Читать книгу Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A chef’s stories and recipes from the land - Denis Cotter - Страница 17

There is no doubt that we’ve come a long way from regarding greens as a purely medicinal form of food. Or maybe it’s not so much that we’ve moved on but that we have eased into a more comfortable relationship with green vegetables. We live in an age where we could easily give them up for a few supplemental pills, and yet vegetables are actually becoming more embedded in our food culture than ever. This is partly due, in an era of extreme health-consciousness, to the wonderful research conducted on the healing and disease-inhibiting characteristics of so many greens, especially watercress and almost all of the brassicas. But it is also true that, released from the slavery of feeling we have to chuck the stuff back to keep us off our deathbeds, we have actually come to love green vegetables for their flavour, texture and almost indefinable life-force quality. When greens were medicine, they were cooked as such and swallowed reluctantly. I especially pity the poor kids of America who had to swallow whole cans of slimy spinach in an effort to grow protruding muscles and strong jaws. Now that we are free to enjoy our greens, we are constantly playing with new ways to flavour the familiar, as well as looking for new varieties to add to the repertoire.

Almost half of the vegetables discussed here are new to me, in the sense that up to two years ago I didn’t have sufficient quantities of them to cook with. You only have to walk through the markets of small towns in Italy or China, or to browse through the vegetable-growing books of pioneers like Joy Larkcom, to see that the potential for further growing and cooking experimentation has barely been touched. Next time you eat some wonderfully exotic, if bitter, greens in Italy, don’t come home only extolling the joys of Italian food culture. Wonder, too, why it is we don’t grow them here. Yet.