Today I picked and ate the first tomato from my garden. After harvesting the last of the spring turnips, I dug a few hills of potatoes. I also hoed a long row of purple hull peas and topped off my asparagus bed with aged compost. Our ancestors loved this time of the year -- when the garden finally started producing fresh vegetables to relieve the monotony of everyday fare.
In the modern world, with its myriad grocery stores and specialty markets, it is difficult to comprehend how hard our ancestors worked to put food on the table. The French settlers at Arkansas Post were more given to trapping and trading than farming, and the population had to scramble to eat properly. But being Frenchmen, after all, they managed.
A 1789 visitor to the Arkansas Post commandant's home was treated to sumptuous meals, starting with what we now call a continental breakfast of bread, butter and coffee. Lunch, which was called "dinner," was served at half past noon. It consisted of a variety of meats, including "some roast, fried stakes, some stued with wine, [some] stued with earbs, etc." The commandant demonstrated his social status by serving wine as well as water to drink, and after the main meal was finished, "the waiters cleaned off the different dishes and set on some fine oald cheese and butter with bottles of wine ..."
As the primary historian of the colonial era, Judge Morris S. Arnold has noted most residents of the Poste aux Arkansas subsisted on far less grand fare: "The lower orders ... relished cornbread, while the French upper classes found it particularly odious." According to Arnold, one of the most commonly eaten foods among the poor classes was gru, a boiled corn mush seasoned with bear oil.
Eggs were scarce in colonial Arkansas but not unheard of. A priest reported in 1727 that he had eaten some very satisfactory omelettes made from turtle eggs. One Arkansas Post resident told of going out into the Arkansas River in a "canough"and "brought in about a peck of ingeon hens [cranes] and black bird eggs, 275 in number, out of which we had some fine egg nog."
Food ways changed considerably after the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 brought Arkansas into American possession. Settlers began arriving in substantial numbers after Arkansas became a territory in 1819. William E. Woodruff of Little Rock is most famous as the founder of the Arkansas Gazette newspaper, but he was also the first Arkansan known to sell vegetable seeds and orchard plants.
If cotton was king of the crops, corn was the queen. Settlers almost always cleared a field for corn production as soon as a house was constructed. Corn was the staff of life for most Arkansans, whites and blacks alike. Enslaved Arkansans were said to live on the "three M diet," consisting of meat, meal and molasses. The 1860 census showed that more than 17 million bushels of corn were produced in Arkansas that year, with every county represented. In that same year, more than 250 Arkansans made their livings as millers -- usually grinding corn into meal.
Henry M. Stanley, the Englishman who later gained fame as the discoverer of Livingstone in Africa, spent a few years in Arkansas just before the Civil War. He described the typical meal as: "The breakfast at seven, the dinner at noon, and the supper at six, consisted of pretty much the same kind of dishes, except that there was good coffee at the first meal ... The rest mainly consisted of boiled, or fried, pork and beans, and corn scones. The pork had an excess of fat over lean, and was followed by a plate full of [corn] mush and molasses ..."
A few plantation owners in Chicot County grew rice to feed their slaves. In 1860 a total of 9,000 pounds of rice was harvested in Chicot County. Jefferson County also saw some early rice production, as well as a few other places. This early rice culture is quite remarkable given the lack of electrical pumps to flood the fields.
Considering the limited variety of available food, especially in the winter, it is not surprising that 19th century Arkansas women put great effort into their gardens -- and took pride in the results. One young wife who traveled west to settle in Ouachita County, wrote her mother back in Alabama on April 6, 1859, with enthusiasm: "I must tell you about my garden. I have a very forward garden, I think, considering how late a start we had, have had nice mustard salad, radishes, & lettuce for several weeks, have 4 squares set out in collards...have squashes & cucumbers up & growing fine ..."
We do not know when the tomato made its way to Arkansas. Michael B. Dougan of Jonesboro, the resident authority on Arkansas' horticultural history, speculates that "...there is every reason to believe that tomatoes were grown and eaten in Arkansas during the French and Spanish colonial period, even if no recipes have survived." He also noted that "... the earliest Southern almanacs gave lessons on tomato culture, and seeds provided by commercial growers figured into the newspaper advertisements of territorial Arkansas."
Newspaper editors have long taken an interest in tomatoes, ranging from Whig newspaper editor Albert Pike to current day Arkansas Democrat-Gazette columnist Paul Greenberg. These newsmen have sung the virtues of Arkansas-grown tomatoes, Greenberg positing that Arkansas men might owe their special appeal to homegrown tomatoes. Albert Pike took the discussion much further by swearing to the medical benefits of eating tomatoes, including preventing "that distressing malady, the Liver Complaint."
Pike concluded his tomato testimonial by noting: "The ease with which the tomato is raised places it within the reach of every family, and a few plants in the corner of the garden will not only furnish a cheap and abundant luxury for the table, but may also save a good many visits from the doctor, and thereby considerably whittle down that monstrum horrendum, his bill."
Tom Dillard is a historian and retired archivist living near Glen Rose in rural Hot Spring County. Email him at [email protected]. An earlier version of this column was published June 25, 2006.
NAN Profiles on 06/24/2018