Hill Creek Farm

‘Ole Pepperpot’ Pepper (Capsicum annuum var. annuum) is the answer to the Mid-Atlantic grower who wants a bountiful harvest of genuinely hot peppers and wants to be able to save seed so that they can keep growing those peppers into the future.  

Pepper plants are grown as annuals, but in their native lands (which never know frost), they are perennials.  The plant, when grown from seed, feels it has all the time in the world to set fruit and even more time for that fruit to ripen.

In lands where we know frost and the cold of winter, growing peppers from seed to seed can be a frustrating business.  Sweet peppers can take until the day before the first frost to fully ripen and many colorful and fiery hot peppers can’t be grown here in Southeastern Pennsylvania at all.

‘Ole Pepperpot’ first ripens in August and continues prolifically until the first frost.  The ripe red peppers (which look like a cayenne because, as William Woys Weaver related below, it is one) actually produce enough of a harvest that the grower and the grower’s entire extended family can eat all the hot peppers they like in season and still have enough to sell fresh, dried as pods or in cute little jars of dried hot pepper powder.

Here​ is William Woys Weaver’s history of Ole Pepperpot:

“Perhaps it is best to begin with a soup called mondongo, a pepper called chiltepe, and Schell’s Long Red Cayenne. Schell’s pepper was essentially a selection of the large Mexican chiltepe pepper, trained to grow on a low bush for field culture. It was a variety sold to truck farmers in the 1920s by the Walter S. Schell seed company of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, as well as by William Henry Maule in Philadelphia. This pepper was intended to supply the kitchens of the Horn and Hardart cafeteria chain with peppers for its once-famous pepperpot soup, not to mention a number of soup and scrapple companies in the region that needed fresh cayenne for seasoning. Not only is the chiltepe a pepper of great antiquity, a pod of it floating in mondongo (Mexican tripe soup) was considered the only proper finishing touch by Mexican cooks. Philadelphia tripebased pepperpot is a Yankee relative of mondongo demanding a similar marriage of tripe and peppers. Most of the heirloom hot peppers that have survived in the Philadelphia region were connected, in one way or another, with the city’s pepperpot soup culture, especially in the heyday of the nineteenth century, when this spicy soup was sold by vendors in the street.

This background history provides the explanation for the name of the cayenne pepper under discussion. Ole Pepperpot is not nearly as hot as a true chiltepe, which may explain why it was more acceptable in upper-class cookery years ago. The pepper was preserved by two families of black Philadelphia caterers, the Augustins, who were famous nationally in the 1800s, and the de Baptistes, who later married into the Augustin clan. The Augustins did not raise the pepper themselves; someone raised it for them under contract. Yet interestingly enough, Ole Pepperpot contains a “blush” of chiltepe, for it ripens like a chiltepe, with a hint of orange at its extremities while still partially green. However, the pods are much different, being twisted, sometimes even curled, about 4 inches in length and 3/4 of an inch in diameter at the stem end. On the blossom end or tip of the pod there is usually a small hook that is sometimes quite pronounced. The plants are tall, often 3 1/2 feet, and branching. The pods ripen by midsummer and produce heavily until frost.

The Album Vilmorin (1873, 24) illustrated an identical cayenne, but yellow in color. If Ole Pepperpot came to America with the Augustins, then it arrived about 1816 while Peter Augustin served as chef to the Spanish ambassador in Washington. Beyond this, very little else is known about the early history of this pepper, except for two interesting coincidences. The Ram’s Horn pepper, preserved by the Fischer family in North Carolina since the early part of this century and now part of the Heritage Farm seed collection (SSE PEP 13), is similar in shape to Ole Pepperpot and may represent a collateral genetic line. Furthermore, the so-called Penis Pepper now so popular among pepper fanciers is a direct descendant of Ole Pepperpot. The tell-tale hook is still there, but sunken into a heavily wrinkled pod. Having crossed Ole Pepperpot with Elephant’s Trunk pepper to create a little monster called Love Gun, I know how this works.

In any case, it would appear that the nineteenth century ancestors of Ole Pepperpot were widely distributed along the coast of the eastern and southern United States. Because of its close association with black cookery in this country and the fact that seed came to my grandfather from Horace Pippin, history has set this pepper apart as one of the important representative heirlooms from the African-American community.”

Buried in all that text above is the nugget that Ole Pepperpot is the unique Philadelphia ingredient for pepperpot soup.  Believe it or not, other cuisines have tripe-based soups (as my Google search for the recipe revealed!) and they are liberally sprinkled with hot peppers.  But for true Philadelphia-style Pepperpot Soup, you need the Ole Pepperpot peppers.

Next blog post will be about my adventures with Pepperpot Soup, which was worth the effort.  But if you’re living in the Mid-Atlantic and frustrated about your ability to produce not only a really hot pepper, but the seed needed to produce those plants in your own growing area, add Ole Pepperpot to your rotation.

Also known as ‘Old Large Red’ or ‘Early Large Red’

Called by Hill Creek Farm customers, “The Tomato That Looks Like Flowers”

The Short Form:  Grow this tomato!

The Slightly Longer Form: (adapted from Gary Ibsen’s Tomatofest page):

Large Red tomato seeds produce indeterminate, regular-leaf tomato plants that yield heavily ribbed, flattened, beautiful, red, tomatoes that shout out terrific, complex, well-balanced, sweet flavors with that old-fashioned acidic ‘tang’. A perfect tomato for slicing fresh into sandwiches or salads.

The Shape: In this day of Emojis where pictures are as important as words, Large Red tomato is shaped like a child’s drawing of a flower.  It’s a fairly firm tomato, so the shape holds when sliced and makes a pretty pattern on a sandwich or in salads.

Although the name is generic enough to make one wince when typing in a Google search, the ribs are so distinctive that an Image search easily reveals everything the Internet knows about this tomato.

The Size:  This is an almost perfect tomato from the standpoint of growing (not fussy, not overly sprawling plants) and flavor (see Gary Ibsen’s description above and William Woys Weaver’s descriptions below).

Size, however, is where things get dicey – and most of that is because of the name “Large Red”.   Expectations are, that is it will be red (which it is) and large (well, er, um – and the hedging begins!).

First off, Large Red is an 18^th century tomato that hasn’t really been fiddled with since.  Tomatoes were a lot smaller in the 18^th century than they are today, so expectations of “large” were different.

Second, this is an early tomato and like many early tomatoes, it starts off strong, but peters out over the season.  You may indeed get several large (12 oz!) tomatoes in mid-July (85 days from transplant is the usual notation).  However, those very same plants by September may be producing cherry tomatoes that are just fine for tossing in to a salad or the sauce pot, but when someone asked you what that cute ribbed tomato is that tastes so great and you have to say. . . ‘Large Red’ . . . it gets embarrassing.

Which is too bad because this really is a great tasting and looking tomato.  But it won’t always be large.

The History:

According to William Woys Weaver in Heirloom Vegetable Gardening (check Amazon or your favorite bookseller for the most recent edition – new printing is coming soon):

“When American tomatoes are discussed for the period 1815 to 1865, Early Large Red is most consistently mentioned, even though it was known earlier in France during the eighteenth century. It is not a true commercial variety in the same sense as Earliana just discussed, for it is very close to its wild Mexican counterpart. Yet where large red tomatoes were grown in the country before the universal acceptance of this vegetable, Early Large Red was indeed the most common. In fact, it was recommended for kitchen gardens in several early garden books, including George Lindley’s Guide to Orchard and Kitchen Garden (1831, 555), and appeared repeatedly in horticultural works throughout the nineteenth century. The Album Vilmorin (1869, 12) depicted it under the name tomate rouge grosse, and H. Dwight Smith of Arlington, Virginia crossed it with Feejee to create the Arlington tomato introduced by B. K. Bliss & Sons of New York in 1873. Other heirloom tomatoes may be more exotic, but this one remains a classic in its plain old-fashioned way.

Early Large Red was not grown as a table fruit to be eaten raw; rather, its strength lies in its uses for cooking, in soups, ketchups, and especially in sauces. The fruit is red, the flavor excellent, but the flesh is mealy, as one would expect in a paste-type tomato. The vines are small — no longer than 4 feet — so the tomato is well adapted to small gardens. Most of the fruits are smooth, although some have light ribbing, and are about 2 1/2 inches in diameter. The skins are tough, a feature noted by Fearing Burr in 1865. Perfect fruit will contain 9 seed chambers. In humid weather the fruit is subject to cracking, and mature fruit even in dry weather will have distinct crack scars at regular intervals on the tomato. These white lines are typical on many early prehybrid tomato sorts.”

In personal correspondence, Weaver says, “As for the tomato (or tomata as it was called in the colonial period), George Washington ate this one in spite of wooden teeth, it was grown in colonial Williamsburg and Philadelphia, and Thomas Jefferson used it for sauce.  This is the tomato, along with Plate de Haiti, that formed the cornerstone of late 1700s Philadelphia cuisine. ‘French Sauce’ in those days meant tomata.  The flavor of this heirloom is unique, succulent.”

Before the Civil War, Large Red was one of the most commonly grown and well-documented tomato varieties in the country.  This popularity was most likely because the Shakers were growing it in Hancock, MA in the 1830s and then listed it in their New Lebanon, NY seed catalog in 1843. A listing in the 19^th century Shaker seed catalog generated similar excitement to a 20^th century listing in the Burpee seed catalog – everyone wanted to grow what the Shakers thought was worth growing.

And, of course, because it’s all over the Internet, here’s the famous Fearing Burr quote on this tomato from his Field and Garden Vegetables of America (published in 1865): “From the time of the introduction of the tomato to its general use in this country, the Large Red was almost the only kind cultivated, or even commonly known.”

There’s a reason this tomato has been popular in the US since the 18^th century.  It tastes good and it grows well with little fuss.  If you want an interesting looking tomato that has great tomato flavor and a fascinating history, grow this tomato!

Large Red tomatoes on the lower right.