Tasting the Past

     When summer comes, I want to eat plums.
     Most people wax lovingly of sun-warmed tomatoes, devoured right there in the August garden. I've eaten my share of tomatoes this way, it's true. I have my favorites, most especially little 'sungold' which there are never enough of for long enough into autumn. But poetry? That's not for pedestrian love apples, which have grown almost tiresome from their enduring presence in the limelight, the darling of heirloom vegetable proponents to such a degree that even the supermarket uses the term "heirloom" as a sort of flavor guarantee. Tomatoes are useful, pretty, estimable for their sheer variety and ability to earn the adulation of the masses. But plums... oh, plums, warmed by the ripening sun, warm on one side and still leaf-cool on the other, eaten in the long, baking grass to the hum of cicadas, with no way to clean the juice from wrist and forearm than the swipe of your own tongue, and the taste of sweat and sweet-tart mingled together... To my mind, this is the reason the word "delicious" was coined.
     Sadly, mine is a taste unfulfilled, summer upon summer. It's easy enough to grow or buy that sun-warmed tomato, even if all you get is a pot on a rented balcony or a day in the country at tomato time. Sure, there are plums in the grocery store, and even at fruit stands in my rural county near the orchard-lined Hudson River. But my longing is more specific than any of these blue, or red or yellow plums can satisfy; something more like the first heirloom tomato advocates three decades ago were espousing. I want a specific plum, a Greengage plum: army-green under that smoky bloom on the skin, and meltingly soft golden ripe within. A ripe greengage sometimes collapses in the hand once your teeth have snapped the skin. It is a fruit to be sought, nearly camouflaged among the leaves, and devoured in place. Sometimes, even the ones I carried home from the orchard in my childhood never made it intact to the kitchen. It is not a plum for shipping, and it is rarely seen at farm stands. The only way to taste a greengage seems to be to grow your own. I tried that once; it was a fifteen year tale of heartbreak, pruning, white flowers and black rot, a tale of trying to recreate my past that ended when my ex-husband pruned the tree one final time on a winter day, six inches above the snow line.

     At Fist-Flower, part of my first year experiment involves growing vegetables from Slow Food USA's "Ark of Taste," a kind of endangered species list for plants of particular merit that have fallen out of commercial availability. They include Amish Paste and Cherokee Black tomatoes, Aunt Molly ground cherries and Amish Deer Tongue lettuce, Jimmy Nardello peppers and Sibley squash.  In most cases, you can't buy these crops at  the store, either because they don't submit to modern agricultural practices or, like my Greengages, they don't bear up to packing and shipping. In many cases, even the seed is hard to come by; a lesson in the stew of politics and power monopolies that is Big Seed. Somewhere among them, I hope to find other flavors that make eating something more than eating; that recall old memories, fire the imagination, that taste of the past and bring back something lost, or nearly lost.
To be continued...