Category: Vegetables

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Harlan II – Field trip

Robert Hijmans puts his money where his mouth is.

I took the train to Berkeley, less than two hours from Davis towards San Francisco. I checked in at the French hotel and dined in the restaurant across the street. We are talking about Alice Waters’ place, Chez Panisse a restaurant well known to the readers of this blog and in-flight magazines.

There is the formal restaurant downstairs (fully booked) and the café upstairs (a late table was available). I had wine made of Zinfandel grapes. ((Quintessential Napa, only recently discovered to be the Croatian variety “Crljenak Kasteljanski” — or so I learned at Harlan II.))

I took the US$29 fixed menu. It had a garden lettuce salad, spaghetti alla Norma with eggplant, tomato, basil, and ricotta salata, and a Concord grape sherbet with roasted Thompson seedless grapes and langues de chat. ((Sic. Why the mix of English, Italian and French?))

These were the variety names on today’s menu: Concord grape, Thompson seedless grapes, and Little Gems lettuce.

And these were the farm names on the menu: Cannard Farm ((As in: “Cannard Farm rocket with shaved zucchini, pine nuts, and pecorino, $9.00”)), Andante Dairy, Soul Food Farm, Marin Sun Farm, Lagier Ranches, and Frog Hollow Farm.

Terroir trumps agrobiodiversity at Alice’s place.

It is a good restaurant. It is very French. The waiter spoke of terroir as if his name were Claude Duchateu. It is very cheap for a famous restaurant. It has a local twist to it. The food is good. But is mainstream now. The menu in the Davis Best Western Palm Court was not that different.

I suppose it is fair what everybody says, that Alice created some sort of revolution. From the wasteland of the American diner to Good Food. Just like her neighbor Alfred Peet transformed mainstream American coffee from diluted sewage to the best coffee anywhere save (perhaps) Italy. But that is ancient history.

But, just for your information, Chez Panisse is passé now. Go look somewhere else. I have heard of an underground restaurant movement in New York.

Chez Panisse is sold out every night, I think. Alice can experiment. But she does not. She chooses the middle of the road. Their produce comes from “farms, ranches, and fisheries guided by principles of sustainability” but the majority of entrees (main dishes) are a fish or meat dish.

Chuck out the meat. Serve different varieties of other veggies than tomatoes (even the Andronico’s supermarket across the street sells heirlooms).  Use something locally evolved rather than merely locally grown. The native Californians used hundreds of edible plants. ((Full disclosure: After being captured and given the opportunity, Ishi, the last ‘wild’ Californian Indian, quickly switched to a doughnut diet.)) But no miner’s lettuce or acorns on the menu of the Queen of Slow Food.  Come on, Alice, surprise me!

P.S. That pasta was really good though. I will go back tomorrow to further investigate the case.

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I can’t believe it’s not meat/fish/eggs/a penis

Elizabeth Andoh, an American who has lived in Japan for 25 years, talks about “food that is not what it seems.” Modoki has nothing really to do with deception, it is all about having fun with your food. Links to Buddhist cuisine of China, vegetarian and vegan stuff, often made to resemble stuff that did have the potential for life.

There is an ancient Japanese book called “100 things to do with tofu.”

She shows a picture of real eel (I’m not getting the names, thanks to the PA) and then a fake (modoki) that is visually identical, down to the surface look of the “fish”. Gobo (burdock root) and lotus root help the whole thing to stick together.

“You have to have keen powers of observation and to take into consideration texture even more than taste. Truly, if you closed your eyes, you would think you were eating eel.”

Now we’re onto Ganmodoki, which is a version of goose meatballs, no goose meat.

“Soy milk skins sound like something even a dermatologist doesn’t want to know about.” They have a wonderful unctuous texture and a creamy feel in your mouth. They perish easily, and are dried, but can be resuscitated by wrapping in a damp cloth. Resemble a thin omelette, an impression that can be enhanced by adding the dried seeds (or buds?) of a gardenia, which “bleed an intense neon yellow”. The end result can be shredded and used as “eggs” in other dishes.

Pseudo-chestnuts made of fish and shellfish meat and fried noodles with a whole-roast chestnut poked inside, provoking a memory of the whole chestnut.

A teeny tiny persimmon made from a dyed quail’s egg with a piece of kombu stuck to the top.

One of the elements in modoki is sheets of daikon radish, which take an amazing amount of skill to make: watch this.

A perfect segue into Michelle Toratani, who takes the floor to talk about a very particular individual daikon, “the fighting root”. A very bizarre story.

How did a vegetable root become a super-hero? Because it is such an important daily vegetable in Japanese life. People can really identify with it.

On to the proper stuff. Daikon originated in China, came to Japan about 1000 years ago. There are about 100 regional varieties of daikon. Don’t have to be white, can be red or deep purple.

Frankly, there’s so much here about the daikon in culture (some of which Luigi nibbled), that I really don’t want to get into here on a Sunday morning. See for yourself. Or Google Daikon Penis.

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An Indian view of Indian markets

Krina Patel talks about Sustainability and Traditional Vegetable Markets in India. Got suddenly interested in the local market in her parents’ home town, and is worried about how these will survive in the modern India. There are three markets in the town. One in the old town. One right outside the main temple, “so that vegetable shopping becomes a daily ritual, a little like praying”. One a wholesale market. There is a three-way relationship at the market: you, the product and the seller. That becomes a long-term relationship that is the basis of culinary tradition.

As in Italy, vendors will give you a little bunch of basic ingredients for free, “which cements the relationship”.

Medical and health concerns are intertwined in the market, where vendors mix practical and ayurvedic advice. “You should not eat okra at this time, because it is very expensive. But also it is not very good for you.”

A new mall is being built, with a vegetables section where produce will be sold all day, threatening to destroy the markets and the relationships. Big corporations are already buying up produce direct from the farmers, which is reducing the amount that comes to the markets. “The okra will be available in Paris, but not locally.”

A questioner uses “weekend” as a verb! “The town in upstate New York I weekend in.”

Sami Zubaida raises the notion that a large part of the basis of civilization is global food exchange, and that while he buys into the notion of the local, he wants to ensure that we remain open to the global.

Which seems kind of obvious. But still, a minor wrangle develops over local market versus supermarket, and, despite the prevalence of historians, nobody raises the exchange of foodstuffs in historical times.

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The first, best, gardening manual

William Rubel is talking about how a French garden manual, translated into English by my hero John Evelyn, is the first really useful gardening book, and is still relevant. If you were to bring together the cookbook literature, the herb books, and the gardening books of the 18th century you would find described the golden age of vegetable gardening and cooking. “The lettuce had a poetic space around it,” and this is increasingly relevant as we move to local, fresh sourcing and eating.

Andrew Marvell’s The Garden is perfection.

What wondrous life is this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine and curious peach
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons as I pass,
Insnared with flowers, I fall on grass.

We tend the garden, “and the poetry of Eden was on the plate, of everyone who at a vegetable”. The English way of cooking was green and tender, and the French way was green and crisp.

The French intensive system of raised beds was not invented in France. What the French added was an unlimited amount of fermented manure, and hot beds. “The French remade the world, they were masters of the seasons, they had asparagus in November.”

“If you were a certain kind of snob, you would serve asparagus in November, but if you were interested in taste, you would serve frost-kissed broccoli.”

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The Roman Vegetable Garden

Joan Alcock says that the Republic’s most popular garden was the Vegetable Garden, but the Empire’s favourite garden was the Flower Garden. ((Or have I got that backward?)) All, however, were very proud of their gardens. Pliny insisted that those who visited the flower gardens were to go through the vegetable garden, the better to appreciate it.

If you have a slave society, you have to keep the slaves occupied, to avoid a revolt. Many of the Roman manuals suggest that slaves pick off greenfly by hand; maybe this was just to keep them occupied. On the other hand, was there any evidence that a barefoot menstruating girl walking round the plants was any more effective at getting rid of pests?

Their tools were more or less the same as ours, and barely needed improvement. Roman spades were wooden, with a T handle and an iron sheath; the sheath and the nails that held it to the wood are generally all that is left.

The Romans were very interested in the medical properties of vegetables. Pliny the Elder spends Book 19 on the vegetables, and 20 and others on the medical properties. Joan spent some months in the hospital last year trying to get the back in order, during which she wondered whether she should turn to Pliny, who said that ashes of bean stalks are good for the back and sciatica. “But he doesn’t say whether the ashes should be eaten or rubbed on the back.”

Romans brought a lot of vegetables into the wild and cultivated them. Carrots and turnips were hard and wooden, but were pulverised in a dish with stones in the bottom. They brought weeds into the garden, and spread their vegetables around the empire, with samples found from forts in Britain and Germany.