White Gold: The Rise and Fall of Catskill Cauliflower

Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas

[00:00:00] Laura Sanford: I married a man from Margaretville, and he was teaching me about the history of Margaretville, and, of course, it included the cauliflower fields that were prevalent here, and I said, "Well, how do you cook cauliflower?" And he said, "All you have to do is put a lot of cream on it, and that does it."

[00:00:22] Frank, Windy & Family: So what do I like about cauliflower is that it's white, you can get the purple one, the green spiky one, make soups out of it, we tried making rice, we bake it, we fry it with a little breadcrumbs. It's pretty much the coolest flower out there that you can eat. It's like a chameleon. It's really good.

[00:00:43] Erin Higgins: The first time I came to the Cauliflower Festival, I had my first cauliflower soup, which had changed my life forever, and I am now a super fan of cauliflower, so thank you, Cauliflower Festival, and thank you, Catskills!

[00:00:55] Brett Barry: This September, the Margaretville Cauliflower Festival celebrates its 20th year. Don't worry, you didn't miss it. Those voices you just heard are from a couple years back. On Saturday, September 21st, from 11 to 4, feel free to stop by the "Kaatscast" table and share your favorite cauliflower recipes and stories, and if you're thinking, "Well, that's interesting, but why cauliflower? Well, Catskill farmers drew a lot of it in the early 20th century and in a good year referred to it as white gold. To shed some light on the history of Catskill cauliflower, we talked to historian Diane Galusha, who once wrote a book about it when cauliflower was king. Stay tuned for the fascinating history of cauliflower in the Catskills with Diane Galusha, right after this.

[00:01:47] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by... The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for the local region, such as the Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, Cobleskill Herald, and Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email: mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past and learn about the ingenuity of the historic milling industry. Watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2024 exploration days, visit hanfordmills.org.

[00:02:28] Diane Galusha: Hi, I'm Diane Galusha, President of the Historical Society of the Town of Middletown, and the author of a little booklet printed 20 years ago called "When Cauliflower Was King."

[00:02:39] Brett Barry: And when you say, "Middletown," some people think about another town, which is south of the Catskills, but the town of Middletown encompasses what?

[00:02:47] Diane Galusha: The town of Middletown is in Delaware County, not that... Orange County, where the city of Middletown is. Middletown incorporates two villages, Fleischmanns and Margaretville, and several hamlets. Arkville, New Kingston, Halcottsville, Dunraven, what am I forgetting something? I know I'm gonna pay for that.

[00:03:15] Brett Barry: And this was kind of the epicenter of the cauliflower, and do you say, "Cauliflower, cauliflower?"

[00:03:23] Diane Galusha: Well, I... I call it cauliflower, but I have seen it actually written "COLLY [C-O-L-L-Y]-FLOWER," so I think that it was referred to as cauliflower just because it was maybe easier to say than call, you know, but historically I, you know, I think it was cauliflower.

[00:03:44] Brett Barry: How did cauliflower come to the Catskills?

[00:03:47] Diane Galusha: That is an interesting question. William Van Benschoten and his wife, Thankful Van Benschoten lived up on Margaretville Mountain and had a farm up there, and they had family on Long Island where cauliflower had been commercially grown for ten years or so. I think they got some plants there and/or seeds from folks on Long Island and decided to try it in the Catskills and see how it would do because it seemed to be doing pretty well on Long Island, and I think the Van Benschotens were looking for some... some way to supplement their income from the dairy, so the legend is that Thankful planted some of these cauliflower seedlings in her window boxes in her kitchen, lo and behold, they grew, and it offered some promise of... of an interesting cash crop, so the next year they planted 200 and the following year they planted 2,000 and they were selling their cauliflower to boarding houses and hotels. The Van Benschotens got started in the 1890s, and you know their neighbors began to take note and began to do the same.

[00:05:07] Brett Barry: By 1910, you write that there were 18 acres planted in Delaware County compared to almost 1,500 acres in Suffolk County, where it was coming from or had kind of originated in the Long Island area, but that increased exponentially by 1918; there were 230 acres in the Catskills devoted to cauliflower. 1924: 700, 1931: 3,000, so it grew and grew and people were catching on. This was, I guess, a good hedge against the dairy farming business?

[00:05:40] Diane Galusha: Yeah, and as soon as people showed that they were making a little money off of it, it seemed as though this is a crop that would... that would thrive in the Catskills, you know, having cold nights and our cool nights anyway in the summer and excellent soils for this particular crop. Lots of minerals that cauliflower seemed to need and want and did really well in. Farm families at the time had, you know, were generally big. It generally had a number of young ones, and there was a lot of work to growing cauliflower, so they put everybody to work in the family and, you know, did everything from putting the seeds in the dirt in cold frames; basically, they would cook the dirt first to get rid of any bugs or microbes that might attack the seeds, and then as they grew, they... the seedlings got transplanted and then they got put out in the field. They had to be, you know, hoed and tended to; they had to be fertilized and...

[00:06:44] Brett Barry: And when you say, "They cooked the soil," they were building fires on top of the grounds to eliminate...

[00:06:50] Diane Galusha: Well, not on top of the ground. The soil would be put in a container and heated. They weren't heating the ground itself. They were either wood fires or... or gas to heat the dirt, and one woman, you know, told me that she just loved the smell because it meant spring was here or about to be here. Wilma Jones's father was Imer Conro, and she said that he used to say, "You could make so much money in cauliflower." One year you could buy a Cadillac, and then the next year you couldn't afford to put a license plate on it. It was that volatile sometimes. There were people who paid for new barns, who paid for new dining room sets; one woman said that her college education was partially paid for by cauliflower proceeds. There was also Brussels sprouts that people grew. One woman in Bovina said that their Brussels sprouts basically paid for their house. They bought a house for $8,000 or something like that or a farm. They made it over time with the Brussels sprouts.

[00:07:57] Brett Barry: Which means that at this point in time, the heyday of cauliflower farming [1920 to 1950], Americans must have been eating a lot of cauliflower and Brussels sprouts.

[00:08:10] Diane Galusha: It would stand to reason.

[00:08:12] Diane Galusha & Brett Barry: Ha-ha-ha!

[00:08:14] Diane Galusha: Yeah, well, you know, it was interesting, too, because there were promotional efforts to explain to women in downstate homes and also restaurateurs, you know, what you can do with cauliflower because a lot of people were unfamiliar with it. It started out being kind of a... a high-class vegetable [that] because it was so labor intensive and the seed was kind of expensive and you needed, you know, you needed to pay somebody 25 cents an hour to go out there and work in the field, and so it cost a lot of money, so it was expensive on the other end as well to buy it in the market, and so it was considered a little bit high-class, but it became more accepted and acceptable as more and more cauliflower came on the market from different areas, too. I mean, Long Island was still producing a lot of cauliflower. Western New York [Erie County] also produced a lot of cauliflower, so with additional supply, the prices came down, and they began to show people how to fix it, how to eat it, you know, what... what to serve with it, and later in the 30s, cauliflower growing cooperatives were established. There were three in this area: one in the Bovina area, one in Walton, and one here in Margaritaville. They produced a cookbook.

[00:09:35] Brett Barry: You wrote about one of these booklets in your booklet, kind of billboarding the qualities of Catskill's cauliflower, and here's what that says, "The ideal mountain soil supplies Catskill Mountain cauliflower with the minerals, which are assimilated by the human system and are so necessary to good health. Food that accelerates the gland action must be rich in vitamins, minerals, and supply roughage to promote peristalsis of the intestines. Sun-bathed Catskill Mountain cauliflower meets the requirements."

[00:10:08] Diane Galusha: Yum! I'm going home and have some for dinner tonight.

[00:10:12] Brett Barry: But you can't because it won't be Catskill cauliflower.

[00:10:16] Diane Galusha: Yeah.

[00:10:16] Brett Barry: It all folded up, so you'd need to be buying cauliflower from probably California or something. What happened to the industry here?

[00:10:27] Diane Galusha: Well, let's see. Cauliflower is susceptible to something called "brown rot," which began to infect fields, and the other thing was competition. I mean, those Long Island growers, you know, they had proximity to the market. They didn't have, you know, two stones for every dirt to worry about like the folks here in the Catskills. It was a little easier to grow things down there, even though the Catskill farmers would tell you that Long Island cauliflower didn't hold a candle to Catskill Mountain cauliflower because of... of the richness of the soil here, but, be that as it may, there was a lot of competition that was kind of a double-edged sword when... when everything worked... the crops were beautiful and abundant, and that, of course, lowered the prices because everybody had cauliflower to sell. On the other hand, if you had, you know, a rotten season and you didn't get any cauliflower, there was that, too, so there had to be this weird balance that... that worked some years and didn't work other years, you know, it really cost quite a lot to grow a crate of cauliflower. Crates, you know, usually held about 12 big heads of cauliflower.

[00:11:37] Brett Barry: And crates were another business that was created here in the Catskills; people who weren't directly involved with growing the vegetable would build the crates, truck the product, lots of other things that were necessary to sell it.

[00:11:51] Diane Galusha: Right.

[00:11:52] Brett Barry: Can you tell me a little bit about the... the auction process? I understand that there was a... an auction platform right in Margaretville where buyers, maybe from the city, would name their price for different grades of cauliflower.

[00:12:05] Diane Galusha: Right, a couple of days a week in the high season in the... in the harvest season [August, September], the commission merchants from New York City markets would arrive and would look over the trucks full of cauliflower that farmers would drive down; this was in the thirties, late thirties, and into the forties up to about 1950. Farmers would bring entire loads down, commission merchants would look at them, and there would be a bidding process depending on the quality [and] the amount maybe, and the need on the part of the markets. This was a... an auction that was mutually run by the three cauliflower cooperatives, so then there would be trucks. Additional trucks waiting to truck those loads down to whichever commission merchants bought them. The truckers would then leave immediately and drive all the way to the city and arrive there at night and, you know, wait their turn to offload and drive all the way back in the years, definitely in the years before the Thruway and certainly in the years before Route 28 was improved to the... to the point that it is, so it was an arduous trip and, you know, it was just part of this long process that began very early in the spring with cooking that dirt.

[00:13:32] Brett Barry: It's funny you mention that because with my modern mind, I'm thinking about old clunky trucks on the Thruway, but no, it was old clunky trucks on...

[00:13:40] Diane Galusha: Old clunky roads.

[00:13:43] Brett Barry: So it was always a fussy crop. It was a fussy crop in the 20s, in the 30s, in the 40s... was there something other reason that by about 1950 it all kind of dissipated?

[00:13:55] Diane Galusha: Well, there was a big flood in 1950 that took out the auction block and did considerable damage to a lot of farm fields, and prior to that, there was the Pepacton Reservoir, which was constructed in the 1940s and through 1954, and took out many, many farms [river bottom farms] that grew some wonderful cauliflower, so it was kind of a one-two punch that and the competition and the brown rot and people just basically gave up the growing of cauliflower on a commercial scale.

[00:14:31] Brett Barry: But one family didn't give it up, Ruff. Tell me about Ruff Farms and how they continued all the way up until 1995.

[00:14:41] Diane Galusha: Mm-hmm. Yeah, Ruff Farms was a big truck farm in the New Kingston Valley, and they also had a dairy farm, but they utilized the flats there along the Plattekill stream to grow cauliflower and zucchini and kale, I think, to some extent, and other produce, and they had a big packing house there; they employed a lot of people, seasonal workers, and they... they had used these big tractor trailers to truck their produce to markets in Baltimore and in Washington and in New York City and in Boston. They found a way to... to keep going into the 90s... 1990s. You know, people used to go to the farm to the... to the packing house there, and they would have paper grocery sacks and you could fill up a grocery sack for a buck of cauliflower. It was pretty astounding.

[00:15:43] Brett Barry: You remember that?

[00:15:44] Diane Galusha: Yeah, I remember exploding a pressure cooker full of cauliflower, and boy, I want to tell you that, that didn't smell too good. That was... that was pretty, pretty awful.

[00:15:57] Brett Barry: So just like today's farmers, farmers in the Catskills during this era would import workers from outside of the region where they were drawing that... that labor from.

[00:16:07] Diane Galusha: There were a number of folks who came from Puerto Rico. This would have been in, you know, maybe the 50s and 60s for those big truck farms that were these folks were... were needed to... to tend to the fields and harvest the... the crop. They... they lived in not great housing, but they lived in cottages on the farms. They stayed pretty much on the farm unless they had to go into town to do the laundry or... or whatever, but they were, you know, willing and... and hard workers. I know the Ruffs used folks from Puerto Rico as did a number of farms out in Stamford and Harpersfield, so some of them actually stayed on and found something to love about the Catskills and they stayed here and... and took work in places like Catskill Craftsmen over in Stamford and... and other places and, you know, some of them would... would travel the country after the cauliflower season and, you know, follow the other crops in the country: grapes and... and tomatoes down south, and so, you know, it was... it was a big help for local farmers who couldn't find enough people to handle these big crops.

[00:17:27] Brett Barry: Cauliflower was known in the Catskills as "white gold" to some, and farmhands would keep lookout—at nighttime—for not only deer and preventing deer from eating the crop, but thieves. You're right, was it really that much of a commodity?

[00:17:45] Diane Galusha: Well, I remember as a teenager, kids talking about going farming. We're going farming tonight, and they would, you know, because they could, you know, they could go and swipe something out of a roadside field. As far as the cauliflower is concerned, I don't think it was people trying to take advantage: pick it and sell it necessarily. There might have been some of that, but there were people who were hungry, and not everybody had a farm; not everybody had an acre to put in cauliflower, and so, I... I think, you know, there's always some thievery. I think the farms just account for that, but I spoke to folks who, as kids, were assigned to go and sleep outside in a tent near the edge of the fields where the deer would come in and they'd have to be sort of vigilant all night and get up and yell and shout and, you know, I think it was probably an adventure for most kids to be able to do that on a summer night.

[00:18:38] Brett Barry: And these interviews that you conducted for the research and writing of this book 20 years ago, you were still able to find people who were... had those memories of being living on the farms?

[00:18:54] Diane Galusha: And sometimes at the Cauliflower Festival, I'll encounter people... 70s, 80s, and remember as kids helping to plant, helping to tie up the leaves because you had to tie the leaves around the head of the cauliflower to keep it white. There are people who still remember it and like to explain how they sat in the back of a cauliflower planter pulled by the tractor driven by a brother or a father and did their part to plant another crop of cauliflower.

[00:19:28] Iris Mead: Hi, I'm Iris Mead, and my father Stanley Mead, before he became a Maytag man... he used to drive a truck picking up cauliflower from the farms in this Delaware County area and drive them to New York City for sale down there.

[00:19:46] Jake Fairbairn: My name is Jake Fairbairn. I own Tree Juice Maple Syrup. I live on the farm that my grandfather bought in October of 1930. He paid for it by growing cauliflower before my dad was born in 1937, so he paid it off in something less than seven years, that's all I know, but he did it in the middle of the Great Depression by growing and selling cauliflower, which he was really good at. I love cauliflower, yeah. I'm actually partial to Brussels sprouts, which was another crop that my grandfather grew some. My dad said that, "In those days, you either grew cauliflower or you borrowed money from a farmer who did grow cauliflower to pay your mortgage."

[00:20:21] Brett Barry: What led you to write this book 20 years ago? I mean, you're a historian. You write books about the Catskills. Was there something about cauliflower that initially caught your eye or attracted you to that history?

[00:20:33] Diane Galusha: Well, I'll be honest, I didn't know anything about the cauliflower industry until Carol Molnar came up with the idea of having a cauliflower festival, and I said, "A cauliflower festival, what are you talking about?" And she said, "She reminded me that she lived on the farm that William Van Benschoten and Thankful started this industry at," you know, she thought she was interested in the history just because she was living it essentially or living in the midst of... of it, so, you know, it gradually grew on folks, and the Chamber of Commerce was among them, and the Historical Society was beginning to be formed, and so we thought, "Well, let's give it a shot and see if we can find a niche here and find some interest in bringing people to the area to learn about and celebrating Catskill agriculture; then the festival is still going on." The 20th will be held on September 21st this year.

[00:21:30] Brett Barry: Can you be found at the Cauliflower Festival every year?

[00:21:34] Diane Galusha: Yes, we... the Historical Society has the History Tent each year at a prime location on the Margaretville Village Parkgrounds where the festival is held, and we have an exhibit of cauliflower history, artifacts, crates, you know, knives used to cut the cauliflower leaves off, and all kinds of interesting stuff, yeah, and every year we also have a separate little exhibit about some aspect of farming or rural life, the history of making a living from the soil in the Catskills.

[00:22:13] Brett Barry: "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a biweekly production of Silver Hollow Audio. This week, we welcome our new production intern, Olivia Sippel, already at the controls during this interview with Diane Galusha. Transcription by Jerome Kazlauskas. Please be sure to follow the show wherever you get your podcasts and give us a rating so more people can find us. If you're a subscriber to our newsletter, see this week's edition for a scan of my own grandmother's vintage recipe for curried cauliflower. Sign up for the newsletter at kaatscast.com for behind-the-scenes stories, photos, and more, and if you're coming to the Cauliflower Festival, we'll have a table there, so come say, "Hello!" I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and eat your cauliflower.

[00:23:04] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is brought to you by Ulster Savings Bank, an award-winning bank where community matters. Meet the friendly staff at their Phoenicia and Woodstock locations. Call (866) 440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender; and by Briars & Brambles Books, the go-to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily! For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call (518) 750-8599.

[00:23:45] Harry Anifantakis: My name's Harry. I'm from Roxbury, New York, in the Catskills, and Cauliflower I discovered was great with potatoes. You mash the potatoes; you mash the cauliflower; you mix them together and spice them up, and damn, that's good!

[00:24:01] Elizabeth Alvarez: Don't forget the garlic, Harry.

[00:24:03] Harry Anifantakis: Oh yeah, don't spare the garlic and other spices, whatever... whatever you like.

[00:24:08] Carol O'Beirne: I like cauliflower soup because I like to add cream to it and some cheese, and it's a simple thing to make, and you have a great dinner like in a half an hour.

[00:24:19] Brett Barry: Do you have a favorite cauliflower recipe? Let's back up. Do you eat cauliflower?

[00:24:24] Diane Galusha: Oh, I do.

[00:24:25] Brett Barry: Yeah.

[00:24:25] Diane Galusha: I love it—actually, my favorite way to eat it. I have two favorite ways, and neither requires any skill in the kitchen whatsoever, which is good because I don't have much. Raw with ranch dip—who doesn't like that, and I also love to roast it with garlic and oil in the oven if it's a cold day, and I also like to put it on the grill with other vegetables and just grill it. That's the way I love to eat my cauliflower.

[00:25:00] Campbell Brown: "Kaatscast" is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation, and by listeners like you! If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so at kaatscast.com. Thank you!