Jimmy Nardello Frying Peppers
Since December of 2020 I have been working with Giselle Kennedy Lord on a book featuring about 80 items from the Ark of Taste in the United States. This is a book Slow Food USA is sponsoring. I write the profiles of the ingredients. My aim has been to supply a newly researched succinct (800-900 words) account of the item providing new insight into its history, biology, and uses. I thought I'd offer up as preview a sample here to get your thoughts on how to improve the profile format and content. Here's a sample overview of the "Jimmy".
Jimmy Nardello Frying Pepper: Brought as seeds to America from Basilicata, Italy, in 1887 by Giuseppe/Joseph Nardiello (1857-1913) and his wife Angela (1863-1940), the thin walled long fruited frying pepper became a fixture in their garden at Naugatuck, Connecticut. What they brought with them was the famous peperone di Senise, the signature pepper of that southern Italian region. While all peppers ultimately hail from the Western Hemisphere, this ancient landrace came to Italy via the Antilles in the 1500s and spread to Calabria and Sicily as well as Basilicata. Its connection with Senise, however, is so strong that the peppers growing area there has been awarded IGF protection. [Luisa Cabrini, Fabrizia Malerba, L’Italia delle conserve (Milan, 2004), 150]. Numbers of famous preparations feature the pepper, none more so that the sun dried, crunchy peperoni cruschi.
All old landrace vegetables, such as this red frying pepper, possess great genetic diversity, and when planted in new soils in new climates they adapt, becoming in effect a new plants. So just as the Nardiellos became the Nardellos in Connecticutt, so the peperone di Senise became more productive, more cold tolerant, and more ranging in their stems (they have to be staked). The winning sweetness (entirely different than that of the meaty bell pepper), the fire engine red color of the ripe fruit, and the 10 inch length of the peppers remained intact from the Italian progenitors. The pepper came to be named after the couple’s fourth son, Jimmy. [Seed Savers Exchange, Product History File].
Jimmy’s designation of his home pepper as a “frying pepper” suggests the preferred preparation in his family was to stem and seed the peppers when ripe, laid it in a skillet with hot olive oil, perhaps some garlic, and cook and cook them until the flesh turned creamy. Yet the Nardello’s maintained the foodways of their old home, stringing up the harvested red peppers at the end of summer and hanging them in the rafters to dry over winter. So peperoni cruschi might always be had. Before Jimmy’s death in 1983 he conveyed the seeds of his family’s frying pepper to the Seed Savers Exchange to insure its preservation and dissemination. If he were alive today he would be surprised at the regard his frying pepper enjoys.
If Connecticut was the home of this pepper for the first century of its return sojourn to America, Northern California has become its home during the second century. It is greatly popular in the produce stalls at the San Francisco Market, where they are affectionately called “Jimmies,” and appears on numbers of restaurant menus. There is great appreciation of the value of the pepper as a raw vegetable, both in its green unripened and its red mature state. In 2012, Jack Aldredge published “Perfect pepper for frying” in SFGATE, the Chronicle’s section on Home and Garden matters. There he observed, “To roast a good pepper, you need thick, fleshy walls, so you have something left after you char, steam and peel the skins. For frying, however, thin flesh is preferred because it cooks quickly, flattening in the pan more easily than the rigid, thick=walled bell types” (“Perfect Pepper for Frying, SFGATE (January 26, 2012): https://www.sfgate.com/.../Perfect-pepper-for-frying...)
The Jimmy Nardello Frying Pepper was boarded on Slow Food’s Ark of Taste when it was still a novelty among heirloom gardeners and the Seed Savers Exchange was the principle outlet for seed. It’s presence on the Ark brought notice to the variety and sparked nationwide interest in growing it. Once scarce, it now ranks as one of the more popular heirloom vegetables on the Ark of Taste—a success story in which a family landrace became a West Coast restaurant staple and a star in the produce markets. Today a dozen seed companies offer seed to the public, in sizes from a 20 seed packet for a home gardeners to a pound of organic seed for the market gardener.
Nowadays most germinate seeds indoors and when soil temperature gets warm enough (peppers love heat), transplant them to a sunlight bed, plot, or field. Depending upon the amount of sunlight, the plants will take from eighty to ninety days to mature. The plants will attain two feet in height. It is important not to over water the plant, particularly late in the season. One can pick the fruit red or green. They can be consumed immediately, raw or cooked, and dried fruit can remain good for a year at least. If you save seed from peppers you grew, their viability declines after two years.
Seed can be obtained from the Seed Savers Exchange, Territorial Seed, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Burpee, Sow True Seed, Hudson Valley Seed, Fedco, the Monticello Shop, Truelove Seeds, Sustainable Seed, Kitizawa Seed, Turtle Tree Seed Initiative, Sandia Seed, and the San Diego Seed Company.