The Reporter's Kitchen

by Jane Kramer

  I now own twenty-two recipes for pot-au-feu, if you count the Italian versions of bollito misto, and am halfway through the biography of a Paris film-world hostess whose own recipe was so renowned that the book is called Le Pot-au-Feu de Mary Meerson. What I am really doing is waiting for fall, because it is much too hot in Umbria to cook a pot-au-feu, and anyway, my butcher, who is hard put even to cut a chicken into four pieces, has never heard of anyone eating beef cheeks. He says it is “not Italian.” (He means not within shouting distance of his own shop.) So I am concentrating on calamari, and if I succeed tonight I will not look at another cookbook until I am back in New York making “oysters and pearls.” My husband has offered to do the cooking while I recover. He is (his word) an “instinctive” cook and claims that cookbooks are a waste of time. He goes to the fish store, picks what’s fresh, and makes it in fifteen minutes. It may be that the best recipe I ever got came from M. Picot, the patron of Le Voltaire, my favorite Paris restaurant. I was there in June, and ordered a sole meunière that was so buttery and delicious that I asked M. Picot how he did it. He smiled wisely and said, “Madame, il faut choisir le poisson.”

  DOWN UNDER

  NOVEMBER 2010

  When I was a girl, lost in poetry, the only root on my mind was the mandrake root in John Donne—the one that made you pregnant. Roots were scary, the cautionary stuff of fairy tales and folklore. Consider the girl with the long gold hair whose parents promised her to a witch in exchange for a basket of roots that her mother craved. The roots turned out to be a kind of rampion—a radishy-tasting taproot—which Germans call Rapunzel and my summer neighbors in Umbria, who crave them, too, call raponzolo. And while no one can say for sure if the root was named for the girl or the girl for the root, most people would agree that there is something dangerous about a vegetable so alluring as to be worth its weight in daughters.

  My family lived on a leafy, manicured street in Providence, Rhode Island—then a city of 200,000 people—but around the corner cows still grazed in a small pasture at Cole’s Farm, the last farm left in what for three centuries had been a neighborhood of family farmsteads. Sometimes the cows broke fence and wandered across the street to nibble the grass under my mother’s dogwoods, and if I led them home, I had the run of the Coles’ kitchen garden, where I picked rhubarb in the spring and cadged tomatoes in September. But if their garden harbored root vegetables, waiting to be dug up and spend the winter in a root cellar, I never saw one.

  Our own cellar was occupied by a freezer, a washing machine and a dryer, and a big, comfortable room with a couch, a dartboard, and a Ping-Pong table. Our vegetables arrived twice a week in the truck of a produce peddler known to the neighborhood as Louie—a man whose most exotic roots were carrots and potatoes. My mother’s nightly admonitions to eat my vegetables referred almost entirely to Louie’s iceberg lettuce and to the bowls of formerly crisp green things leached in the “boil, butter, and serve” style of New England kitchens of the 1950s. But she never said, “Eat your carrots.” She never had to. I loved carrots long before I acknowledged that they might once have been gnarly things deep in the ground, and may even have shrieked with pain and deadly intentions, as mandrake roots were said to, when they were pulled from the darkness into God’s fresh air. My father’s outsize edition of the Judeo-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, which I used to consult for the illustrations, included the chilling advice that the only safe way to procure a mandrake was to tie your dog to it, walk away, and let the dog do the pulling, and suffer the consequences for you.

  Childhood habits of mind can be hard to break. I cooked happily with all manner of root vegetables—carrots, potatoes, and also parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, and sweet potatoes—for more than thirty years before I thought of them as a family or even put the words “root” and “vegetable” together. This changed five years ago, when I flew to Stuttgart on assignment and stopped at the Staatsgalerie, where my friends Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, conceptual artists from Berlin, had installed two round potato patches, ringed by gilded metal acanthus leaves, on the museum’s front lawn. The patches referred to a lean winter early in the nineteenth century, when an art-loving local king named Wilhelm I of Württemberg petitioned the city to buy a choice collection of Northern Renaissance paintings (van der Weydens and Memlings among them), and was rebuffed by a politician who stood up in the city’s parliament and cried, “Who needs art? We need potatoes!” The collection went to Munich instead. But in Stuttgart, nearly two centuries later, Württembergers were enjoying a feast of art and potatoes—an occasion commemorated, inside the museum, by photographs of potatoes that, according to Stih and Schnock, resembled the heads of many of their favorite artists. (I have two hanging in my front hall: a smooth, perky potato called Dorothea Tanning and a wizened spud called Jerg Ratgeb, for the turn-of-the-sixteenth-century German painter.)

  Walking up to the museum, past the patches, I came upon two gardeners on their knees, and was reminded of a family of rooting boar that my husband and I had seen a few nights earlier, driving along an old post road through the forest between Berlin and Wannsee. It occurred to me then, in what Homer Simpson would describe as a “d’oh” moment, that the only difference between the Stuttgart gardeners and the Berlin boar, as rooting descriptions go, was that the gardeners’ prehensile thumbs and small shovels put them at one remove from a snout and allowed them the use of the more delicate word “dig.”

  A few months later, I flew home to New York and made a slow braise of root vegetables and lamb shanks. The recipe came from Jasper White’s Cooking from New England, a book that by the end of the nineties had transformed New England’s kitchens. And it was full of delectable things: garlic, shallots, tomatoes, rosemary, oranges and lemons, and a medley of serious root vegetables, braised in olive oil and simmered in white wine and a veal stock reduced to a demiglace. I had made it for years, with a little cheating on the vegetables. That day I didn’t cheat. I followed White’s recipe to the letter and, for the first time, went eye to eye with a celery root, which I cubed to simmer along with the parsnips and the rutabagas—root vegetables that appear in my New York greengrocer’s bins so improbably shiny and appealing as to belie their origins.

  There is no way to disguise the origins of a celery root, or really even to think of it as a vegetable. It is a hideous-looking creature, and it takes work. You need a sharp knife and a strong arm and the composure to hack away at a warty and unyielding surface, made doubly unpleasant by writhing extrusions and matted, fibrous hair. The process left me bloody, but I got through it by reminding myself that the root leaping off my chopping board and onto the floor with every whack of my sharpest knife was the source of all the silky céleri rémoulade I ordered for lunch whenever I worked in Paris. The celeriac that emerged from my parings, much reduced in size and menace, was just as silky and just as good to eat. I cook with it all the time now. I can toss off the chestnut, apple, and celery-root soup in Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook (if I buy the chestnuts cooked, peeled, and in a can) and have even produced a credible rémoulade; the moans and howls and alarming ouches that still punctuate my encounters with a chopping board and celeriac are usually sufficient to drive my husband from his study to finish the chopping for me. He is quiet, quick, and focused, chopping, but my cubes are neater.

  Botanists distinguish root vegetables morphologically. There are true roots: taproots (celeriac is one, carrots are another) and storage roots (sweet potatoes). There are modified stem roots: corms (Chinese water chestnuts, say, or taro); rhizomes (arrowroot, ginger); tubers (as in yams and potatoes); and finally, slipping just under the botanical wire, bulbs (from garlics to onions, and everything in between). Forget those categories. For kitchen purposes, a root vegetable is any vegetable where all or most of the part you eat grows underground—or as the food writer and historian Anne Mendelson describes them, “a bunch of people who happen to be named Smith.” But my old distinction between kind roots and cruel roots was not so fant
astical, after all, although the difference has nothing to do with the way roots look but, as it turns out, with the amount of oxalic acid or hydrogen cyanide—prussic acid—they produce. (Rapunzel, despite the folklore, are quite benign. Mandrake roots, which, as Vladimir tells Estragon in Waiting for Godot, sprout from the ejaculations of hanged men, can kill you.) A plant of any kind can be toxic: try eating a rhubarb leaf and see what happens. There are, as the food scholar Frederick J. Simoons memorably put it in a book title, “plants of life” and “plants of death.” I would add that they are often the same plant.

  The manioc root—otherwise known as yuca or cassava—is one of the most important food staples and sources of carbohydrates in the world, and if you happen to be a Quechua, farming in the western lowlands of Peru, your manioc is sweet and harmless. But if you are an Amerindian in the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin, the root is bitter, and you have to soak or boil it for hours to extract its deadly juices and make it safe to eat. Years ago, in Brazil, I bought a six-foot-high basket called a tipiti—a long woven tube, really, with a loop for a pole at each end. It was a lovely, mysterious, and as it turns out, essential object, having been used by the Canela Indians, a small rain-forest tribe isolated for centuries in the basin, for squeezing the cyanide out of shredded manioc before pounding it into flour. And given that I am addicted to moqueca de camarão—a rich shrimp stew, traditionally cooked with urucum berries, chili, onions, lime juice, coconut milk, and palm oil, dusted with toasted manioc flour, and served on rice—which I ate for the first time that year at a restaurant in Ipanema, I keep my tipiti in the living room as a memento mori of all the Canela who must have died looking for ways to make their manioc roots safe and tasty. I have never used the basket. Today you can buy manioc flour, not to mention the tiny pearls of manioc starch called tapioca, at any Brazilian grocery in New York.

  But imagine New York in the mid-eighties, when I brought my tipiti home. The only manioc you could find north of the ethnic-food emporium called Kalustyan’s in Murray Hill was instant tapioca-pudding mix. And practically the only kinds of potato besides “boiling” or “baking” on sale south of Fairway, on the Upper West Side, were in the bins of Dean & DeLuca, a new grocery store in SoHo, where the man who chose the market produce was an aspiring sculptor from the Midwest named Lee Grimsbo, whose father happened to be a horticulturist and potato researcher at the University of Minnesota’s North Central Experiment Station. Grimsbo left Dean & DeLuca after seven years, but many New Yorkers still refer to “the Grimsbo years” as the city’s root-vegetable awakening. He began by raiding the produce stock room at Fairway. Soon he had two assistants and was driving up to the Hunts Point wholesale market, in the South Bronx—the distribution center for most of the farm produce entering the city. “Seven circles of hell,” he called it when I caught him at his apartment, about to leave for the art-supply store where he works now—a short, brisk walk from the best root-vegetable stand at the Greenmarket in Union Square. He found daikon radishes at Hunts Point, and Japanese turnips—“little snowy white things that look like radishes but taste like turnips”—and salsify and its cousin the long black-skinned white-fleshed root called scorzonera. He even discovered white carrots. His explanation: “Something’s in them, but it’s not beta-carotene.” He started adding those carrots to the potatoes he used when he made vichyssoise for supper—which was fairly often, because by then he was also flying to San Francisco for Dean & DeLuca and coming home with five or six varieties of gourmet potatoes that most native New Yorkers had never even heard of. His best trip, he told me, was to the sprawling wholesale food market in Rungis, outside Paris, which had replaced the central market called Les Halles by the 1970s but still served coffee with cognac when the farmers arrived in their trucks at three or four in the morning. Rungis was a treasure trove of root vegetables. “I almost wept,” Grimsbo says, talking about that visit. “It was heaven. Root heaven.”

  Late last spring, I asked Nach Waxman to give me a capsule history of root vegetables. Waxman is the anthropologist turned food scholar and bibliophile who owns the bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York. He carries the contents of twelve thousand volumes in his head—they run from facsimiles of ancient cuneiform recipe tablets to the latest vegetarian offerings from the London chef Yotam Ottolenghi—and the first thing he told me about root vegetables was that in twenty-seven years in the business, he has come across “maybe half a dozen root-vegetable cookbooks, at most.” It saddened him, he said, to see a food that we eat all the time so conspicuously unacknowledged.

  Waxman is a lover of roots. He collects root-beer labels and root-beer lore from the nineteenth century, when root beer was the hot new patent medicine—a miracle elixir with just enough alcohol in it to convince you that your dyspepsia or quinsy or “female complaint” was gone—and it was brewed, as Waxman put it, in its purveyors’ “caldrons, the ingredients secret beyond belief.” The labels said things like “sassafras plus,” and the recipe that Waxman cherishes most, from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, which was published in 1901, calls for a half pint of root-beer extract to “ten gallons of lukewarm filtered Mississippi River water.” He told me that by the middle of the 1890s root beer was such a huge business that in one year alone, the Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Hires sold enough of his own extract to produce sixteen million gallons of elixir—a figure that translated to about four glasses of Hires Root Beer for every man, woman, and child in the United States.

  Waxman’s favorite root vegetable is horseradish. He grows his own, in shallow pots in his living room on the Upper West Side. He nourishes the roots with rinse water from the dinner dishes and then, come spring, trims them and sets them, with their leaves intact, in the middle of his family’s Seder platter—a bit of commemorative decoration he describes as “a little patch of sod with greens on top.” Meanwhile, he grates and pickles the best horseradishes he can find at the Korean markets on Upper Broadway, and produces the bitter Passover herb known in Hebrew as maror—after which, he says, it’s good for a year of roast beef and bloody marys. “I’m utterly persuaded that the real history of root vegetables is that there’s no ‘history,’” he told me. “I mean, they’re simply part of the history of who we are. Primates dug for them. The hominids—chimps—even made tools to get them out. So it followed that when our brothers and sisters, out hunting and gathering, saw what the other animals were doing, they did it, too. They knew that the roots were there and they valued them. Aside from the fact that their great-great-great-ancestors ate them, they saw that root vegetables had a lot of advantages.”

  The obvious advantage is that we might not have survived without them. For millennia, root vegetables were the most dependable source of nourishment that most people on the planet had. For one thing, they kept better than any other plant form. For another, you could take what you needed and leave the rest underground. “Storage in situ,” Waxman called it. “Plus, you could keep the competition away by not telling anybody where they were.” The result was that thousands of years before anyone had even heard of a carbohydrate, people knew that they needed root vegetables. And for equally obvious reasons, those people were extremely wary of roots that were not their own—a fact of culinary history that I used to think of as early man’s “beware of Greeks” syndrome. Then I discovered that it was modern man’s syndrome, too, because the wariness persisted well into the sixteenth century, when newly discovered root vegetables filled the hold of every ship returning to Europe from the Americas.

  By then the problem was less digestive than theological—born in large part of the coincidental arrival in Northern Europe of the potato and the Reformation. Anne Mendelson told me that to Europe’s newly minted Protestant peasants, and to their cousins settling in North America, “God-fearing vegetables were seed vegetables, plants that ‘looked up’ to heaven, like wheat and barley—the kind of plants that were cultivated by Christians like them, by the sweat of their brows.” She said that not only were
potatoes regarded “with puzzlement and suspicion”—too many people having sampled “the wrong ends,” as she describes the potato’s poisonous leaves and berries—they were also known to Protestants as “the lazy root” (in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was the devil’s root), because all you had to do to grow them was dig some holes, put in the pieces of spuds with eyes, cover them up, wait for five or six months, and dig them out and eat them. Potatoes, in short, were something Catholics did, and there was some truth in that, since the Spaniards had taken to root vegetables with huge enthusiasm. So, for that matter, had the Anglican upper classes. In 1610, the gentlemen farmers who wrote “A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia” were happily eating potatoes—along with the parsnips, carrots, cucumbers, and turnips that they had brought from home—and praising them as food “which our gardens yeelded with little art and labour.” (There is no evidence as to whether they burned in hell for that one phrase.) Still, as late as 1845, when the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland, preachers all over England and America were warning their impressionably evangelical flocks that the Irish had brought suffering upon themselves with slothful and ungodly agriculture.