Gourmet Vegetables: Smart Tips and Tasty Picks for Gardeners and Gourmet Cooks Everywhere
Picked when they are fresh, ripe, and full of the power to impart health, homegrown vegetables are a culinary joy bar none. This handbook invites you to experience the pleasures of growing and eating gourmet vegetables. Renowned gardeners, growers, and chefs offer expert advice on scores of classic and little-known vegetable varieties, from artichokes, asparagus, and the tastiest tomatoes to ancient crops like quinoa and amaranth. They also share their favorite recipes, enticing you to savor the unsupassed flavors of sun-ripened produce from your own backyard.
Introduction: Fresh From the Garden
by Anne Raver
What is a gourmet vegetable, anyway? Something you've never heard of? Something crucial to Thai cooking? A baby something, as in baby carrot, baby corn? Something that looks as if it grows at the bottom of the ocean? I have pored over glossy food magazines, gorgeous garden cookbooks, the essays of favorite food and garden writers. The only answer I've come up with is this: something exquisitely fresh and delectable.
Now, that could be good old 'Silver Queen' corn, which is leagues ahead of that awful super-sweet stuff that tastes like white sugar and is promoted by an industry mostly interested in long shelf life. 'Silver Queen', of course, must be ripped off the stalk while the pot is on the boil. But what a wonderful ritual! It only adds to the special feeling of the occasion. The 'Silver Queen' is ripe!
The same thing holds for a truly delicious tomato. I have not found a modern hybrid to match the complex, softly acid flavors of an heirloom tomato like 'Brandywine' or 'Prudens Purple', blending together in the back of my throat like a fine wine.
Peas are another example. Who could sniff at a mess of perfectly picked 'Lincoln' peas, steamed and smothered in butter, and say, "How boring"? The joy of savoring that old-time pea has led me to edamame, the fresh soybean pods so beloved in Japan and popularized here by Japanese restaurants. Over time, they found their way into the seed catalogs.
An array of freshly picked summer vegetables ready for the gourmet chef.
Gourmet vegetables may lead the adventurous gardener on a quest, like the one the food historian William Woys Weaver set out on when he began to re-create unique strains of Native American corn by growing out seed, selecting the most promising ears, then growing that seed, and on back down the line until a plant resembling the original configuration, of say, a speckled corn like 'Bear Dance', with its violet, purple, blue, gray, and cream kernels, flourished in his garden. Weaver also makes green tortillas from the cornmeal he grinds from a dent corn called 'Oaxacan Green'.
Who can eat 'Yellow Bantam' after this? (Well, I can.) A gourmet vegetable is whatever speaks to your personal palate, your sense of the memorable, that moment of biting into something you may never experience, just that way, ever again.
I think a quiet revolution has been under way among American food lovers. Maybe it started with the realization that we didn't have to eat tennis-ball tomatoes in the winter. We could simply stop eating tomatoes?until they ripened once again in our gardens. Or we could eat them in sauces made from the ones we picked fresh last summer or froze from a bushel bought at a favorite farm stand.
Our gardens have grown more international, with tomatillos spilling into the tomato patch, accompanied by cilantro and chiles for salsa. We grow eggplants and big poblano peppers to roast over a homemade grill; we learn how to cook long, graceful okra pods in spicy Indian dishes that cry out for fenugreek. Fenugreek? What's fenugreek? And where do you find it? Not on the shelves of most grocery stores, that's for sure. The toothed grassy herb, native to southern Europe, makes an excellent green manure, and its tangy young shoots are key to the unforgettable flavor of okra and green mangos in Indian dishes.
A gourmet vegetable is more vigorous, more delicious grown in organic soil teeming with earthworms and microorganisms. (If you don't believe me, try it yourself.) A gourmet vegetable looks better grown with flowers and herbs; a bowl of greens tastes better with peppery orange nasturtiums sprinkled on top.
We get so addicted to these flavors, we start pushing the limits of our designated "zones" with cold frames and row covers and hoop houses. We sprout lentils and mung beans in old Mason jars to brighten a February salad. We dig root cellars to keep all those heirloom potatoes through the long, dark winter.
Maybe a gourmet vegetable is more a frame of mind than it is any one species or variety. It is certainly one I like to eat?fresh and perfectly cooked and eaten with good friends and a glass of wine.
