Vegetables [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION- The'Bountyof Fields and 'Qardens This is a book of discovery, a guide to the wonderfully rich—yet too frequently neglected—world of vegetable cooltery. Of all foods, the produce of fields and gardens contributes by far the most varied and abundant source of nourishment. In Asian and Middle Eastern cooking, vegetables are prized as highly as meats, and treated as carefully. In most of the Western world, however, they are often literally pushed aside and served as mere accompaniments to meat. On far too many tables, vegetables appear as boiled potatoes and overboiled greens—sodden offerings that hold little appeal for the palate. More often than not, such uninspired treatment stems from lack of knowledge, both of the different vegetables themselves and of the many cooking methods that can be applied to them. How to deal with unfamiliar vegetables, therefore, is one aspect of this book; how to prepare all vegetables in exciting and imaginative ways is another. Step-by-step photographs in the chapters that follow teach these lessons in dozens of demonstrations: eggplant, tomatoes, peppers and zucchini are transformed into a fragrant ratatouille; potatoes become a rich gratin; broccoli, cauliflower, mushrooms and artichoke bottoms are coated with batter and deep fried to make crisp fritters. Taming and tailoring nature More than any other food, vegetables challenge cooks with their prodigal variety—a variety that reflects many centuries of experimentation with plant species. Prehistoric farmers domesticated edible wild plants as early as 6000 B.C., and during the next several millennia, great agriculture-based civilizations developed and spread throughout the ancient world. Tomb paintings from early Egyptian dynasties are testimony that vegetable farming was well established in Egypt by 3000 B.C. When Rome reached its pinnacle of glory three millennia later, cabbage, leeks and lettuce from Asia Minor were growing in the city's gardens, as were cucumbers from India, peas from central Asia and such plants of Mediterranean origin as artichokes, asparagus, beets, celery, garlic, parsnips and turnips. The oldest surviving European cookbook, attributed to the Roman merchant Marcus Gavias Apicius, devotes great attention to vegetables. (The cookbook probably was the first to offer the unfortunate advice that green vegetables be boiled with baking soda; the soda fixes their color, but it also gives them a brackish taste, a fact Apicius—and his successors—did not record.) The cornucopia now open to the vegetable cook has been at least partly produced as a side effect of war and conquest. Apicius' colonizing countrymen carried seeds and roots from Rome to northern Europe, civilizing with the plowshare as well as the broadsword. In the Middle Ages, the Moorish occupation of Spain and the Crusades to the Holy Land introduced to Eiurope such Middle Eastern vegetables as eggplant and spinach. The vegetable larder we know today was not completely stocked, however, until Europeans reached the New World in the 15th and 16th Centuries. Like their Old World counterparts, Indian farmers had been cultivating native plants for thousands of years. The conquering Spanish brought home from the Americas the seeds and roots of green beans, lima beans, peppers, tomatoes, potatoes and that greatest of the Indian staples, corn. Several of these vegetables were only slowly accepted (for example, the tomato, being a fruit from plants of the deadly nightshade family, was considered poisonous); yet it is hard to imagine modern cookery without them. By Columbus' time generations of careful breeding by selection had greatly changed these vegetables from their wildling ancestors. By choosing the seeds of the best plants for reproduction, the Indians had developed in their crops such useful characteristics as large size and hardiness. When the Indians began to cultivate corn around 5000 B.C., the cobs were less than 1 inch [2 Vi cm.] long. By the time the Europeans arrived, careful breeding had yielded cobs that approached modern dimensions. European farmers knew the technique well and already had employed selection to create many new varieties of vegetables, as well as bigger and better versions of existing plants. In some cases, a single plant had given rise to several varieties that now seem scarcely related at all. Starting with the scrawny wild cabbage, the Romans developed tender broccoli; centuries later in northern Europe, farmers used the very same plant to create today's cold-tolerant, tightly headed white and green cabbages, as well as Brussels sprouts and kohlrabi. Despite such achievements, early plant breeding and improvement was a haphazard affair that left much to chance and to the mysterious green thumbs of a skillful few. In the 20th Century, however, plant genetics has replaced the traditional hit-and-miss methods with sophisticated breeding systems that give quick, reliable results. In turn, the geneticists' creation of disease-resistant, high-yielding plants has helped make American vegetable farming into an industry whose output would have been unimaginable not too many decades ago. From farm to market Only a small proportion of today's vegetable harvest is supplied by the small family farms so dear to American tradition. Vege-