How San Francisco got its Chinese produce
Displaced gold miners from China turned to farming, and grew fruit and vegetables they knew from home to feed California's first Chinatown. It's to their descendants that a San Francisco farmers' market owes its diversity
The diversity of produce at San Francisco’s popular thrice-weekly Ferry Plaza Farmers Market is a metaphor for the city itself. Jalapenos and fava beans sit alongside Pacific Sweetwater oysters and fuyu persimmons, all trucked in from farms just a few hours’ drive away.
As Peter Rudolph, executive chef at Madera, the signature restaurant at Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, in nearby Menlo Park, takes us around the market, he points out several boxes of greens he’s ordered from a stallholder.
“They’re choi sum,” he says, but the small, feather-light, purple-stemmed leaves look nothing like the thick-stalked, green flowering cabbage of the same name sold at wet markets all over Hong Kong.
It turns out the vegetable is indeed Brassica chinensis var. parachinensis, the same variety as the Hong Kong wet-market staple, but this type is picked early, when it’s tender enough to be eaten raw as a salad vegetable.
Among the market stalls we also spot a farmer showcasing waxy Bosc pears and a variety called Yali, sometimes known as sui jing lei (“crystal pears”).