plant" because its flavor resembles that 

 of fried oysters. 



Cardoon is another vegetable 

 grown at Tryon Palace that has fallen 

 out of favor. Cultivated for at least 3,000 

 years, cardoon {Cynara cardunculus) is 

 an ancestor of the globe artichoke. 

 Colonial cooks blanched its stalks like 

 celery and served them as a side dish, in 



stews or soups, pickled, or dipped in 

 batter and fried. 



Other vegetables grown in my 

 backyard garden may not belong in 

 Tryon Palace's kitchen garden. The 

 most notable is the tomato. Named from 

 the Aztec word tomatl, the tomato was 

 originally a weedy, small-fruited native 

 of Peru, Chile, Bolivia and Ecuador 



Above: Jerusalem artichoke 

 At right: eggplant 



north to Mexico. Spanish conquistadors 

 found the tomatl growing in Emperor 

 Montezuma's gardens in 1519 and carried 

 the fruit to Europe. There, it became an 

 essential part of many cuisines, especially 

 in southern Italy, where it was called the 

 pomodoro (golden apple). The tomato 

 was greeted more skeptically in England, 

 however, and it wasn't described as a food 

 plant in the American colonies until 

 Jefferson's Garden Book in 1781. It is 

 doubtful that tomatoes would have yet 

 been grown in New Bern during Tryon 's 

 governorship. 



Unlike most backyard gardens today, 

 the kitchen garden also holds a wide 

 variety of heirloom vegetables. Most 

 modern vegetables are fairly recent 

 hybrids. With only a few corporate 

 agribusinesses monopolizing the seed 

 market, fewer plant varieties are culti- 

 vated, and a growing number of gardeners 

 purposefully collect and raise older 

 genetic varieties (known as heirlooms) to 

 preserve them. Finding heirloom varieties 

 dating back to Tryon 's day is difficult but 

 not impossible. One of the carrot varieties 

 at Tryon Palace today — the "Long 

 Orange Improved" — dates to Dutch 

 breeders in 1620 and has been cultivated 

 in North America for 350 years. 



The kitchen garden at Tryon Palace 

 also mingles herbs and vegetables, a 



practice true to 

 the colonial 

 period but much 

 less common 

 today as garden- 

 ers tend to 

 cultivate separate 

 herb gardens. The 

 herbs originally 

 in the kitchen 

 garden would 

 have been used 

 for culinary 

 purposes, but a 

 colonial kitchen 

 garden also 

 functioned as a 

 source of 

 medicines. Julie 

 Craig, the current 

 kitchen gardener, 



20 WINTER 1998 



