Pedigreed Peppers
In a catch-up call with an old friend from out west this past week she bemoaned the loss of her beloved Jimmy Nardello Peppers at the local farmers market. She was a first-generation Italian, her parents emigrating in search of better opportunities after WWII after befriending American GI’s who told them of a place in the United States that grew grapes, citrus, and olives on the Pacific coast. We had met while both cooking professionally in the Ojai Valley, a region then that was known for its vast assortment of local produce. Everything from the alien-like citrons to artichokes the size of softballs showed up at the farmers markets. We’d run into each other twice weekly as we’d shop for the restaurants where we worked, a friendly jousting for specialty ingredients from our favorite farm and orchards before grabbing a coffee and pastry to discuss the latest industry gossip and bounce ideas off of each other.
“No one has them this year,” she lamented as many of her regular vendors’ offerings had become quite sparse and a few had given up altogether on this year’s crops due to a severe drought. For some farmers, the cost of water to grow crops would exceed the profits and for others, there just wasn’t any water. Their wells were dry.
On Sunday when I showed up to Bethesda there was a huge display of gorgeous red peppers with a hand-written sign for Jimmy Nardello peppers. At first, I wanted to take a picture of the pile and text it to her but decided against it. Her distress at the loss of generations of tradition had been real. Once we even arm wrestled on a plastic folding market table over who would get the first crop of the season. I thought I’d easily win, but her want for those peppers slammed the back of my hand down with a mighty force. For her, food was her heritage, a connection to her nonna who laid the foundation for her successful career in the food industry. No, to send her that picture would be a slap in the face, especially after she joked about turning into a farmer like I had so she’d have access to the foods she wanted.
The original seeds where carried to America in 1887 by the Nardello family who had also emigrated from the same region of southcentral Italy as her own. One of the eleven Nardello children became an avid gardener, continuing his parents’ tradition of seed-saving. He passed along his heirloom sweet Italian frying pepper seeds to the Seeds Savers Exchange in 1983 who made them his namesake.
A staple in Italian kitchens, the long slender, sweet, red peppers are used fresh, strung by the stems to be dried, pickled, canned, and frozen. Now coveted by chefs and home cooks, the Jimmies are a farmers market favorite that arrive at the peak of summer, requiring at least 90 days to mature. They can be picked and eaten green, but for the full depth of sweetness should be harvested when completely red.
The first time I ate them they were charred over a wood-fired grill and plopped on my plate. Grilling a pepper was as foreign to me as from where they were originally grown. It was as if the peppers whispered, “There’s a big world of peppers out there just waiting for you.” Each week at market is a veritable circumnavigation of the globe—the Italian Nardellos, Japanese shishitos, Mexican jalapeño, serrano and Anaheim peppers. I have worked my way through China, Mexico, Turkey, and Indonesia—the top pepper producers in the world. I’ll fill bags of whole mini snack peppers to freeze and pull out during the winter months to add flavor and color when the sky turns gray with snow. There will be pickled peppers, pepper poppers, and pepper jelly. And maybe I’ll box up a few pounds of Jimmies and overnight them to an old friend who is longing for her peppers.