The Forgotten Vegetable

                            Curly kale, decorating the early 16th-century cloister of Cahors cathedral

Try and explain kale to a Frenchman! Chou frisé? ‘I’ve heard of it.’ But he’s never seen it. You can’t find seeds to plant it here, and no restaurant south of the Loire would ever dream of sneaking it into a menu. 

Meanwhile, the humble kale is all the rage among the dissipated yuppies of America’s coastal metropolises. It’s a cultural cycle. In the Depression, their grandmothers badgered their kids into eating it because it was good for you. So their moms wiped the horrible thing out of their memory when good times came back, and now their grown children are rediscovering it and finding it’s not so bad after all, especially when simply sautéed with olive oil and garlic. 

Kale, lowly kale, is the Sinatra of vegetables; it’s been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet—a pawn and a king. If you’re not familiar, it’s really just a cabbage; the word ‘kale’ is the same as the German kohl or the Dutch kool. Scientifically, it’s the acephala sort of cabbage that does not make a head, just floppy leaves. There are countless varieties, all closer to the original wild cabbages, and they have nourished us at least since Roman times. 

In the Middle Ages, kale was king. All over Europe, it was a staple of the peasant diet. Even so, very few cookbooks even mention it. The nobles didn’t care for vegetables. Things that grew close to the ground were for groundlings. Birds and fruits that lived in the clear air were proper fare for noblemen. 

That didn’t stop kale from becoming a surprise star of Gothic sculpture. One of the most charming features of the great French cathedrals is the way they incorporate familiar common plants into the sculptural schemes of the portals, vaulting and capitals. In the early Gothic it was a celebration of spring. Notre-Dame in Paris is carved in plantain, cress and celandine; look closely at Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, and you’ll see buttercups everywhere. 

In the 15th century, the botanic whim of Gothic art was moving on to other things, including vegetables. The French variety of chou frisé with its elegantly curling leaves fitted the artistic mood perfectly (chicory, thistle and seaweed were popular too). The late Gothic flamboyant style made the old peasant fodder into something elegant and ethereal. There’s lots of it at Rouen cathedral, and closer to us in the Lot, the cloister of Cahors cathedral (see above) is a kale garden in stone. 

Somehow, kale fell out of style. Maybe it was the Reformation and Counterreformation; maybe the importation of such new foods as potatoes and tomatoes from the new world, or more productive round-headed cabbages. Kale held on in Protestant Scotland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands and north Germany. In the Catholic south, it nearly disappeared. In France today it is unknown, and most people use chou frisé to mean Savoy cabbage.  

In Italy, one important variety called cavolo da foraggio is still around, but you won’t Google any recipes for it, though you will find mentions of the plant as ‘food for beasts’. 

We disagree. In fact we planted some in our garden last September, courtesy of the firm Seeds of Italy. It didn’t do anything but grow. By springtime there were leaves like Brobdingnagian dinner plates. They’re tough, but sautée them for about twenty minutes with oil and lots of garlic, and they are pretty tasty. 

Wild sea-kale growing near Plymouth, England (from geograph.org.uk) looks a lot like the Italian cavolo da foraggio we just finished from our garden. 

In Tuscany, at least, they are still very fond of one variety of kale: cavolo nero, or cavolo lacinato, or Tuscan kale. If you’re in a reasonably warm climate, this is a great thing for filling up the spaces that appear in your garden in late summer. For us at least, it soldiered on through the winter and into the following spring and provided a good return with no effort. The only drawback, as with most kale, is that you can cook the central spine of the leaf all day without making an impression. It has to be cut out, which is tedious. 

Tuscans are earnest folk and immune to tedium (spend some time there and you’ll start to notice...). So cavolo nero is a main ingredient in the humble but much-beloved weekday dish called ribollita, so called because it is basically yesterday’s leftovers ‘re-boiled’. We won’t bother with a recipe right now; there are millions of them online, each one different, but the basic principle is always the same: a bunch of kale and a nearly equal amount of verza (Savoy cabbage), chopped onion, tomato, white beans, and breadcrumbs or croutons. And whatever else at the bottom of the fridge you’re trying to get rid of. 

The white beans are a familiar refrain. Along with pork, they’re something that goes naturally well with kale. We’ll try to come up with a good recipe soon. 

Eating the Enemy

I was out in the garden, doing what everyone with a garden in these parts does in July: pulling out purslane. I gave it my special attention last year, concentrating on eradicating the cursed stuff completely so I might not have to deal with it this year.

Ha. Purslane always wins. Purslanologists note that one plant can make 32,000 seeds. But I can hold it at bay, taking special care to get the root out—because leave one sliver of taproot and it will be up again in no time. Trying to hoe it only makes more purslane. On hot afternoons I can hear them laughing at me.

To be fair, it’s a rather charming plant, a cousin of the portulaca, with its starburst of creeping stems and glistening, semi-succulent leaves. It’s only coincidence that the Italian word, porcellana, should be the same as for ‘porcelain’, but the delicate colour and the sheen do make the leaves seem as if they were made of celadon ware.

While yanking them out I might nibble on a couple. Purslane when freshly picked does have a pleasantly tart taste. I remembered that the Greeks like it in salads. Back before we even knew what the stuff was, Dana’s relatives back on her father’s Greek island, Ikaria, had given her some to plant at home. Healthiest thing for you, they said. Dana kept it in water until the ride to the airport, and carefully packed it for the trip home. It was not one of the great moments in her life when of all people our daughter, the Queen of Mockery, was the one to notice that the weeds she was ripping out to make room were exactly the same as the stuff she was putting in.

But did we have porcellana in the menu decoder yet? What do Italians do with it? I had to check as soon as I got back inside and washed my hands. Dana had already written a short entry, where she noted that they throw them in salads like the Greeks, and also sauté them with garlic, just as you would do for other greens.

We found a score of local dialect words for them: barzellana, perchiacca, perchiazza, porcacchia, precacchia, pucacchia, purciaca, purchiddana, and on and on. Back in harder times, everyone used to eat them, just as they did in England and France. A little research turned up some recipes: purslane in soups, in malfatti, in omelettes, or fried in batter like courgette blossoms.

The thought was becoming irresistible: if you can’t beat the enemy, eat it. We’ll give it a try, and report back soon. 

Eating the Enemy, Part II

           The more we got to know about purslane, the greater our wonder and respect for it. It has an astoundingly high level of omega-3 fatty acids, more than any other vegetable. And omega 3’s are very fashionable these days. Purslane is loaded with vitamins, especially vitamin C and E, along with lots of healthy minerals and antioxidants. Doctors have been singing its praises since antiquity, for countering inflammation, sore throats, ulcers and earaches. It’s good for the heart and the joints. Put some in a poultice on your bee stings and boils. 

Even in the  garden, purslane’s fans claim it is the most virtuous of weeds. It makes good ground cover to hold moisture in the soil, and breaks up soil to help plants with less robust roots. (Maybe so, but if you let it, it will take over everything. Everything.)

There’s been no rain for two weeks now, but the purslane just keeps coming. It’s time to yank some up and cook it. Everyone who has ever used the stuff recommends picking it in the morning. The plant employs an unusual sort of photosynthesis; it does its work at night, storing up nutrition in the form of a slightly acidic chemical, which it converts to sugars over the course of the day. Get it in the morning while it’s still tart.

This we do. We have to cut off the roots and soak it; growing next to the ground it picks up a lot of dirt. Italians have been eating porcellana (also called portulaca) forever. The Milanese Bonvesin de la Riva mentions it in his list of foods in his 1288 Marvels of the City of Milan.  But we haven’t found a lot of compelling recipes for it.  So we try it the most common way: like any other green, sautéed with a little garlic and olive oil (and a chopped chilli, because that’s the way we are). It looks about like any other green when it’s done, but I have to admit we were a little disappointed by the taste. The tartness disappeared, and a  blandness replaced it. Fortunately we didn’t cook it too long. That’s the worst mistake you can make; after about five minutes on the stove a sort of gluey texture starts to emerge—not nice. Five minutes is just about right.
 

            One cookbook suggests making a sauce for meat or fish: mash up a bunch of it, with an egg white, an anchovy and some oil. Others remind us that  the country folk used to make it  sott’aceto, preserved in vinegar. Everyone else seems to limit it to salads: with cucumber, with tomato, beetroot, beans, lentils or whatever.  There’s a nice one (in Italian) involving cold chicken, basil, pistachios, shaved grana padano and red currants.

            Bottom line—it’s absolutely fine in salads, though it will never be a star. You can leave the smaller stems in, and there doesn’t seem to be any difference in taste between the young shoots and the full-grown monsters.

            The Italians haven’t provided much inspiration, so we looked to see what the French do with their pourpier. Back in Roman times, Pliny oddly referred to it as ‘Gallic asparagus’, which suggests it was somewhat prized. And Gallic pourpier, after all, is what’s menacing my garden. But the French were no help; all they do is purée it for a soup, a velouté, like they do with everything else.

Next year the purslane will certainly be back, and we’ll be trying  a Mexican favourite, pork and purslane, or the Lebanese salad called fattoush, with lots of mint and lemon juice,  or this very intriguing Indonesian salad.

Finally, all you gardeners be advised that purslane has an evil twin. The false purslane is called ‘creeping spurge’. it is nearly as common and mildly toxic. Almost as soon as I learned this I noticed, yes indeed, we’ve got that in the garden too. But the leaves are smaller and flatter, and grow in pairs. It’s not hard at all to tell the difference.