RI Farms & Chefs put Heirloom Harvest Week on the menu

RAFT heirloomsThere are many varieties of vegetables and fruits rooted in New England’s climates and soils, but simply no longer grown. Their disappearance happened as our food supply became increasingly homogeneous. The marketplace favored varieties – think Red Delicious apples and tomatoes that bounce – that can produce large harvests (often with lots of fertilizer) and that can travel long, bumpy distances (often with lots of fungicide) to then sit on supermarket produce shelves. Many varieties with out-of-this-world flavor did not fit this mold and without a market, they became became rarer to find in seed catalogs and were rarely grown.

Among these rare heirlooms are Boothby’s Blond Cucumber, Boston Marrow Squash, Early Blood-rooted Turnip Beet, Forellenschuss or Speckled Lettuce, Gilfeather Turnip, Jimmy Nardello’s Sweet Italian Frying Pepper, Long Pie Pumpkin, Marafax Bean, Siberian Sweet Watermelon, Sibley’s/Pike’s Peak Squash, Stowell’s Evergreen Sweet Corn, Student Parsnip, Trophy Tomato, Wethersfield (Red) Onion, and Winningstadt Cabbage.

They boast such incredible, interesting flavors and they grow so well here, that now with the rebirth of farmers’ markets and farm-to-chef connections based around flavor and quality, there is again a viable marketplace to grow these heirloom varieties.

That was the thinking at Slow Food and the Chefs Collaborative when they designated October 12 to 18th as Heirloom Harvest Week. Early this year, 13 RI farmers were given the seeds to grow the aforementioned 16 heirloom varieties. And this week chefs at 16 Rhode Island restaurants will be creating menus to highlight these uniquely New England flavors. (Not surprisingly a majority of the Heirloom Harvest chefs also participate in Market Mobile, a new program that has already this year resulted in an additional $150,000 in farm-to-chef sales. That’s a lot of local food!) Here’s who is participating:

You can read up on the Heirloom Harvest Week varieties and if you’d like to try them in your own kitchen, most of the farmers have a few of the varieties for sale at farmers markets they attend. Click on a farm name to see which markets: