Blog the Eighteenth: Eggplant in Season

Make it easy, make it garlicKy.

The piles of eggplant at market are even higher than those of zucchini, eggplant being summer’s big boy.  This kid is high‑maintenance, though, and has been so from its youth.  Although eggplant’s agricultural history is long debated among those who care, it apparently began as a small prickly green vegetable with bland flesh and a bitter taste.  Being a member of the deadly nightshade family (like its cousin the tomato), it was sometimes feared to be poisonous.  What but an incurably curious omnivore could sustain interest in such a food? 

Human domestication has managed to get rid of eggplant’s pricks, but not always its bitter after-taste, so it often requires purging before cooking.  Cross-breeding has also managed to educe a variety of shapes and colors, one of those being the smallish white ovular variety that has given the fruit its English name.  A momentary mood of linguistic atavism once moved me to overpay for intriguing little white eggplants on offing at the gourmet market.  The recalcitrance of their flesh to flavoring and softening gave me a refresher course in the sophistries of gourmet supermarkets.

Thomas Jefferson brought purple eggplant to America as a table decoration, but it took immigrants of the Mediterranean and Asia to teach Americans how to eat eggplant.  It is labor-intensive food to cook, so as a cook you must understand that its virtue is not so much in its flavor as in the power of its spongy flesh to assimilate the flavors you feed it.  In this respect, it is like white mushrooms.

Blog the Ninth: Artichokes ‘n Potatoes

Stuffed with Love or Braised with Ease:  You Choose.

Today I will present you with dueling recipes, as in that cookbook that Jacques Pepin and Julia Child did together with contrasting recipes on facing pages of the book, except that it will be me facing off with my mother.  Let me concede from the start that her artichokes are more delicious than mine.  So what’s the contest?  Well, hers require the indefatigable patience of maternal self-oblation, while mine are easy enough for you to do even on a worknight.  If you’re not a self-oblating Italian mother, gourmet mania might perhaps substitute for maternal kenosis to carry you through my mother’s recipe, but I doubt it (however tendentiously).

My mother lovingly stuffs each leaf of each artichoke, one by one, with a delicious little breading, so that each time you pull off one of the leaves of your artichoke and scrape it with your front teeth, you get a little savory breading together with your little bit of artichoke flesh—yes, every single leaf.  These stuffed artichokes are such a favorite in my family, especially with kids, that it is beyond numbering how many my mother has made over the years.  She’ll complacently make as many as a dozen at a time, so they’ll be extra for the kids to take home.  (This amazes me in a woman who tells me that stripping broccoli di rape stalks one by one is playing house!)  In any case, I personally don’t know of any modern kids deserving of such a labor of love, and I maintain that it rises to the level of the spiritual virtue of charity if done for unworthy ones, so this can count for your Lenten mitvah of the day.

Blog the Sixth: Mushrooms Garlicy

A Supererogatory Side,

or else a Pasta Garlicy or Risotto, 

or even a Frittata

Because I could not resist the Baby Bella mushrooms on sale the night I broiled my pork chop some blogs ago, I decided to have a third vegetable side that night.  This inability to resist a sale testifies to the very wellspring of my cookery, namely poverty.  I learned to cook as a graduate student when, in the face of indefinitely protracted doctoral dissertation composition, I tired of cafeteria food and decided that, whatever the case might be with the dissertation, adulthood could not be put off indefinitely, and it was time to cook real food for myself on a daily basis.  There were however limitations, to wit, a graduate student budget.  So, I would go to the supermarket, buy what was on sale, go home, call my mother, and say, “So how do I cook veal breast—it looks like it’s all bones.”  Thus did I learn how to cook veal breast, and whatever else was on sale that week.

To this day, I go to the supermarket, not with a shopping list, but with a budget, even if not as constricted as in yesteryear.  I look for what looks good and is at a good price, which usually means what’s in season and hence in abundance, if not locally, then somewhere on the globe.  I shop global, not local, because that’s what I can afford.  My senses are the final arbiter:  what looks good, what smells good, what feels good—of what’s on sale—that’s what I buy, whatever its provenance, and I figure out what to do with it when I get it home.

The Baby Bella's looked good and were cheap, so I grabbed them.  I love mushrooms.  I do not understand people who do not.  They perplex me.  If the truth may be spoken, they seem to me to be missing a part of soul.  I know that a soul, being immaterial, cannot have separable parts, as does a brain.  It can, nevertheless, have parts of a sort, namely powers.  But what power can be lacking in these poor souls?  They do not lack the power of taste, for the mushrooms taste bad to them, however unaccountably.  Are we to think there is a power of soul more specific than taste that is necessary for the appreciation of mushrooms?   It seems pretty well established for some time now that the formal objects of sensation are five, corresponding to our five senses.  And so these poor souls perplex me.

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.