Czytaj książkę: «Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A chef’s stories and recipes from the land»

It’s a green thing

It all comes down to the rain in the end. Of course it does. How could it be otherwise? Of the many clichés and myths surrounding Ireland, two of the most unavoidably true are that it’s a green place, and it rains a lot. These are facts. It’s a simple equation. The rain makes the place green. That, and the temperate climate, which means the land never gets scorched in summer or frozen in winter. The damned grass never stops growing.

Coming in to land at Cork Airport, you will still occasionally hear stifled gasps and hushed exclamations at just how green the fields are down below. Not just from first-time tourists – they expect it, they’ve read the brochure – but also from returning natives who’ve popped abroad for a spot of weekend shopping and martinis. We Irish may be a moneyed lot these days, but we still get excited at the sight of our little green home.

Those who know and care about these things say that green is the colour of hope. Hmm…I like that. Hope is a very strong force in life, nothing like the wishful thinking it is often taken for. It is a positive, purposeful energy, and in my green-tinged world, that connection makes sense.

Green has long been an obsession of mine. The colour, that is. My eye is drawn to flashes of green in every visual setting. Artwork, furniture, a row of books, crockery on a shelf or shoes in a shop window; clothes especially, whether on a body or hanging on a rack. I wear a lot of green, and feel comfortable with myself in green more than any other colour. I took to it quite young, glorying in its many shades – and there are so many, far more than the forty that the hoary old Irish ballad glorifies.

Some greens are fun in a shocking way, most just merge into the background – literally, in a rural context, of course. The ones in the dark green-black, olive-tinted sphere are almost soberly elegant. Almost. There are dozens that seem bearable when viewed in an indoor mirror, but in the light of day make you resemble a lost American tourist looking for Killarney. I actually love them all, in the way a good parent likes his children equally, or a cat lover pampers every one of her disdainful feline fold.

In the vegetable world, greens have long been lumped together. Mind you, now that I think of it, the political Greens are usually treated in the same way – tolerated, patronised, thought of as vaguely good for you, an off-centre sideshow to the real focus of the political table.

Green vegetables, if they are eaten at all, have very often been taken as if they were medicine, a source of some necessary but unidentified nutrients, and swallowed as such without any expectation of pleasure. ‘Eat your greens’, that familiar old war-cry, translates into: ‘Enjoy your dinner but eat that dull but healthy stuff I put on your plate too; it’s good for you.’ It was inevitable that this attitude led to greens being cooked as though they were medicine too, with little care given to how they might taste.

In the days before the arrival of modern calabrese broccoli to our shops, the range of greens eaten in most households where I grew up was narrow, and greens typically meant cabbage. Whatever was on the plate in the way of protein, the accompaniment was always cabbage, and the cabbage was ‘good for you’. It was no great punishment to me, however. I liked cabbage, but that was just luck, it wasn’t why it was fed to me.

It seems to me there are plenty of families now who don’t even bother to inflict greens on themselves in this way. Sometimes it’s a basic lack of health awareness, despite the burgeoning produce markets and the ubiquitous high-profile foodie campaigners on our TV screens. For those who do fuss over their nutritional requirements, the options for satisfying these has widened to include supplements, pills, fortified breakfast cereals and milk products, and other horrors. Believe in that lot if you will. Even if we were to accept that these fulfil all our nutritional needs, does it mean the end of usefulness of our traditional medicinal greens?

If anything, I think there is a certain freedom in it. A freedom to not bother, if you’re that way inclined. But also, a freedom from thinking of greens as medicine. A freedom, if you like, to love them for the rich and complex flavours they bring to the table.

Eating greens for pleasure; now that’s an interesting concept, and a real cause for hope. And yet, I only realised the extent of my own fascination with greens when teasing it out with another devotee. I have been fortunate in the last few years to be working with Ultan Walsh of Gortnanain Farm, a grower who, like me, has a passion for the food he produces. He grows vegetables that he loves, both as commercial crops and as food to use in his own kitchen. (In theory, he also grows what I want him to grow, even if it’s not something he cares for. Somehow we don’t get much of a supply of those crops. I must get to the bottom of that one day…)

Ultan and I have often eaten some new variety of greens he has produced, and then launched into a post-mastication analysis of how it stands in the league of greenness, and how it compares to others like it. Does its texture compensate for a certain flatness of flavour? Does it have a wonderfully satisfying taste but look like a pile of sludge on the plate? This ongoing inquest has always existed between us to an extent, but it became a top-of-the-agenda subject when he trialled Chinese kale. The purpose was to check out this exotic vegetable, see how it behaved as a crop and test it in a few recipes. We were also interested at the time to find some new greens to fill those gaps in the seasons when the fields are almost bare. Ultan’s first response was to declare it the best green he’d ever eaten! Well, I wasn’t expecting that; it wasn’t even on the agenda. The ‘best’? How do you make such a declaration? What are the qualities of green? What is the vocabulary that speaks of greenness? The world of wine has a native language that allows those inside to speak fluently to each other about the endless intricacies of structure, flavour and all-round character of their subject. To outsiders, it can be an incomprehensible jargon, but there is no denying its fluency and the fact it has the practical usefulness of any proper language. Cheese and chocolate lovers sometimes aspire to creating a language of similar complex usefulness, though they still have a way to go.

So it is with the matter of greens. When Ultan and I eat some freshly cut Chinese kale or sprouting broccoli, cooked in olive oil with maybe a little chilli and garlic, we gush incoherently in praise of its very fine greenness indeed. ‘By God, but that’s a damn fine green, that’s about as green as a green could get.’ And so on, our enthusiasm compromised by a lack of vocabulary.

To me, there is a quality in the finest greens that can’t be measured in terms of nutrients or flavour. Other vegetables provide pleasures of taste, but in the inherent pleasure of fresh greens there is what can only be called a ‘life force’. It is like going straight to the source, accessing the most primal and vital food. It is engaging with life itself, in a pure and vibrant form that we can absorb but can’t quantify. More prosaically, how to define the experience of eating greens must lie, of course, somewhere in the combination of texture, flavour and appearance.

The texture of greens can range from meltingly soft baby spinach to the crisp ‘bite’ of Savoy cabbage and the satisfyingly chewy kales. Soft is good and I will happily sing its praises later, but the most prized greens in our canon have a tougher textural character.

The flavour is hard to pin down. I call it ‘green’, but that’s not really enough, is it? At the top of the scale, there is some element of a strong cabbagey character, earthy with a little bitterness. However, when cooked these greens reveal a sweet note underneath. This unique combination makes the best greens – such as sprouting broccoli and black or Chinese kale – a great partner for olive oil, various spices and the sweetness of tomatoes and peppers. Add some sheep’s cheese and you have a sense of what my heaven tastes of Of course heaven has a flavour! How could it not?

In this quixotic search for the ultimate green, colour is very important, and it may be the most telling element. Well, it would be, I suppose, given that we’re talking about vegetables that share a name with a colour.

The vegetables that rate highest in our admittedly very subjective quest have, in the raw state, a deep, dark shade of green, intense but self-contained. Toss them in a pan with some olive oil and they become vivid, glowing and translucent, a green unlike almost anything else in nature. Mind you, nature itself can get pretty vivid. One of the most electric greens I’ve ever seen lit up my journey one spring morning, while I was driving through the West Cork countryside. I was on my way to see my good friend Bill Hogan, to cook a dinner celebrating his wonderful artisan cheeses. I hadn’t been out that way in a while, but felt familiar enough with the area not to pay too much attention to the scenery. Just enjoying the drive, listening to Grant McLennan sing his beautiful melancholy. The morning had that peculiar mixture of thin sunshine and comically heavy showers that is typical, yet never quite expected, of West Cork in May. (Why does the rain surprise us? Have you ever met an Irishman with proper rain gear? Do we not expect rain in our lives or do we just not take any notice of it? Never mind, we could get stuck on that tangent forever.) Suddenly, I came to the top of a long rise in the road just as the rain took a short break, allowing the timid but still blinding sun a moment of glory. Unfolding in front of me, as I sped along, was an idyllic rural scene. For some reason, probably the music, my attitude was different and I took notice of my surroundings. Small fields of grass and meadow of the most vivid green, dripping with moisture, lit by striped sunlight, and marked out by hedgerows in which the creamy hawthorn blossom was dominated by the shockingly bright yellow, bright orange of gorse flowers. There is something in the gorse that turns the fields of West Cork to eleven on the monitor. I kid you not. Go look for it if you get a chance.

The essential greens are those on your doorstep

So much for the notion of‘green’, and the essence of what it is about green vegetables that turns me on so much. Perhaps it’s time to take a look at the specific ones that do it for me. As with all the vegetables in this book, what follows here is a study of those that have been closest to my heart over the past year. Most are long-standing favourites, but even then they have become new again to me in the way that I work with them, which is constantly evolving, and, even more so, in the way that I procure them. Green vegetables, more than any others, have to be fresh to give their best, and the only sure way to get fresh greens is to grow them yourself or to source them from a local supplier who can deliver what you need when you want it. The shorter the journey from field to kitchen, the more we can access the almost magical qualities of foods that, being so recently picked, are simply bursting with life. It is in the forming and nurturing of the relationships essential to that transaction that we can change the way we value our greens. When it comes right down to it, the ultimate reason these vegetables are so important to me is because they are grown close to where I work by people I know and trust.

Here then, from cabbage to watercress, via asparagus and chard amongst others, is a personal take on the most truly vital ingredients of my kitchen.

The iconoclastic lover of heartless cabbage

Cabbages of all sorts have been playing a huge role in the diets of most parts of Europe for hundreds of years. So I’m told, anyway. They certainly played a big part in my youth, which concerns me a lot more. It may be subjective and provincial, but my youth, despite fading into the past, still affects my relationship with food more than European history does. If the opposite is true for you, I’d love to read your dissertation on cabbage and its role in the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

I know it’s an old Irish cliché now, but I did in fact eat a lot of cabbage as a child. I can at least spare you the weary and hackneyed description of the smell of over-boiled cabbage permeating the house, simply because I have no memory of it. My mother never over-boiled cabbage. When she used it in classic bacon ’n’ cabbage (yes, we did have it a couple of times a week), it was added to the pot lateish with the lid kept off, and cooked until soft but not disintegrating. How’s that for enlightened?

I do, however, have a reference for the type of horrific food smells that can cause distressing memories. No, not from my friends’ houses, because everyone in the town was similarly enlightened. (Thanks to the town council for sponsoring that comment.) In New Zealand, there is a similar modern trauma amongst the newly sophisticated regarding the smell of long-boiled mutton, often combined with cabbage as well. I knew about it from hearsay before I ever experienced it. Like the cabbage legend on this side of the world, their version is often used as a way to laugh at country cousins or the ignorance of an earlier generation.

When I finally came nose to nose with the olfactory reality, I was living in a small town in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand. One quiet day of many, I went out for a cycle to pass the time. I could have gone swimming or cricketing or rolling bowls around the green like everyone else, but I was feeling unsociable. Miles out of town, I was overtaken by one of those serious bike people, decked out in the kind of tight-fitting, outrageously gaudy outfit that would get cyclists thrown out of all but the most hedonistic of gay clubs. He pulled over and made small chat, always delighted to meet someone interested in bikes, and so on. He was not a young man, and thus was very proud of overtaking youngsters. He was also running a small cycling club in a part of the world that didn’t care much for the sport, always on the lookout for new members. I wasn’t exactly fit at the time, but I was young and had my own bike, so I guess I was fair prey. I was also foreign and way too polite. Against my better judgement, I followed him to his nearby house to sign up to a glittering cycling career.

It was one of those classic Kiwi country homes, a tiny shack of timber with a tin roof and a small front porch on which there is always an old couch with cushions held together by the dog or cat hairs of their usual occupants. While the club chairman went into the back room to get forms, I stood in the kitchen. There was a tall pot on the stove. I recognised it from the legend. In it goes a piece of a dead sheep with plenty of water, and maybe a couple of onions if you’re really cooking. On goes the lid, heat turned down low, and off to work you go. When you get home, you call it dinner. Or maybe when you get home, you put the cabbage in – I never did pay enough attention. Anyway, the smell was vile, even sulphurous. I wasn’t professional enough to do an analysis, but I would swear there was definitely cabbage in this one. The smell wasn’t just coming from the pot – every part of the house reeked of it, from the endless daily ritual. By the time the chairman came back with the paperwork, I was a couple of miles down the road, moving a lot faster than when I’d met him. Saved by the reek of long-boiled dinner.

Because I have no childhood odour trauma about cabbage, I have never been uncomfortable with it, which must be why I still find it one of the most useful, affordable and flexible vegetables, both at home and in a restaurant kitchen.

The first book I usually turn to when trying to decide what flavours to pair with a vegetable is Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book. Although I’ve never knowingly cooked directly from it, the book works as a springboard to an almost endless range of possibilities because of Grigson’s passionate but detailed research. True to form, she doesn’t hide her disdain for what she considers the coarser greens. On spring cabbage and its inability, or disinclination, to form a heart, she quips that ‘heartlessness is never a desirable quality’. It’s a fun line she must have enjoyed writing. I would have liked an evening in her company to discuss it – wouldn’t even have minded losing the argument, though an argument it would have been.

However, she clearly adored some cabbages, and rightfully placed the Savoy at the top of the pile. The Savoy is a highly cultivated vegetable, with a sweet flavour and wonderfully crunchy texture which makes it just as good eaten raw or cooked. Despite the recent trend against long cooking of cabbages, I think the best way to cook Savoy is to braise it for an hour or more in olive oil, wine and stock, with the possible addition of spices and the extra sweetness of tomato. After that you can add anything you fancy that goes with cabbage: I like chickpeas, lentils, seeds such as fennel, coriander, caraway and cumin, sweet peppers, fennel, even potatoes in a reverse of the classic method of adding cabbage to spuds. Not all at the same time, mind. Pick a well-matched two or three. In Paradiso we use it as a wrapping for dolmas and timbales, as well as a braised side dish. Savoy isn’t the most obviously smooth wrapping material, but the flavour makes it worthwhile and it only takes a little effort to flatten the leaves if you need to.

Even after losing my imaginary argument with Ms Grigson, I still love spring cabbage, partly for its lovely soft, pliable leaves and its relatively mild flavour, but mostly because it arrives in early spring just when we are tiring of the stored winter foods. Putting away the winter things and moving on is one of the most exciting times in the vegetable year. It changes your focus from the past to the potential future. Spring cabbage has the flavour of new growth, of life and hope and the mad optimism of a new year.

The brassica that divides people most, however, is surely the Brussels sprout – an eccentric name for a gloriously eccentric-looking plant. Brussels sprouts are compact cabbages in mini form, with concentrated flavour. But what an astonishing-looking plant they come from. It grows about 60cm (2 feet) high with a few dozen sprouts clinging to the stalk, while out of the top it puts up what it clearly believes to be a decent attempt at a cabbage. And it’s not far wrong. The leaves are indeed good cabbage, and have the advantage, culinarily speaking, of clinging to life when the sprouts and most other winter greens are gone. These should, however, be cooked like winter rather than spring greens. They are tough, having been hanging around all winter, and are best braised or thinly sliced and fried.

The sprouts themselves are as adaptable as the entire range of cabbages put together. They are best known as a simply boiled vegetable – hard or soft, as you like it. But they also fry well, with spices and tomato. They are good in creamy gratins with strong cheeses. The sprouts can also be shredded leaf by leaf and added to salads, soups or stews. Brussels sprouts with chestnuts is a classic combination, one that gets a frequent run-out at Christmas, but they also go well with other nuts, including walnuts, hazelnuts and macadamias. I believe they work with blue cheese too, but not everyone agrees with me. You have to admire that about Brussels sprouts – as much as they are pigeonholed by local tradition, they are also just as happy dressed up in exotic gear.

The thing about sprouts is that very few people can agree on how to cook them. Leaving out those who simply can’t abide the vegetable at all, the rest of us who profess to love them – there is apparently no middle ground with sprouts – are very subjective about how they should be cooked, so it is very difficult to say anything other than this is how I like mine. For everyone who likes them lightly steamed, there is another who likes them almost mushy, and really loves them that way, so you can’t say it’s wrong or ill-advised. Every winter at Paradiso I try a new twist on sprouts. The recipe to follow later with a blue cheese cream and spiced potato gnocchi is this year’s model. I love it, but I accept that it’s a personal thing.

There is also a relatively new cabbage that we used for the first time last winter. In fact, it’s relatively new to everyone except the Ethiopians. It was only in the late 1950s that it was first brought to Europe and America. It is called Abyssinian cabbage, but you may have come across it as ‘Texsel greens’, a very unglamorous name given to it by people trialling it as a crop in, er, Texas, would you believe? Ultan first grew it to fill that gap in mid-to-late winter. It can survive outdoors in our summer, but the fields and tunnels are full of greens then. So instead, he grows it in a tunnel in the dull days of November to February, to give us some badly needed variety at that time, something softer and lighter than most winter greens.

We harvest it in two ways for Paradiso: firstly as a cut-and-come crop where small-to-medium leaves are picked from closely sown plants; and secondly as a plant grown to full maturity when the leaves are almost the size of spring cabbage. The younger, cut-and-come leaves are close to spinach in texture, and can be used in almost the same way, bearing in mind that they do have a slightly tangy cabbage flavour. This works well with the sweetness of tomato and garlic, and it is comfortable too with the zing of ginger and some of the sweeter spices like nutmeg, paprika, fennel and cinnamon.

Even at full size, the leaves are relatively soft, somewhere between a coarse spinach and spring cabbage. This is a refreshing food to have in the depths of winter, when you want the flavour of fresh greens but are not in the mood for the full-on hit of kale. You can even eat the sprouted shoots, which cook like sprouting broccoli. The large leaves make a good wrapping for dolmas, timbales and terrines, but they are best cooked simply in any way that works for spring cabbage, especially stir-fried and seasoned with sesame and soy sauce.