Re: Ruskin Tomato Festival

Great story, Daryl. Thanks.
My father was one of the lucky ones--he'd gone to work for the post office in 1928. He'd been a freelance journalist but had to have a steady job before my mother's parents would allow her to marry him. So he had a steady job, albeit with Hoover Holidays, throughout the Depression. But, because our farm was on Main Street in LA County--the main thoroughfare between the LA Civic Center and San Pedro harbor, my mother set up a kind of soup kitchen for the hundreds of hobos traveling either to the city or to the harbor looking for work. Those were truly terrible times. Yet our dinner table was always an interesting place, with "guests" from virtually every state with stories about their home places and what they'd seen and experienced on the road. 


On May 6, 2007, at 1:07 PM, Daryl wrote:
I think a lot of childhood favorites grew out of our parent's and grandparents' experience, especially if they grew up in the Depression or before. They were either comfort foods or special treats created out of necessity.
Noodles were easy and cheap. Flour and water, maybe an egg if you had chickens. Potatoes were available in huge bags for a few cents. Meat was expensive, hard to get and had to go a long way. Hence the noodle and potato thing, with a tiny amount of beef and a lot of gravy.
For vitamins, there was cabbage. It could be grown in almost any back yard or purchased inexpensively in season and turned into sauerkraut or boiled and chopped with noodles or potatoes and a little sausage. I remember years later visiting the old neighborhood. I could still smell the ghosts of the boiled cabbage -but cabbage was all that stood between scurvy and health for some.
For those in the south, tomatoes were easy to grow and produced early. Sliced green, floured and fried with a bit of bacon grease early in the season. Later, sliced tomatoes on bread with a little salt and pepper provided nourishment (remember the bread back then had more protein and vitamins than the doughy goo common today). When "loaf bread," as they call it locally, became available, there was a switch to the sliced white bread, with mayo added to help keep the bread intact. The tomato juice would otherwise cause it to disintegrate.
My parents were better off than some. My Dad grew up on a dairy farm, and even though they had to work very, very hard, there was always food. Not only did they grow crops for the local canning factory, they had an orchard, berry patch and a large vegetable garden. I remember long hours picking berries, making sauerkraut and applesauce, and everyone pitching in to can almost anything imaginable. And I remember that there was always plenty of food on the table, no matter who stopped by at dinnertime. There was always another jar to open or potato to cook.
My mother's father owned a butcher shop, later a grocery store in Chicago. Even when they lost all of his investment property when people couldn't pay the rent, he still had ties to wholesale purchases. I remember my mother telling me about my grandmother who became so sick and tired of potatoes one year that she told my grandfather that the potatoes had all spoiled. (Fortunately Grandma was also an excellent cook, and made noodles and bread that were of excellent quality.) In reality, she had dumped the potatoes behind the garage. Imagine her surprise when there were hundreds of potato sprouts the next spring! It's a good thing they really loved one another... 

d




----- Original Message ----- From: "Kitty" <kmrsy@comcast.net>
To: <gardenchat@hort.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 11:56 AM
Subject: Re: [CHAT] Ruskin Tomato Festival
I know we've visited this subject b4, but it's kind of interesting how we all grew up with certain foods and not others. To me, a sandwich requires some sort of protein. However, I'd never heard of an egg sandwich until I was an adult. To me sandwich protein was meat, cheese, or peanut butter.
And last night my sister and I were talking about the difference we noticed in foods when we moved from Chicago to Ft. Wayne when I was 10. We'd never seen noodles b4 and couldn't quite grasp why a favorite dish was mashed potatoes, topped with noodles, topped with beef and gravy. That's a lot of starch.
I understand Elvis liked peanutbutter and banan sandwiches, but just banas on bread seems strange. 
Kitty
neIN, Zone 5
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andrea Hodges" <andreah@hargray.com> 
To: <gardenchat@hort.net>
Sent: Sunday, May 06, 2007 9:31 AM
Subject: Re: [CHAT] Ruskin Tomato Festival
Wow Kitty, my Dad grew up on tomato sandwiches and loves them to this day. Two slices of bread, mayo, salt and pepper and a big slice of tomato. I personally would rather just slice it, salt it and eat it all by itself! LOL! Oh, and we also ate banana sandwiches, which I do love, same way minus the salt and pepper. 
A
----- Original Message ----- From: "Kitty" <kmrsy@comcast.net>
To: <gardenchat@hort.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 6:11 PM
Subject: Re: [CHAT] Ruskin Tomato Festival
Oh yummy! I'd never have thought of a tomato sandwich, but you make it sound sooooooooo good! 
Kitty
neIN, Zone 5
----- Original Message ----- From: "james singer" <islandjim1@verizon.net> 
To: "Garden Chat" <gardenchat@hort.net>
Sent: Saturday, May 05, 2007 3:01 PM
Subject: [CHAT] Ruskin Tomato Festival
I love these kinds of hokey things. A tomato festival! But there were Ms Fatma and I--two old duffs wandering around in the 85+ degree sun eating tomatoes and basil marinated in balsamic vinegar, fried green tomatoes, a local supermarket's in-store baked chocolate chip cookies [all at no cost except, perhaps, to our arteries] and talking to 4H kids about the plants [tomatoes, naturally, peppers, and sunflowers] they were selling. They had a large sign that read "Peppers are perennials in Ruskin!" There was a bluegrass band that sounded more like zydeco than Bill Monroe, but it didn't seem to matter. But I guess what really impressed me was a local farm selling tomato sandwiches--two slices of white bread, two thick slices of tomato, two dollars. The line of people waiting to buy one of these simple constructions was far longer than the lines for the corn dogs and funnel cakes and all that other ghastly carny food combined. We ended up buying three tomatoes--2-1/4 pounds--for salads next week. 

Island Jim
Southwest Florida
27.1 N, 82.4 W
Hardiness Zone 10
Heat Zone 10
Sunset Zone 25
Minimum 30 F [-1 C]
Maximum 100 F [38 C]


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Island Jim
Southwest Florida
27.1 N, 82.4 W
Hardiness Zone 10
Heat Zone 10
Sunset Zone 25
Minimum 30 F [-1 C]
Maximum 100 F [38 C]

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