Last summer, in the midst of our
tomato-blight/potato-wireworm tragedy, we had a success story - our peppers. Even though the summer never got warm & sunny enough to fully ripen them all, the anchos and pimentos we planted grew and produced like gangbusters. There were so many peppers on most plants, we had to stake up branches to prevent them breaking off. Once the nights got frosty, we picked them all and pickled a peck or two. We've been enjoying them all winter. And that inspired us to improve on our efforts by searching out another pepper variety to try this year. I kept coming across mention of this guy, Jimmy Nardello, and his amazing sweet Italian frying peppers. They even got voted onto
Slow Food's Ark of Taste! Who is this guy, and what the heck is a frying pepper? Here's what I learned...
"In southern Italy, at what one might call the “instep of the boot,” is a mountainous region called Basilicata. In the subregion of Potenza, with its small coastline on the Thyrrhenian Sea, sits the tiny town of Ruoti.
For several years there, Giuseppe Nardiello and his wife, Angela, nurtured a favorite variety of sweet frying pepper. When they set sail from the port of Naples in 1887 for a new life beside the Golden Door, Angela carried her one-year-old daughter Anna and a handful of the pepper seeds with them. They settled in Naugatuck, Connecticut, where they raised the peppers, and eleven children. The fourth one was a son named Jimmy.
Jimmy’s son James, who is now 81 and still residing in Naugatuck, told me that the teachers in Jimmy’s grade school dropped the “i” from Nardiello, apparently believing that theirs was the proper spelling. It stuck to Jimmy, and to all the subsequent siblings and descendents.
James also said that his father was the only one of the Nardello children to inherit Angela’s love of the garden, and that Jimmy lovingly cared for his own throughout his life. He built them the way his mother taught him, in terraces, the way all gardens were built in the mountains of southern Italy. There he grew hundreds of peppers, but the sweet frying pepper was his favorite, and he would string up his bounty and hang them to dry in the shed, so his family could enjoy them all winter long.
Jimmy passed away in 1983. But before he did, he donated some of the heirloom pepper seeds to
Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) in Decorah, Iowa. SSE specializes in protecting heirloom seeds, with more than 11,000 varieties protected in two separate climate-controlled vaults. They grow out roughly ten percent of the stock on a ten-year rotating basis, refreshing and expanding the supply each time. One of these seeds is the one that has become known as Jimmy Nardello’s Sweet Italian Frying Pepper.
One hundred and twenty years after the Nardellos set sail, bringing a small piece of their homeland with them, the pepper that bears the family name is becoming a favorite among chefs and home gardeners nationwide, but it is still registered as “endangered” on Slow Food USA’s Ark of Tastes. The Ark is an effort to find, catalog, and protect the world’s endangered flavors from the onslaught of the standardization of agriculture and cuisine."
"The Nardellos are turn from their youthful kelly green to a mature fire-engine red, indicating that they are ready to be picked, sliced, fried in olive oil with garlic, and slathered over steaks alongside a generous pour of Primitivo.
They are also delicious as a sweet edge in your favorite chili or salsa recipe, and they are the best sweet pepper for drying. To dry them, string them on thread with a needle, careful to pierce them through the stem and not the fruit. Hang them near a sunny window or on the porch, and they’ll add decoration as they dry.
The best ones resemble a pig’s ear. James says that’s how his dad picked them. They grow in full sun in neutral to acidic soil, and are quite prolific as long as they are not over-watered."
(The above information comes from
The Iowa Source.)
It's not too late to join us in our old-world journey of pepper-discovery by planting some of Jimmy Nardello's peppers yourselves. Or look for starts at your local (and I mean local) nursery or farmer's market. We'll let you know how ours do, oh say, around September...
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On the milking front, Stella has a new stall tie set-up. It's a vertical bar mounted to a corner post, with a short length of chain attached via a ring that allows the chain to slide up & down. She's gotten into a habit of fidgeting back & forth which means I have to move the milk bucket around a lot and lose time milking. This way she can reach her hay, look around, nuzzle her baby, but can't mess around too much. She doesn't seem to mind it and is still giving 3 to 4 quarts of milk after 4 to 5 hours separation from Doug.
Our hearth has been doing yeoma'am's duty, curing squash, ripening peppers (in paper bags with an apple for ethylene gas), drying beans and wet outerwear. The kitties will be happy when there's room for them to bask in the heat again.
Here's a new batch of kraut-chi in the works. We added some grated beets to this one, so it's now pink-chi.
We had to do a rush harvest of all the peppers left in the garden, thanks to the sub-freezing nights we've had lately. They weren't all fully ripened, but look at the color on those Jimmy Nardellos!
We put a light in the coop for the hens, to help them keep laying as the days get shorter. They get a couple hours, morning and night. At bedtime, they tend to go in & out like it was a poultry night club. Mornings, they get up in the dark and are looking for scratch while it's pitch black. I've never had hens who liked the dark, but as long as they're happy, we're happy....
