a Celebrity tomato. LSU did release what it called a Creole tomato 1969, but it wasn’t retained in the seed archive because it was a leggy, indeterminate variety that needed staking. Farmers responded unenthusiastically.

If you want to get super technical, Creole tomatoes only come from St. Bernard or Plaquemines Parishes; it’s about how the weather and the soil produce a very specific flavor, but the cultivar doesn’t matter. (That’s “terroir” if you’re fancy.) That probably means if I want to find a true Creole tomato, it means a trip out to a roadside stand in Chalmette — or a stop at the French Market this weekend.

We still haven’t tracked down a true farmers market, but when we do, here’s what I’m hoping I’ll see, because like Creole tomatoes, they are as much about the backstory as they are about the flavor:

1. Dr. Wyche’s Yellow: First heirloom I grew; picked up a leggy, pale start growing in a paper cup at Freulingsfest in Mayestown, Illinois. It didn’t look great, but how can you take a pass on a tomato cultivated by a dentist/circus owner who used elephant fertilzer on his beds? He called it “hot yellow,” because it had a kicky flavor despite its pale color, and he passed his cultivar to Seed Savers in the mid-1980s right before he died. (By the way, his former circus, Carson & Barnes, still exists.)

2. Mortage Lifter: This big guy has a nice flavor (sweet) but mostly I love it because it used to be called “Radiator Charlie.” Radiator Charlie! And this person actually existed: Marshall Cletis Byles, who worked as a mechanic at the top of a mountain pass in West Virgina. Truckers’ engines often overheated during ascent, which blew out the radiator, and Byles was the closest garage. In addition to being the Beethoven of truck radiators, he was a really clever gardener, and during the Depression cross-pollinated the biggest tomatoes he could find, and created a classic. You can see a picture of him here.

3. Aunt Ruby’s German Green: It’s all there in the name: a green German tomato, cultivated by Ruby Arnold of Greenfield, Tennessee. I’d love to know what else Aunt Ruby was up to (fixing radiators? Raising elephants?) but because she developed this cultivar in the good ol’ genderist 20th century, we don’t have much more than that. She needs more backstory! Because these are as hefty as Mortgage Lifters, a pound or more, and they’re a beautiful, marbled green color, ripe and unripe.

4. Pippin’s Golden Honey Pepper: OK, this is a bit of a cheat, but peppers are in the nightshade family, too. Horace Pippin’s best known as an artist (the Saint Louis Art Museum has a really nice piece of his) but he was also a master gardener. He paid his doctor in seeds for bee-sting treatments to manage pain. William Hoy Weaver found those seeds stored in baby food jars in his late grandpa’s basement, and donated them to seed archives. Now Pippin’s known as much for his art as for his peppers, including the goldens, fish peppers and purple peppers.

PS: Sorry for running late this week. It was my birthday week! Thomas wrote a top-notch recap of our French Quarter Birthday Staycation Day… which did not include a stop at the French Market for tomatoes.