Читать книгу Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A chef’s stories and recipes from the land - Denis Cotter - Страница 15

While we were diligently eating our cabbage here in Ireland, children in other parts of the world, particularly America, were shovelling back the spinach. Nutritionally, its strongest card is iron, which it has in spades, if you’ll excuse the pun, and is surely what that crazy fiend Popeye was supposedly benefiting from when he glugged down those cans. Was that guy invented by a committee of lunatic nutritionists? I know it must have seemed like a good idea to have a cartoon character that encouraged kids to gobble up their greens, but couldn’t they have come up with a role model with rather more admirable characteristics? Popeye was a rough sailor, not the brightest fish in the sea either, with a shockingly poor grasp of grammar and vocabulary. OK, he loved his girlfriend, and that’s a sweet message, but I can’t help thinking she might have been better off with someone else. Whenever there was a problem, and sometimes when he merely imagined there was one, he lashed back a couple of cans of spinach and came out, fists blazing, walloping people clear out of the scene with ferocious violence. Whiskey would have had the same effect. (In fact, he surely must have been drinking off screen, in one of those seedy waterfront dives populated by cartoon lowlife.)

As it turned out, the information that fuelled not only Popeye but also the enormous canned spinach industry was erroneous. Big time. When the US research of the 1890s was retested by German scientists in the 1930s, it was found that the original results had put a decimal point in the wrong place, multiplying the potential benefits of spinach tenfold. Just in time to start a huge industry. Oh, dear. You wouldn’t want to be cynical, would you? If only Popeye’s foes were aware that he was fuelling himself on a fallacy.

Spinach is still a highly nutritious vegetable, even so, and it does have a decent amount of iron. But even if it wasn’t so healthy, we would still eat it for its flavour and all-round usefulness. Spinach is, in many ways, the ultimate green. Granted, in the company of some of the other greens here, it may not seem a big hitter, having neither the complex flavour nor the strong texture of the likes of sprouting broccoli and black or Chinese kale. But that is not what spinach is about. It has a mild flavour and a soft texture, which makes it easily the most useful, multi-functional green. Available all year round now, spinach is almost always on the menu in Paradiso, often in more than one dish. There is always spinach, the other greens come and go.

Spinach is also the benchmark of leaf greens, the one that the others are judged by. Is this or that kale softer or tougher than spinach? Sweeter or more bitter? Longer to cook? Easier to grow? Can it step into classic recipes that call for spinach or is it too strong, bitter or tough?

Recipes for spinach? There are thousands. For hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years, it has been served in tarts both sweet and savoury, curries, soups, inside ravioli, as a component of pasta dishes and even as a colouring for the pasta itself; in gnocchi and other dumplings, omelettes and endless egg dishes, pancakes, salads, and much more besides. Not forgetting that it is also wonderful served on its own, whether in the English style with butter, or with olive oil, as the Italians prefer.

There are many varieties of spinach, but it’s best to think of them as two types. The soft ‘true’ spinach, as it is sometimes called, can be used raw in salads, especially with the likes of soft cheeses or hard sweet ones, fennel, oranges and oily nuts such as walnuts or pine nuts. It can certainly also be cooked, and has a meltingly soft texture and beautifully dark, glossy colour. However, you have to be very careful, as it cooks very quickly and reduces to less than a tenth of its volume. The other type is generally known as ‘perpetual’ spinach. It has much larger, thicker leaves of a lighter shade. For general cooking, I prefer to use this one. The flavour is less exquisite, but it carries, and stands up to, other flavours very well. It also loses much less volume when cooked. Oh, it shrinks all right, but not so much that it breaks your heart and sends you scurrying to the shops for more.

There is one variety that needs to be looked at in its own right, however. It goes by the name of‘New Zealand spinach’ or ‘tetragonia’. Although I have spent a bit of time in New Zealand, I have no memory of this vegetable there. However, it is documented that the great (or terrible, according to your perspective) Captain Cook brought it back from his first voyage down under. Or perhaps I should say it came back on his ship. I don’t know if Cook was that interested in plants, but he was lucky enough to have someone on board who was – a certain Joseph Banks, a botanist with an appetite for exploration.

Back on this side of the world, however, despite its flavour and suitability to the climate, New Zealand spinach is still very rare, and little used as a vegetable. Unlike other spinach varieties, this one can tolerate dry, and even hot, conditions. This has sometimes been mistakenly believed to be because it doesn’t go to seed as easily as the others do when stressed. The truth is that the plant is forever going to seed, hence those beautifully sweet buds that add greatly to its flavour and texture. New Zealand spinach grows well in a tunnel or glasshouse in spring and autumn, and has proven to be perfectly happy outdoors during our warm but often damp summers. In fact, the only conditions it really doesn’t like is a combination of very hot and very wet. Should be safe as houses in Ireland, then. We can do wet with gusto, but hot is rare enough to be a tale for the grandkids. Both together would mean the whole island had slid down to the equator.

There are, I think, a couple of reasons for the lack of success of this spinach variety. New Zealand spinach grows as a creeping plant and covers the ground in a fiercely territorial way. The tips of the shoots, with the top few leaves and the tiny bud attached, are the best parts to pick and cook, though the lower leaves are excellent too. Because of the way it grows and the way it is harvested, it is never going to be well enough behaved to be of any use to supermarkets. And so it remains a defiantly domestic vegetable or, at a stretch, one grown by dedicated professionals for specific customers. I always admire that in a vegetable – one that is clearly great homegrown but can’t be tamed for the convenience market. When people ask in the restaurant where they can find this gem of a green, it is great to be able to say that the best thing is to grow your own.

The second drawback is that there comes a time when the sweet little buds become too coarse and tough. The leaves are still good at this point, but the work involved in preparing the vegetable, picking off the buds, is almost doubled. I’ve tried asking Ultan to do it, but only by leaving a phone message as I didn’t really want to hear his reply. It is no problem doing this at home for a small number, but in a restaurant kitchen, preparing for multiple meals, the cooks quickly grow to despise the chore. When it comes to that, it’s time to give up on the troublesome vegetable. A grumpy kitchen is no fun, and not much good at the sensitive job of cooking dinner either.

So why persevere with New Zealand spinach, then? Although it is very close in character to standard spinach, and it can be used in any recipe that calls for the latter, it has two important advantages. Texture and flavour. Yes, those two! The matter of flavour is subjective, of course, and I may well be taken to task for saying it, but New Zealand spinach is somehow richer and greener than other spinach varieties, yet still sweet and without any of the bitterness of the coarser greens. It really stands alone in terms of texture. The shoot tips, with a tiny bud and some leaves attached to a thin stalk, hold their shape beautifully when cooked, as indeed do the other individual leaves. This is a wonderful asset to a restaurant kitchen, where the aesthetics of food is always high on the agenda. A good-looking vegetable that doesn’t sacrifice flavour is a restaurateur’s dream.