Читать книгу Vegetables - Sophie Grigson, Sophie Grigson - Страница 8

I’d like to serenade the beetroot. Thank your lucky stars then that this is a book, and you can’t hear me try. Tunefulness was never my strong point. The fact is, though, that beetroot is a miraculous vegetable. Despite extraordinary maltreatment (what else would you call boiling the poor things in vats of malt vinegar?) the beetroot has re-emerged in recent years as something of a star. It features on the menus of the most elevated of restaurants, and it appears regularly in the smartest recipe books, regaining its rightful reputation as a truly delicious, unique vegetable. What other vegetable can offer the combination of full sweet, earthy flavour together with the rich purple-red of a classic beetroot?

If the foregoing leaves you bewildered, it may just be that you have never tasted beetroot at its finest. In other words, home-roast beetroot, cooked slowly to preserve its true flavour. Sure, you can save time and buy it ready-cooked in neat little vacuum packs, but it will have already lost so much to the processing that it is hardly worth the bother. Sure, you can save time and boil your beets in a large pan of water, but again, so much flavour flows out that you end up with a dumbed-down version.

The classic dark purple, staining beetroot is not the only form of the vegetable in existence. The colourways can vary from the palest white spattered with rose, to the summery hue of golden beetroot. Although both occasionally wander on to the shelves of smart greengrocers, or even the better supermarkets, they are hardly common fare. You are more likely to come across them at a farmers’ market. Or, of course, you could grow them yourself and enjoy them pulled straight from the ground, golf-ball sized. Is the taste of these golden beets different? A little, I think, though not radical enough to make headline news. The colour is the main attraction plus the fact that the juice doesn’t stain clothing to anything like the same extent.