Sticky Situation: Satsuma Salmon - No. 270

Winter sunshine on a plate + a myriad ways to love Satsumas

EACH YEAR WHEN THE WINTER CHILL gets too uncomfortable, I figure out a way to get to Florida along with the other snowbirds. One of the perks of being in a warmer climate is not just the sunshine, but the citrus.

I fell in love with a seedless, sweet mandarin orange called the Satsuma about six years ago when I saw a pile of them at the Crescent City Farmers Market in New Orleans. I bought a bagful, and peeled one right on the spot. The taste was like orange soda!

And the name reminded me of a famous Nashville tea room, which opened in 1918, before women had the right to vote and when much of America was infatuated with the Satsuma orange.

According to Slow Foods’ Ark of Taste newsletter, the name, Satsuma, conjures up a love story because it was created by an Irish-born painter named Anna Schoyer who while on a cultural mission in Japan in 1868 during the Meiji Restoration, met Robert Bruce Van Valkenburgh, the U.S. Ambassador to Japan.

They fell in love, married in Japan, and she tasted a small orange on Kyushu Island, the southernmost of Japan’s four islands, that she couldn’t forget. When the couple returned to the United States, they planted 75 Owari Satsuma trees behind their home overlooking the St. Johns River in Jacksonville, Florida.