When I first set out to make these chocolate-covered peanut-butter balls, I intended not to refer to them by their traditional Midwestern moniker. Surely, I thought, neither the State of Ohio nor its flagship public university can claim any special relationship to sweetened peanut butter in a chocolate shell. There’s no reason I have to invoke tOSU’s mascot in the middle of football season in Michigan. But then I found some pictures of actual buckeyes nuts, and I’ll be damned if they don’t look uncannily like their namesake.

Real buckeyes are the seeds of trees in the genus Aesculus, which includes between 13 and 19 species (depending on how you count) that grow all across the Northern Hemisphere. The name “buckeye” is generally attributed to an American Indian word for the seeds and the nutritious mash they made from them after roasting—“hetuck,” which means “eye of a buck.” One species in particular, Aesculus glabra, became commonly known as the “Ohio buckeye,” even though it grows throughout the American Midwest and Great Plains regions, ranging from southern Ontario to northern Texas, apparently because the botanist who gave the tree its English name first encountered it on the banks of the Ohio River.

However, there’s also a California buckeye and a Texas buckeye and even a Japanese buckeye. And the seeds of all the trees in the genus—including Aesculus glabra—are also commonly known as horse chestnuts, after the larger family they belong to (Hippocastanaceae). So there doesn’t seem to be any simple botanical or taxonomical reason why the “buckeye” became so firmly associated with the state of Ohio.

How the Buckeye Became Ohioan and Ohioans Became Buckeyes

According to one story, it all goes back the spectacularly-named Ebenezer Sproat (or Sprout), who was a Colonel of the Continental Army in the Revolutionary War. After an unsuccessful post-war stint as a merchant, he became a surveyor for the state of Rhode Island and bought stock in the Ohio Company of Associates, which sent him west with the group led by Rufus Putnam that founded Marietta, Ohio, the first permanent American settlement in the Northwest Territory. There, Sproat became the first sheriff in the NW Territory. And aside from being a relatively prominent citizen, he also happened to be quite tall and, “of perfect proportions,” according to Wikipedia, whatever that’s supposed to mean. The Indians in Ohio were impressed with his height and/or his importance, and thus came to refer to him as “Hetuck” or “Big Buckeye.” A similar account suggests that it was mostly his height—claiming he was 6’4” (which would have been tall indeed in the 18th C.) and that he earned the sobriquet on September 2, 1788 when he was leading a procession of judges to the Marietta courthouse. Indians watching the giant of a man walk by began calling out “Hetuck, hetuck.”  Read more

Not Your Famous Pop Arist’s Tomato Soup

I love Campbell’s classic condensed tomato soup. I know, me and half the rest of the Western world, right? There’s a reason it’s an icon. I’m not saying it makes me special or anything. But I really, really love it. My freshman year of high school, I made a Campbell’s Tomato Soup can costume for Halloween out of two giant macramé rings and some red, white, and mustard-yellow felt. That was before everyone had cell phones and all cell phones were cameras, so you’ll just have to believe me when I say it was a decent facsimile. I wore it again on Halloween my sophomore year of college, and my roommate went as Andy Warhol. No one got it. We didn’t care.

I’ve mostly abandoned the other processed foods I loved as a kid, like Kraft Mac & Cheese, Nissin Cup O’Noodles, and the generic versions of Lucky Charms and Apple Jacks. But I always have tomato soup in my cupboard. I had never even thought about making fresh tomato soup before, because why bother? Campbell’s is so good.

And then, this summer, I just kept finding myself stuck with mountains of too-ripe tomatoes (and a lot of rotting ones that ended up in the trash bin). I did the fresh tomato pasta sauce thing. I did the fresh salsa thing. But eventually, all I could think about when I looked at the endlessly-refilling pile was the tomato juice I made a couple weeks ago for the tomato bars. There were a few ounces left over, and as I drank them, I regretted the fact that I didn’t have gallons of it. It reminded me of a velvety, chilled version of Campbell’s soup.

You Can Never Go Home Again

Looking back, I feel like that juice was my first tentative bite of a forbidden apple. Now that I’ve fallen to temptation and made fresh tomato soup not once, but twice, I’m a little afraid that I won’t be able to go back my old canned stand-by. What if I don’t like it as much anymore? What if I’ve spoiled myself?

It would be one thing if it was entirely different—the way baked macaroni and cheese is so unlike Kraft, the two don’t even really compete. Apples and oranges. But it turns out that if you cut up some really ripe tomatoes and then simmer them for 15-20 minutes, maybe with some sautéed onion and a dash of sugar and salt, maybe with some jalapeno and/or ginger, and then you strain out all the solids…it’s almost exactly like Campbell’s, except better. Transcendent. It’s the purest, richest tomato flavor I’ve ever tasted, permeated by sweet onion and spice. It feels like a warm hug in a bowl, like a last gift from Summer delivering you gently into the Fall.

I didn’t even want to put crackers in it because they just would have diluted it. I might eat it alongside a grilled cheese sandwich someday, perhaps something snooty like port salut with mango chutney, or raclette with ham and pickle slices…but there will be no dipping. This soup is the platonic ideal of cooked tomato all by itself. 

However, I guess since I figured I’d already ruined myself for Campbell’s, I decided: why not make a creamy version? Same process, but I cooked the tomato down a little more before straining it and then made a quick roux to thicken the milk before whisking the tomato back in. This time, I garnished it with a few parmesan curls and some chopped fresh parsley. As I was eating it, I got to thinking that what would really put it over the top is some grilled cheese croutons: sharp cheddar or gruyere melted between two thin slices of bread and then cut into bite-sized pieces, tossed in a little oil or melted butter and sprinkled with dried parsley, garlic powder, and maybe some grated parmesan and then toasted for 10-15 minutes in a hot oven until golden brown and crisp all over. Of course, that’s really just gilding the lily

Both ways, it’s fantastic and deceptively comforting, given that it may be robbing you of one of your most enduring childhood pleasures. I just hope I don’t find myself tomato soup-less when the first cold front hits and I’m out of fresh tomatoes. When I have to go running sheepishly back to Campbell’s, which I inevitably will, I hope its familiarity will overwhelm the inevitable disappointment. And maybe that will be the time to break out the grilled cheese croutons. Read more

My Most Ambivalent Holiday

I was raised in a Union family. We checked clothing labels and only bought the ones that said “Made in the U.S.” We didn’t buy grapes because of César Chávez. Every year, my dad went to the Eugene V. Debs Memorial Kazoo Night where he watched a Tigers game from the bleachers and between innings, hummed “Solidarity Forever” in unison with bunch of other Union guys. He would bring home magnets that said “Stick it to capitalist tools” and sponges that said “Wipe up capitalist scum” and t-shirts emblazoned with a twist on Debs’ most famous quote:

While there is a lower class, I am in it, and 
while there is a criminal element I am of it, and 
while there is a soul in prison, I am not free, and
while there is a game in Tiger’s Stadium,
I am in the bleachers.

My feelings about labor organization have gotten more complicated over the years. I’ve had to reckon with the fact that unions are fallible and that labor history is marred by strategic missteps and ugly bigotry. The current popularity of anti-union sentiment can’t be entirely attributed to Reaganomics and  right-wing campaigns—unions themselves bear at least some responsibility. However, that awareness—the idea that little-u unions can be wrong—seems to exist on a different spatio-temporal plane than my belief that the idea of Unions, or Unions qua Unions are good. That thought/feeling is deeper and also somehow before my ability to think about why unions make mistakes or the erosion of labor organization in the U.S. I guess it’s something like an article of faith.

That’s not to say I don’t have reasons for being pro-Union. I think all workers deserve a say in their conditions of employment. I think more egalitarian resource distribution is both morally and practically a good thing (for some of the same reasons that Robert Reich mentioned in his recent NYTimes op-ed). I believe that protections against some of the worst abuses of workers in the name of profit wouldn’t exist without labor organization, like the minimum wage and child labor laws. But ultimately, it’s impossible for me to separate those beliefs, which might be subjected to rational debate and supported or contested with evidence, from a more inchoate “Union = good” thought/feeling that precedes and undergirds them.

Ultimately, that faith eclipses my cynicism about how the holiday was only established to try to placate workers who were (justifiably) outraged about the fact that federal troops called in to put an end to the Pullman Strike had killed 13 workers and wounded 57. Or how the September date was set to distance it from International Worker’s Day, which commemorates the Haymarket Massacre and tends towards far more radical agitation and demonstration. Or how those injustices and the accomplishments of organized labor have largely slipped from our national memory. In many ways, Labor Day itself is a far better symbol of how unions are pacified and convinced to delay—often indefinitely—their pursuit of more radical demands than it is of the victories of organized labor.

And then there’s the fact that it’s also the symbolic end of summer. The end of sundresses and afternoons when it’s too hot to do anything but take a nap near an open window and hope for the occasional breeze. The end of my annual half-hearted attempt to control a small tomato jungle. It is the official point when I can no longer pretend I’ll ever make up for the gap between everything I had intended to do and the summer that has actually eclipsed—with too few meandering walks, too little of my dissertation written, and far too few mint juleps.

Despite all of that, I love Labor Day for basically the same reason I love Thanksgiving and remain grudgingly fond of Memorial Day and the Fourth of July and, to a  lesser extent, Mother’s and Father’s Days. For one, they remind me to appreciate and celebrate things that I am truly grateful for. And moreover, my primary association with them has way less to do with the ostensible reasons for the holidays than it does with the way I celebrate them: by taking a day off work, getting together with friends and family, and eating some great food.

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