Fruit (Mostly)
We had an abundance of mangoes, papaias and bananas
here, but the pride of the islands, the most delicious
fruit known to men, cherimoya, was not in season. It
has a soft pulp, like a pawpaw, and is eaten with a
spoon.
-Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii (1866)
Route 25 winds through the farmland and vineyards of the
North Fork of Long Island. By the side of the road in
the village of Cutchogue sits the Wickham family farm
stand, where the main attraction is the wonderful local
fruit. If you stop there once during the high summer
season, it’s almost impossible to drive straight past
ever again. As you approach, you’ll start thinking about
the extraordinary white and yellow peaches or the tiny
Suffolk red grapes. You’ll wonder what that morning’s
sweet corn is like. Then your mind will wander to one of
the many varieties of tomato; then to the blueberries,
blackberries, and raspberries. By the time you’re
contemplating what’s in the cheese locker today and you
remember the homemade doughnuts, you’ve turned off the
road and into the dusty parking lot.
The current custodians of the family business are
Prudence Wickham and her husband, Dan Heston, along with
Prudence’s uncle Tom Wickham. Other family members share
ownership, but these three live and work here. They’re
part of a very long line of Wickhams who have been
farming this land since 1680. When Prudence talks about
the land grab the family suffered after the
Revolutionary War, she sounds like she’s still miffed
about it on her ancestors’ behalf. More recent
incursions from pillaging property developers have been
fended off. The family has sold development rights to
their land, mostly to the state and county, and it’s
good to think that the monstrous and ugly houses long a
feature of the South Fork, and which are now cropping up
to the north, won’t be built on this bit of eastern Long
Island at least.
This is the kind of place where you can feel close to
the source of what you’re eating. Directly behind the
structure that houses the retail operation are the
pick-your-own apple and peach trees. Buy some of the
family’s produce and talk to Prudence Wickham for a
couple of minutes. She grew all the crops here, so she
can tell you everything you could possibly ever think to
ask about them, including their lineage and the history
of the land they grow on. The location of the farmhouse
has changed more than once. It’s now situated down a
lane that begins behind the stand and through the fruit
trees. “You want to have a buffer between you and the
rest of the community,” says Prudence. “Everybody wants
to live next to a farm, until they live next to a farm.”
Cutchogue is situated on a narrow sliver of rich
farmland between the abundant waters of Peconic Bay and
Long Island Sound. Says Prudence, “It used to be that
anyone who was farming out here was also working the
water. When my great-grandfather was farming he did as
much with the water as he did with the land. He did the
farming in the summer; in the winter he was mostly
working the bay and had one of the largest fleets of
boats out here doing commercial fishing. That has
changed because farming has specialized more and the
knowledge required to put these crops out has increased.
Farmers have been forced to make the decision: Are you
going to go fishing or are you going to stick with the
land?” The Wickhams decided to stay ashore, although
nothing is far from the water in this part of the
world-there’s water on three sides of the farmland. The
Wickhams own about 292 acres, but some of that is salt
marsh, where food crops won’t grow. After the Second
World War there was an initiative to make the country
self-sufficient in food. The Army Corps of Engineers
helped design a system of dikes that drains when the
tide is low and blocks the water when the tide is high.
Priorities have changed since the forties. “Imagine
messing around with the wetlands today,” Prudence says.
“Drying them up so you could farm. It’s a whole
different culture, and people’s expectations are
different. We’re careful with them.”
The location does have its benefits: water retains heat
better than soil, so among other things, the buds of
fruit trees and bushes don’t freeze during cold snaps in
the spring. The other factor is the sun-fruit needs a
lot of sunlight to ripen, and Cutchogue officially gets
more hours of sunshine than any other town in New York
State; more than the sometimes fog-bound Hamptons, a few
miles south. So the Wickhams are able to grow fruit you
wouldn’t expect to find this far north, like nectarines
and apricots.
When the Long Island Railroad started running between
the city of Brooklyn and Greenport in 1844, no one was
growing nectarines in Cutchogue. Farming was
concentrated on vegetables like Brussels sprouts,
potatoes, broccoli, and cauliflower. The farm also
produced seeds, and at one time the Wickhams were the
world’s largest suppliers of cauliflower, broccoli, and
Brussels sprouts seeds. The railroad changed the
farmers’ focus from local markets to the big one in New
York City. Today, if you take the first left from the
farm stand, you’ll find yourself on Depot Road, so
called because there used to be a train stop there, with
a storehouse to hold potatoes for shipment to New York.
Prudence’s father, Jack, remembers the building being in
use when he was a teenager.
For years the business was strictly wholesale. Then the
farm started producing peaches and plums. Initially the
fruit was sold from the back of a truck, then from a
skid that was pulled down to the roadside every morning
and back up to the farmhouse at night. After the Second
World War, Prudence’s grandfather John Wickham was …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Eat This!
by Ian Jackman
Copyright © 2007 by Ian Jackman.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Harper Paperbacks
Copyright © 2007
Ian Jackman
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-06-088590-8
