ISSUE 67, ARK OF TASTE, Part 6: Salzer's Ferris Wheel Tomato
Salzer’s Ferris Wheel Tomato
Sometime in the 1820s giantism seized the popular imagination regarding vegetables. Newspapers began printing notices of farmer’s exhibiting a “mammoth” pumpkin or watermelon. The exhumation of skeletons of mastadons and wooly mammoths in the early decades of the 19th century alerted people to the possibility that living things, such as elephants, might grow several orders of size larger. Why not vegetables. “Size collects eyes.” And so seed companies began breeding for gigantic proportion: onions, heading cabbages, watermelons, pecans, okra, and tomatoes.
In 1894 the John E. Salzer Company of La Cross, Wisconsin, introduced the largest commercial tomato variety ever to reach the American market, the Ferris Wheel Tomato. The largest examples boaste a 20 inch circumference and five lbs. weight. George Washington Gale had constructed the first ferris wheel the year before, at the World Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. 264 feet tall, it was the largest and most visible attraction on the Midway. Salzer’s introduction their creation included a woodcut of the tomato with an image of the ferris wheel at its heart.
“Please look at this illustration carefully. This monster, this leviathan, this giant, measures almost 2 feet in circumference. We studied for an appropriate name and finally concluded to name it Ferris Wheel Tomato, in honor of one of the greatest inventions of the age. This Tomato possesses every good quality to be found in a tomato.” John A Salzer 1897 Catalog. Offering $50 gold for large examples grown by customers, Salzer hoped to reinforce the genetics for giantism. But the majority of the tomatoes when field cultivated averaged between 1 ¾ and 2 lbs. in weight.
Salzer had created his mammoth tomato from the Ponderosa variety, crossing it and selecting it for vine strength, uniformity of shape, smooth skin surface, and flavor. He characterized the results of his work succinctly: “Fruits have thick, solid, meaty flesh, which is of the finest quality, delicious, sub-acid flavor and very small seed cavity. The vines are strong and vigorous and easily bear their enormous weight of fruits which are of handsome appearance, smooth, and which have a rich, dark purplish-crimson skin.“ [Sow Salzer’s Seeds our 70th Anniversary 1868 to 1938 (La Cross, WI: John A Salzer Seed Co, 1938), 57.] One remarkable virtue for a tomato of its size was that it does not split, even in a rainy growing season.
The Ferris Wheel tomato fell victim to the industrialization of baking and the standardization of loaf dimension, so that a bread slice measures 4.5 by 4.5 inches. When sliced for a sandwich using standard loaf bread, the Ferris Wheel stuck out too much on all sides. When the Salzer family sold its seed company in 1945, the tomato was dropped from the listings of offered vegetables. For the last half of the twentieth century the Ferris Wheel Tomato was virtually extinct.
In 2002 Craig LeHoullier, heirloom tomato savant and breeder, secured seed from the USDA germ plasm collection. Upon growing it out, he determined that the flavor was superior to that of the Beefsteak, the most popular mammoth heirloom tomato in the United States. He interested the Victory Seed Company in adopting the variety, and seed is currently available for home gardeners: https://www.victoryseeds.com/tomato_ferris-wheel.html . Nature and Nurture Seeds, another supplier of seed, says the following about the taste of the revived Ferris Wheel: “The outstanding flavor of Ferris Wheel knocked us off our feet when Ryan Padgett of Radicle Roots Farm brought this large beefsteak to our 2017 Harvest Festival’s tomato tasting; it has been a favorite ever since. Large, pink, 1 lb fruits are lusciously juicy, sweet, and complex.” The strain now averages just over a pound in weight, though the Victory Seed Company reports examples that have tipped the scales at 32 ounces. Its current form is more suitable for the sandwich making. The revived tomato takes 90 days to mature and is somewhat subject to splitting. It is generally categorized as an heirloom pink tomato.