Blog the Sixteenth:Greens ‘n Potato Mash

With a Side of Dry-Roasted Meat.

Like most addictive substances, greens are an acquired taste.  Remember the first time you tasted alcohol?  Didn’t it seem inconceivable to you at the time that anyone could like that taste?  And if you had known how much trouble it is to produce wine, beer, or spirits, wouldn’t a passion for it seem not only gross, but down right unnatural?  Such is the case with greens.  What tastes like dirt to others, to its lovers is earthy; where others taste metal, its lovers taste minerals.  Greens require lots of soaking because, well,  they’re dirty.  They sometimes need par-boiling because, well, they taste like iron.   After these preparatory purges of huge unwieldy heads of greens, you end up with a small pile of green mush.  What but addiction could explain anyone’s going to such lengths?

Well, poverty might could explain some of it.  No doubt my people’s knack for making greens delicious goes back to that mating of poverty with resourcefulness that gave birth to their cooking.  They were poor.  Greens are both easy to find in the byways and easy to grow in abundance.  The tender stuff, especially the hearts, can be eaten raw in salads.  But what to do with the tough, the bitter, the metallic?  That’s when ingenuity enters in, and cooking gets started.

Such culinary ingenuity should not be taken for granted.  It is yet another witness to human omnivorousness.  One might expect animal appetite to tend naturally toward the pleasant and away from the painful.  But human beings like the sour as well as the sweet; the fiery as well as the mellow; the bitter as well as the salty.  The human palate enjoys being pinched, bitten, burned, desiccated, and generally roughed up, now and again.  We can get interested in the full gamut of tastes and feels.  Why?  Because our senses are the mediums of our minds, and we like to perceive and contemplate all that there is.  We are omnivorous.

Blog the Fourth: Broccoli Garlicky

Side Kick to 
a Pork Chop Breaded & Broiled  
(or else, a Pasta Primo)

My mother says, “Vegetables need help.” And that’s the truth. What she means by “help” is olive oil, salt, and garlic (or else onions, but that’s another blog). One of the most common preparations of vegetables in my people’s cooking is all’aglio e olio. It’s fun to say, once you’re able to. It defies the usual abhorrence for hiatus that Italian shares with English (e.g., “a apple”). Yet the phrase all'aglio e olio sandwiches two such hiatuses between lilting l’s, themselves sandwiched by vowels, and preceded by yet another lilting l and vowel. One’s tongue ends up sliding through it all with the pleasure a child takes in sliding through mud, or perhaps the pleasure an acrobat takes in his own nimbleness. But since the American tongue is not practiced in Italian acrobatics, let’s give it a name fun for us to say: Broccoli Garlicky.

This pair, garlic & oil, has the remarkable power to accentuate the specific deliciousness of many a vegetable. Its action is not like the invisible operation of salt, which educes from a food’s native potency its specific taste. Rather, garlic & oil act more like a harmonic chord, or the contrapuntal melodies of a polyphonic chant, or the jiving of a jazz back-up. Music-making was practiced for generations before the discovery of the mathematical ratios that explain harmonies, but chemistry has yet to achieve this for cookery. But I can testify with the certainty of immediate perception that garlic & oil rightly used makes vegetables taste good, each in its own way. It is a thing I wonder at, a thing I praise, not a thing I can explain. Salt brings out the flavor; garlic and oil accent it. Would you come naked to the dinner table, Gentle Reader? Would you come with only a fig-leaf to cover your humblest member? Is not the beauty of a beautiful body even better displayed well-clothed than unclothed? Then let us so adorn our vegetables as to magnify their beauty for both eye and tongue, with garlic and oil.