Tucked into a February 1944 wartime garden newsletter, past the earnest reminders that "there's a war on!", is a small note that would be easy to miss:

At Breeze Hill we found Jubilee Tomato to be a good orange-yellow variety with thick flesh of fine flavor. It slices to advantage and makes excellent juice as well.

Breeze Hill news was the "quite irregular publication" of J. Horace McFarland's Breeze Hill Gardens and Mount Pleasant Press in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. McFarland was a giant of American horticulture — a printer, rose breeder, and conservationist who pioneered color garden catalogs when most were still black-and-white. The 1944 issue is a fascinating snapshot: staff being drafted, the government printer commandeering their presses, and the garden pushing "millions more of what it takes to promote the Victory Garden."

The Jubilee reference is a small artifact of a big moment. Burpee had introduced the Jubilee tomato just the year before, in 1943, to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary. It promptly won the All-America Selections award — the horticultural equivalent of an Oscar. Breeze Hill's endorsement in early 1944 is essentially a real-time trial report on what was then the hottest new vegetable in America.

Here's what's been forgotten: orange-yellow tomatoes were once considered mainstream, not exotic. During the Victory Garden era — when 20 million American households were producing an estimated 40% of the country's fresh vegetables — pale, low-acid tomato varieties were prized for their mildness, their sliceability, and (as gardeners of the time understood) their gentler effect on people with sensitive stomachs. Modern research has confirmed what those growers noticed empirically: yellow and orange tomatoes generally contain less citric and malic acid than red ones, though their sugar content is comparable, which is why they taste sweeter.

Then supermarkets happened. Postwar consolidation of tomato breeding aimed at one thing: red, round, and shippable. Jubilee, Golden Queen, and the entire orange-yellow class were pushed to the margins. By the 1980s most Americans had never seen a yellow tomato outside a farmers' market.

The irony is that the heirloom tomato revival of the last twenty years has rediscovered exactly what Breeze Hill was quietly noting in 1944 — that a thick-fleshed orange tomato "slices to advantage." Jubilee itself is still available from a handful of heirloom seed companies. It is, in a sense, a Victory Garden veteran that's been through:

• A world war (its debut)
• Half a century of near-extinction
• A hipster resurrection at farm-to-table restaurants charging $14 for a tomato salad

Next time you see rainbow heirloom tomatoes at a farmers' market, remember: your great-grandmother probably grew the yellow ones in her backyard as a patriotic duty.