Remarkably few families of plants give us the bulk of our vegetable foods. The grasses supply grain. The cabbage, or, “crucifer,” family provides numerous, familiar table-vegetables. The nightshade family gives us tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplant and tomatillas, as well as deadly nightshade. The beet family, believe it or not, includes spinach and chard, but not the turnip, which as a crucifer, belongs to the cabbage alliance. Peas and beans are pretty much peas and beans, although outside the supermarket, legume kin run from clover (good for edible sprouts) to the mesquite bush (namesake of the seed-eating Mescalero Apache tribe) as well as the honey locust tree, the pods of which serve for animal feed. The morning glory family produces the sweet-potato. Seeds of the morning glory are said to be hallucinogenic. Centered on this effect, a native American religious cult once flourished. It is surprising that the silent majority is still silent on the subject. They had less trouble getting young persons interested in religion than we do, one supposes. Most squash are indigenous American finds, and that includes melons and the pumpkin, dating the “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin-Eater,” rhyme as having been written after the return of Columbus from the new world. Vita Sackville-West, the Bloomsbury figure and a superb garden writer, used to grow rambling roses up old apple trees, suitable as the rose (family) embraces the apple, the pear and the quince. One tell-tale of their kinship is their common affliction with fungus diseases. The rose itself has been candied and distilled as attar, while it’s seed pods or, “hips,” are a source of vitamin C. The violet and peony have long histories of dietary usage, though fallen lately out of fashion. The lily, less expectedly, is head of a line of which asparagus is scion. Queen Ann’s lace, in other dress, yields the carrot, parsley and that warted peculiarity, Hamburg parsley. No, not parsley with flat leaves, for laying upon beef patties. Those rascal thistles make some compensation by giving us lettuce. It is not a very great leap from the wild onion, rampion, to the domestic.
But real curiosity lies in the disappearance of once common edibles plants from our menus. The sunflower flourishes, but its relative with edible tubers, the Jerusalem artichoke, is nowadays spurned. Amaranth and chelipodium now languish under the aspersions, “pig weed,” and “goose-foot.” The native Americans raised both as high-protein greens and grain crops and development is under way to return them to our resources. One gets the idea that the New World was captured by highly aggressive, picky-eaters. As far as northern Europe was concerned, the starches–potatoes, squash, beans and corn– were all that really caught on. Tobacco must be viewed as a sort of revenge for the buffalo. Of course, commerce found use for a wider range of plants and something already long available in the diet–sugar–moved from the pharmacy to common usage, when large quantities of sugar cane became available. Brillat-Savarin writes of one French citizen proclaiming, just before the Revolution, that he would never drink water without sugar again. Decadence personified!
The edges of our world are studded with possibilities–in table gardening no less than elsewhere. Out-of-fashion veggies, such as the cardoon, which Proust recalled with marrow; radicchio; jicama; tomatillo; sorrel; and the swarm of Japanese introductions, from that denticulate, sword-swallower’s delight–edible chrysanthemum–to seaweed, hight, “sea vegetable.” Every year I like to try growing something new, for the romance. Gardening is a romantic activity. Imagine how pleased I felt to learn that, “cantaloupe,” is Italian for, “wolf-song,” the Italian castello in the kitchen gardens of which the mellon came to be.
appeared April, 2001
But real curiosity lies in the disappearance of once common edibles plants from our menus. The sunflower flourishes, but its relative with edible tubers, the Jerusalem artichoke, is nowadays spurned. Amaranth and chelipodium now languish under the aspersions, “pig weed,” and “goose-foot.” The native Americans raised both as high-protein greens and grain crops and development is under way to return them to our resources. One gets the idea that the New World was captured by highly aggressive, picky-eaters. As far as northern Europe was concerned, the starches–potatoes, squash, beans and corn– were all that really caught on. Tobacco must be viewed as a sort of revenge for the buffalo. Of course, commerce found use for a wider range of plants and something already long available in the diet–sugar–moved from the pharmacy to common usage, when large quantities of sugar cane became available. Brillat-Savarin writes of one French citizen proclaiming, just before the Revolution, that he would never drink water without sugar again. Decadence personified!
The edges of our world are studded with possibilities–in table gardening no less than elsewhere. Out-of-fashion veggies, such as the cardoon, which Proust recalled with marrow; radicchio; jicama; tomatillo; sorrel; and the swarm of Japanese introductions, from that denticulate, sword-swallower’s delight–edible chrysanthemum–to seaweed, hight, “sea vegetable.” Every year I like to try growing something new, for the romance. Gardening is a romantic activity. Imagine how pleased I felt to learn that, “cantaloupe,” is Italian for, “wolf-song,” the Italian castello in the kitchen gardens of which the mellon came to be.
appeared April, 2001