ISSUE 91, RADISHES, Part 1: Radishes in America
Radishes
Drawing distinctions between radishes and turnips becomes difficult at a certain point. Both are root vegetables from the Brassica family (that large, various family of vegetables, generally European in origin, that gives us cauliflower, cabbage, broccoli, mustard, collards, beets, and Kohlrabi). Both can be eaten raw or cooked. Both are abundantly nutritious. Both encompass a variety of forms and flavors.
Most tend to think of radish as the Spring vegetable, while turnip is the Fall. Most American consumers eat radishes raw in salads. Those same consumers tend to cook turnips, often with the turnips’ greens. Until the 1920s radishes were largely reckoned a breakfast vegetable, eaten with butter and salt. Turnips appeared at dinner and supper, roasted, boiled, mashed, or with a mess of greens. Gravy ramped up the flavor of turnips. Radishes were best with salad dressing.
Radishes assume a number of forms: the most common are spheroidal with a pointed tip; and the majority of these are white fleshed and red skinned. Yet at various times icicle shaped radishes commanded favor, particularly the French Breakfast and the Cincinnati Glasshouse Radish. In the past 30 years the girthy Daikon radish from Japan has found favor among gardeners both from tis provision of edible root and its ability to break up soils more than a foot down from ground surface. Then, there is the horseradish, a member of the clan that deserves a treatment by itself in a future essay.
Glass house gardeners surrounding American cities cultivated several kinds of radish In the early nineteenth century. A list from The Kitchen Gardener’s Instructor of 1847 gives a sense of the varieties: “Long Scarlet, Long Purple, Scarlet Pear-Shaped, Scarlet Turnip, White Turnip-rooted, Long White Naples, Purple Turnip, Yellow Turnip, White Spanish, Black Spanish.” There are three forms noted, two of which remain in cultivation in the 21st century: the long (or icicle shaped) and the turnip (or spheroidal shaped). Pear shaped radishes no longer appear in American gardens. The instructor noted that besides the roots being consumed and the young leaves as salad greens, the seed pods “if pickled when young and green, are considered by some a good substitute for Capers.” It is worth noting that no Asian varieties are listed.
Radishes vied with peas as being the quickest growing of the garden vegetables. Seed for the short-topped Scarlet Radish began being sown as early as January south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and beds sown successively for three months. While antebellum radish cultivators tending to be greenhouse vegetable specialists, the post-Civil War formation of large scale seed companies enabled radish to become a field crop. From 1870s to the 1890s the area around Norfolk Virginia developed into the foremost source for American-grown radishes. New Jersey was the second source. Fields up to 500 acres of red round radishes were sown, broadcast in narrow beds, for harvest beginning in the third week in March and extending to the first week in June. The fields then cycled to a second crop—melons or peanuts—and in fall, sometimes a third crop. Laborers were hired by the month. According to an 1899 article entitled “Radish Growing in Virginia,” “a good hand will pull and tie as many as 1200 bunches in a day. Others will not get more than 500 bunches to their credit—making the wages range from 50 cents to $1.20 per day” [Springfield Republican (May 27, 1899), 11]. The radishes were packed in half-barrel baskets, the bunches arrayed around a brick of ice so they would come to market crisp and fresh.
Shortly after the turn of the twentieth century California gardeners discovered Japanese radishes and became smitten. It’s pure white flesh dazzles. It’s size, whether round or long (Daikon), made the ordinary red radishes of commerce seem puny. “Cut it, and you find it has the consistency of a Baldwin apple, firm and fine grain: taste, and it proves to be away ahead of the most delicate Spring radish that every passed your lips” [“Japanese Radish,” San Jose Mercury and Herald (June 11, 1905), 22].
Asian radishes transformed the thinking of American growers and consumers on the West Coast during the 20th century. It did not exert so strong an influence on eastern consumers. Yet since 1900 the important innovations in radish culture came from Asia, the most recent being the popular Watermelon Radish from China, an heirloom form of Daikon.
Radishes retain a special place in the hearts of gardeners for their cold-tolerant hardiness, their quickness to mature, and their tangy flavor raw when pulled from the bed.
Almost everyone has eaten raw radish roots, but surprisingly few have consumed cooked radishes. Article 2 in this series will treat creamed and baked radishes. Article 3 will treat pickled radishes, and Article 4, horseradish.