By John DeMers

When a New Orleans shrimp stew is bright red with tomatoes, it’s called shrimp Creole. When a New Orleans chicken stew is bright red with tomatoes, it’s called chicken Creole.

And when you’re staring at the source of all this color—an imperfectly shaped, not tough enough for shipping, not numerous enough for marketing, orb from the flood-enriched delta of the wide Mississippi—you, dear traveler, are in the presence of a real Creole tomato.

Creole tomatoes! Chefs in New Orleans practically make pilgrimages south along the river all year, delivering burnt offerings to the tomato gods for a first-rate crop. To hear local chefs (and indeed most New Orleanians) tell it, there simply are no other tomatoes on the face of this earth. Creoles, quite simply, are cool.

When the Creoles arrive at the French Market, in addition to inspiring a really fun festival—which most things do around here anyway—the word goes forth from kitchen to kitchen. And within hours, the laser printers of New Orleans’ most creative eateries are spitting out menus featuring this natural born delight. Shrimp remoulade suddenly becomes shrimp remoulade on a slice of Creole tomato. Crawfish maque choux suddenly becomes crawfish maque choux with fresh Creole tomato salsa.

At the French Market, of course, Creoles are king, for however many weeks the supply from Plaquemines Parish, St. Bernard Parish, and a handful of other pockets holds out. Even in huge suburban supermarkets, where shelf space seems to be handed out by computer, all other tomatoes from those high-yield, big-bucks places are pressed aside. Hastily hand-lettered signs announce “We’ve got Creoles.”

So what is a Creole tomato, and why all the fuss?

It’s all right to ask, for the more meditative among us have been asking for generations. Since the answer touches on botany and even chemistry, most of us lose interest along the way, or else have to go stir shrimp Creole on the stove. But, yes Virginia, there is a Creole tomato in and around New Orleans at this time of year. It just isn’t, we’re told by the experts, the one you can’t wait to eat.

Creole tomatoes are an official variety grown in home gardens in many parts of Louisiana. These are good, as homegrown, non-mass-produced tomatoes are likely to be anywhere that the season is right. But these are probably not the variety that you’ll find in the shopping frenzy brought on by Creole tomato time in New Orleans.

The Creoles in the market are not named according to variety but according to origin. In other words, any variety of tomatoes grown along our stretch of the river can be sold as a Creole tomato.

If this strikes you as a marketing gimmick (as indeed it may be, partially), it is also a great agricultural truth. For just as wines draw their unique character from the land that gives us their grapes, and just as these wines differ wildly on opposite side of a stream or slopes of the same hill, so tomatoes speak loud and clear of the soil that produces them. And “Creole” is a speech any tomato would want to hear.

Like a funnel guiding the Mississippi out into the Gulf, the watery finger of land that is rural Plaquemines Parish has (like the Nile in the Bible) been cursed with its very own blessing. For centuries, uncontrollable flooding was the rule rather than the exception, making life on this land next to impossible. What those same waters were doing, however, was building up some of the darkest, most nutrient-rich soil this side of Pharaoh’s Egypt.

Some of the earliest settlers of New Orleans, especially farmers accustomed to the rockier, less-friendly conditions in Germany and Sicily, saw this delta as God’s special gift, or perhaps as divine restitution for the humidity, mosquitoes and disease that were the local lot. The Spanish had already created a small market for tomatoes here, enough that any red dish called “Creole” probably has its Spanish roots showing.

The strangest thing about this sweet, juicy, delicious fruit (yes, a tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable) is that for the longest time Europeans and their colonies believed it was poisonous. The same people who downed raw oysters, foie gras and escargots in bulk would refuse a tiny taste of tomato.

It was none other than Thomas Jefferson, gastronomic history tells us, who launched the tomato’s first American PR campaign. And it was, of course, Jefferson who engineered the Louisiana Purchase. Is it possible that the savvy Sage of Monticello figured out that, with the river and all, there had to be a place around here somewhere that would someday grow super tomatoes?

Filed Under: Food Talk