by Jane Kramer
A few of those preachers may still be around. Late last summer, when I was working my way through a plate of Ibérico charcuterie topped with sliced black radishes—taproots—at a small Paris restaurant called Le Basilic, a vegetarian from Norway at the next table, who had been eyeing my plate with a certain horrified interest (I’d assumed that it was the ham), announced that she never touched radishes. We started talking, and I asked what root vegetables she ate at home. She replied, “I don’t eat things that hide in the ground. I eat only things that grow in the light, toward God.” “Not even potatoes?” I asked her. “Especially not potatoes!” she said.
I have always had problems with potatoes, though admittedly this has nothing to do with God. I love potatoes when other people cook them, but my own repertoire is limited (unless you count sweet potatoes, an entirely different root family and, more to the point, nearly impossible to ruin). True, I can bake a potato, fill it with butter and sour cream, and plate it next to a rare, juicy porterhouse steak. And I am particularly fond of making rösti—a foolproof Swiss potato pancake whose ratio of butter to grated potatoes rivals Joël Robuchon’s famously fattening purée de pommes de terre (a quarter pound of butter to each pound of potatoes). But for years the sight of a plain potato—so humble, unpromising, and eager for attention—filled me with kitchen jitters. I had mastered a lamb en croûte, a cloud of raspberry angel-food cake, and a seafood risotto of such mysteriously delicate flavor (the secret is fresh fennel) that even Italians asked for the recipe, long before I attempted the layers of the milky, cheesy, but hardly complicated casserole called gratin dauphinois. And even then it took years more for me to produce one in which the potatoes were neither rubbery nor mush.
That happened at last one summer after I discovered that my erstwhile Italian gardener had been planting huge potato crops in a field hidden behind my kitchen garden and selling them at a produce stand the minute I left for New York each fall. I demanded my potatoes and went to work under the tutelage of my friend Caroline Moorehead, an inspired potato cook who happened to be staying in our guest room at the time, working on a book. Caroline could slice the potatoes, chop the garlic, grate the Gruyère, and produce a gratin dauphinois in less time than it took me to open my Julia Child to “vegetables.” Watching her, I got the recipe under control, and we even turned it more or less “Italian,” with the addition of Parmesan and pancetta. But I have yet to attempt it for a dinner party. When I have friends for dinner and a sack of new potatoes in the kitchen, I take the smallest ones I can find, boil them in their skins until they’re just tender, add them to a pot with olive oil and garlic—a lot of both—crush them slightly with a pair of forks, toss them for a minute over a low flame, add some parsley, and that’s that. (Crushing is the essential part; it adds an illusion of creativity.) Better still, I turn off the voice of thrift in my head—my aunt Beatrice intoning “Waste not, want not” as she dried used paper towels in her oven on Sutton Place—and ignore my potatoes entirely. When that happens, I make a purée of turnips or carrots, with a sprinkle of cardamom, fresh savory or chervil, and an unhealthy amount of cream. Or the parsnip-and-walnut fritters in Jane Grigson’s exemplary cookbook Good Things. I never have problems with roots like those.
The Romans loved roots; Apicius cooked a mash of parsnips, red wine, cumin, and rue. The Babylonians loved roots, too; Nebuchadnezzar is said to have grown carrots in his Hanging Gardens—that is, if you believe that there were hanging gardens in Babylon. In those days, most carrots were a skinny deep-purple forked wild root. (The others came from a faded mutant strain.) They stayed purple for a couple of thousand years, even though nobody really liked their carrots purple—perhaps because the color bled into soups and sauces, turning everything else in them purple, too. I gleaned this bit of culinary history from a conference paper called “The Carrot Purple,” which the Washington food writer Joel Denker presented a few years back at an Oxford Symposium on vegetables. It wasn’t the only paper on roots. There was one on a tuberous root from the Dutch Caribbean called a pomtajer (which tastes a little like taro, a little like potato, and is sweet enough to have been used in Holland in a clafoutis), and even one on potatoes in Ireland, which contained the surprising news that before the potato arrived, the Irish were eating more butter than anybody else in Europe, and close to the largest amount of meat and cheese. But Denker’s paper got the most attention, because so few people had suspected that, botanically speaking, orange carrots were brand-new carrots—a seventeenth-century Dutch invention and a product of the same entrepreneurial enthusiasm and scattershot genetic engineering that produced the tulip bubble.
Denker, who at the time was also pursuing the history of horchata (a drink that Spaniards make from a root they call “earth almonds”), told me that food scholars were still debating whether orange carrots were a shrewd tribute to the House of Orange or the result of an equally shrewd assessment that a bright, sunny color like orange would make more people want to eat them. Everybody did. Today, some three hundred and fifty years later, purple “heritage” carrots are just starting to appear in the more expensive groceries of New York. New Yorkers, of course, eat root vegetables because they like them. Sandy Oliver, who writes books about American foodways, told me that living on an island in Maine, as she does, means eating roots, whether you like them or not. She said that the Europeans who first settled there had had to get up so early and work so hard—clearing woods, building stone walls, plowing fields, and raising livestock, not to mention children—that they needed the calories. Oliver put it this way: “Now, what vegetables were going to be truly satisfying to those folks, with their urgent, exhausted life? I’ll tell you, it wasn’t lettuce!”
Like most year-round Maine islanders, Oliver has fashioned a root cellar of her own. “You’re not going to eat vegetables like that in the summer,” she says. “You’re going to make them last as long as you can, because in winter, if you eat any vegetables at all, it will have to be the root vegetables.” She and her husband, who comes from a Cape Breton family and is no stranger to the culinary privations of North Atlantic winters (his mother cooked turnips every night from October to April), store onions, potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabagas, and turnips in their cellar, and she gave me instructions, should I ever happen to have a root cellar in Manhattan. “It’s not a very beautiful arrangement,” she said. “We use big white five-gallon plastic buckets. I heave them into the cellar and make cardboard tops so the air can circulate, and hang them up on a nail from the beams to mouseproof them. But our cellar is an ideal storage space—first of all, because it’s a stone-walled cellar with a cool dirt floor, and second, because we don’t have central heating.”
I have neither of those advantages in New York, but my apartment building does have an unused roof, and I have heard that many similar buildings, not to mention corporations, are going fashionably green with rooftop vegetable gardens. Can root cellars be far behind? The board of my building has already made a foray into root status by planting—depending on which doorman you ask—either potatoes or sweet potatoes around the trunks of twenty topiary boxwoods that sit in an alley of stone urns on the way to the front door. (Back in September I was told that this year, when the potatoes were dug, every apartment would get one.) Oliver goes “grocery shopping” in her cellar, the way I go past those potted potatoes to my neighborhood farmers’ market. The only roots she doesn’t cellar are the fresh spring parsnips in her garden. She digs them up in April, and the day they are out of the ground they go into a traditional parsnip stew—a “yummy ceremonial dish,” she calls it—that you make like chowder, but with parsnips instead of fish. She gave me the recipe, more or less, which is to say, in the “some of this, some of that, and a sprinkle of something else, if you have it” style that I first encountered reading the great English food writer Elizabeth David. I made Oliver’s chowder this fall, feeling my way through her bracingly vague instructions: “You cut up some bacon, sauté it, add some onion, some parsnips, a
few potatoes, and some water, followed by milk and cream.”
The turnip is one of my favorite root vegetables. I braise turnips in broth and ras el hanout whenever I make a couscous, for their smooth texture and curiously tangy sweetness. I glaze them whenever I roast a duck. If I come across a lonely turnip, in the vegetable bin of my fridge, I figure that it is waiting there just for me and I slice it and eat it raw. But at the top of my list are parsnips and sweet potatoes—never, I’ve learned, to be confused with the ubiquitous and lowly yams that appear at my corner store marked “sweet potatoes” around Thanksgiving. Yams (orange-fleshed doppelgängers from an entirely different root family) are native to West Africa and Asia, sweet potatoes to South America. More to the point, yams are usually a lot sweeter than the native American sweet potatoes that a proper Thanksgiving casserole or pudding calls for. For years, I had no idea.
In New York, September is the time when the sweet potatoes I buy are really sweet potatoes, and the fall parsnips are young and fresh. In Oxford, they are still at their best in November—which is where and when I first sampled my friend Patricia Williams’s “chicken-with-both,” as I have come to call the most satisfying comfort food I’ve eaten since warm rice pudding with maple syrup. It was a raw, drizzly day. I had been out since early morning, interviewing Anglican clerics on the subject of women bishops, and by the time I got back to Patricia’s house, where I was staying that week, I would have settled for a sandwich or, this being England, a cold pasty. Instead, I was greeted by a medley of the most captivating smells, and naturally I wanted to know what was in the pot. “Oh, just a chicken and things,” she said. “A simple one-pot dinner.”
I asked her what things. The list was so long that I gave up listening and made her promise to e-mail the recipe, leaving nothing out, as soon as I got home. But peering into the pot, I could see at once that we shared an excellent culinary principle: only the foods you like and more than you need of the ones you like best—in Patricia’s case (as in mine), sweet potatoes and parsnips, plus a good deal of cumin, coriander, garam masala, and turmeric—and it doesn’t matter at all if the result is a little India, a little Morocco, a little South America, and a little England. There were chunks of oranges, carrots, red onions, and garlic in her pot, too, submerged and simmering slowly in chicken stock and white wine with the sweet potatoes and parsnips, the spices, and of course the chicken, a plump local bird that sat in the middle of them all, breast up, nearly submerged, and draped with rashers of streaky bacon. It was a memorable meal—made more so when Patricia sent the recipe and I read a disclaimer that, like Sandy Oliver’s instructions for parsnip chowder, put her squarely in the Elizabeth David tradition of whatever works. “I know this is not a helpful thing to say,” she wrote, “but I do vary the amounts and ingredients of this according to how I am feeling … this is roughly what I do.”
This fall I cooked it for friends. I hadn’t intended to. I had ordered a rabbit, which I was planning to stew in a parsley-root, carrot, and spiced Marsala sauce—a Berlin-doctored recipe from the kitchen of Renata Stih’s Croatian grandmother. Parsley root was the last vegetable on my list of “new” root vegetables to tackle, but it turned out that no greengrocer in my neighborhood sold parsley roots or had even heard of parsley roots—nor, in fact, had I until Renata cooked her grandmother’s stew for me a few years earlier, in Germany. (All I can really tell you about parsley roots is that they are white, shaped like parsnips, taste a little like celeriac, and are reportedly easy to peel.) Then my butcher called to say that his rabbit supplier’s truck had broken down.
It was noon by then, so I thought fast and—given the basket of Yukon Golds that had sat accusingly on my kitchen counter since my last trip to the farmers’ market—ordered a chicken to roast and serve with rösti. I also decided, by way of a symbolically local-produce gesture, to claim my allotted potato from my building’s potted patches and add it to the potatoes I was about to grate. But when I asked the doorman if I could dig one up, he told me that I would have to wait for the “distribution.” What’s more, he said, the super had it from the gardener that the potatoes this year were in fact sweet potatoes, which have similar pale-green leaves. The thought of sweet potatoes, potted or not, sent me off on some serious root shopping, and I started the peeling and chopping for a chicken-with-both. My spice shelf was somewhat depleted, but I heeded Patricia’s second disclaimer: “I put in something like a tablespoon of each if I am using a big pot and a lot of liquid. But I also sometimes use a mixture or some or all of them, depending.” The truth is, you can never miss with a pot full of root vegetables. And never mind that last week, when my building’s potatoes were finally dug, they turned out to be neither true sweet potatoes nor even—as a Norwegian might put it—Irish potatoes, but a twisty sweetish cultivar called a Margarita. The leaves were the same, but bigger. “Ornamental,” the gardener said.
THE FOOD AT OUR FEET
NOVEMBER 2011
I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes. It didn’t matter that the first thing I learned about that daunting pastime of hunter-gatherers and visionary chefs was that nature’s bounty is a thorny gift. Thorny, or if you prefer, spiny, prickly, buggy, sticky, slimy, muddy, and occasionally so toxic that one of the books I consulted for my summer forays carried a disclaimer absolving the publisher of responsibility should I happen to end up in the hospital or, worse, in the ground, moldering next to the Amanita phalloides that I’d mistaken for a porcini. I was not deterred. I had foraged as a child, although it has to be said that children don’t think “forage” when they are out stripping raspberry bushes and blackberry brambles; they think about getting away before the ogre whose land they’re plundering catches them and turns them into toads. I could even claim to have foraged as an adult, if you count a mild interest in plucking berries from the caper bushes that cling to the walls of Todi, the old hill town near the farmhouse in Umbria where my husband and I go in the summertime to write. Caper berries are like blackberries; they amount to forage only in that they are not your berries.
I wasn’t the first throwback on the block. The pursuit of wild food has become so fashionable a subject in the past few years that one eater.com blogger called this the era of the “I Foraged with René Redzepi Piece.” Redzepi is the chef of Noma in Copenhagen (otherwise known as the best restaurant in the world). More to the point, he is the acknowledged master scavenger of the Nordic coast. I’ll admit it. I wanted to forage with Redzepi, too.
JUNE
I began working my way toward Denmark as soon as I arrived in Italy. I unpacked a carton of books with titles like Nature’s Garden and The Wild Table. I bought new mud boots—six euros at my local hardware store—and enlisted a mentor in the person of John Paterson, an exuberant Cumbria-to-Umbria transplant of forty-seven, who looked at my boots and said, “What’s wrong with sneakers?” Paterson is a countryman, or as he says, “not a reader.” He is the kind of spontaneous forager who carries knives and old shopping bags and plastic buckets in the trunk of his car. (I carry epinephrine and bug repellent.) Being lanky and very tall, he can also leap over scraggly brush, which I, being small, cannot. Cumbrians are passionate about foraging—perhaps because, like their Scottish neighbors, they have learned to plumb the surface of a northern landscape not normally known for its largesse. What’s more, they share their enthusiasm and their secret places, something the old farmers in my neighborhood, most of them crafty foragers, rarely do. The peasants of Southern Europe do not easily admit to foraging—at least not to strangers. For centuries, foraged food was a sign of poverty, and they called it “famine food” or “animal food.” The exception was truffles and porcini, which today command enough money for a good forager to be able to wait in line at the supermarket, buying stale food with the bourgeoisie. Some of my neighbors have truffle hounds penned in front of their chicken coops, ostensibly keeping foxes at bay. But they never ask to truffle in the woods by my pond when I’m around and, by local e
tiquette, they would have to offer some of the precious tubers they unearth to me. They wait until September, when I’m back in New York, and keep all my truffles for themselves.
Paterson got his start foraging—“Well, not actually foraging, more like scrumping”—as a schoolboy, combing the farms near his uncle’s Cockermouth sawmill for the giant rutabagas, or swedes, as the English call them, that children in Northern Europe carve into jack-o’-lanterns at Halloween. He worked in his first kitchen at the age of twelve (“I washed the plates,” he says. “I was too shy to wait on tables”) and twenty-five years later arrived in Umbria, a chef. Today he has a Romanian wife, two children, and a thriving restaurant of his own—the Antica Osteria della Valle—in Todi, where people used to reserve their accolades for the meals that Grandmother made and, until they tasted his, had already driven away two “foreign” chefs, a Neapolitan and a Sicilian. In early June, I was finishing a plate of Paterson’s excellent tagliarini with porcini when he emerged from the kitchen, pulled up a chair, and started talking about the mushrooms he had discovered foraging as a boy in a patch of woods near a bridge over the River Cocker. “All those beautiful mushrooms!” he kept saying. He told me about green, orange, and red parrot mushrooms and parasol mushrooms and big cèpes called penny buns and bright, polka-dotted fly agarics “so huge they could fill a room” and mushrooms “like white fennels that grow from the shape of saucers into gilled cups.” He ate judiciously but admired them all. In Italy, he started foraging for porcini to cook at home. At the Osteria, where he has to use farmed porcini, he roasts the mushrooms in pigeon juice, fills them with spinach, and wraps them in pancetta. He said that foraging had inspired his “bacon-and-eggs philosophy of little things that work together.”
A week later, we set out for some of his favorite foraging spots. We stopped at the best roadside for gathering the tiny leaves of wild mint known in Italy as mentuccia (“Fantastic with lamb”) and passed the supermarket at the edge of town, where only the day before he’d been cutting wild asparagus from a jumble of weeds and bushes behind the parking lot (“Great in risotto, but it looks like I took it all”). Then we headed for the country. We tried the field where he usually gets his wild fennel (“The flowers are lovely with ham and pork”) and found so much of that delicious weed that the fronds, rippling across the field in a warm breeze, looked like nature’s copy of Christo’s Running Fence. I was hoping to find strioli, too. Strioli is a spicy wild herb that looks like long leaves of tarragon. It grows in fields and pastures in late spring and early summer and makes a delicious spaghetti sauce—you take a few big handfuls of the herb, toss it into a sauté pan with olive oil, garlic, and peperoncini, and in a minute it’s ready. But there was none in sight, so we turned onto a quiet road that wound through fields of alfalfa and wheat and soon-to-be-blooming sunflowers, and parked next to a shuttered and, by all evidence, long-abandoned farmhouse that I had passed so often over the years that I thought of it as my house and dreamed of rescuing it.