In the days before the arrival of modern calabrese broccoli to our shops, the range of greens eaten in most households where I grew up was narrow, and greens typically meant cabbage. Whatever was on the plate in the way of protein, the accompaniment was always cabbage, and the cabbage was ‘good for you’. It was no great punishment to me, however. I liked cabbage, but that was just luck, it wasn’t why it was fed to me.
It seems to me there are plenty of families now who don’t even bother to inflict greens on themselves in this way. Sometimes it’s a basic lack of health awareness, despite the burgeoning produce markets and the ubiquitous high-profile foodie campaigners on our TV screens. For those who do fuss over their nutritional requirements, the options for satisfying these has widened to include supplements, pills, fortified breakfast cereals and milk products, and other horrors. Believe in that lot if you will. Even if we were to accept that these fulfil all our nutritional needs, does it mean the end of usefulness of our traditional medicinal greens?
If anything, I think there is a certain freedom in it. A freedom to not bother, if you’re that way inclined. But also, a freedom from thinking of greens as medicine. A freedom, if you like, to love them for the rich and complex flavours they bring to the table.
Eating greens for pleasure; now that’s an interesting concept, and a real cause for hope. And yet, I only realised the extent of my own fascination with greens when teasing it out with another devotee. I have been fortunate in the last few years to be working with Ultan Walsh of Gortnanain Farm, a grower who, like me, has a passion for the food he produces. He grows vegetables that he loves, both as commercial crops and as food to use in his own kitchen. (In theory, he also grows what I want him to grow, even if it’s not something he cares for. Somehow we don’t get much of a supply of those crops. I must get to the bottom of that one day…)
Ultan and I have often eaten some new variety of greens he has produced, and then launched into a post-mastication analysis of how it stands in the league of greenness, and how it compares to others like it. Does its texture compensate for a certain flatness of flavour? Does it have a wonderfully satisfying taste but look like a pile of sludge on the plate? This ongoing inquest has always existed between us to an extent, but it became a top-of-the-agenda subject when he trialled Chinese kale. The purpose was to check out this exotic vegetable, see how it behaved as a crop and test it in a few recipes. We were also interested at the time to find some new greens to fill those gaps in the seasons when the fields are almost bare. Ultan’s first response was to declare it the best green he’d ever eaten! Well, I wasn’t expecting that; it wasn’t even on the agenda. The ‘best’? How do you make such a declaration? What are the qualities of green? What is the vocabulary that speaks of greenness? The world of wine has a native language that allows those inside to speak fluently to each other about the endless intricacies of structure, flavour and all-round character of their subject. To outsiders, it can be an incomprehensible jargon, but there is no denying its fluency and the fact it has the practical usefulness of any proper language. Cheese and chocolate lovers sometimes aspire to creating a language of similar complex usefulness, though they still have a way to go.
So it is with the matter of greens. When Ultan and I eat some freshly cut Chinese kale or sprouting broccoli, cooked in olive oil with maybe a little chilli and garlic, we gush incoherently in praise of its very fine greenness indeed. ‘By God, but that’s a damn fine green, that’s about as green as a green could get.’ And so on, our enthusiasm compromised by a lack of vocabulary.
To me, there is a quality in the finest greens that can’t be measured in terms of nutrients or flavour. Other vegetables provide pleasures of taste, but in the inherent pleasure of fresh greens there is what can only be called a ‘life force’. It is like going straight to the source, accessing the most primal and vital food. It is engaging with life itself, in a pure and vibrant form that we can absorb but can’t quantify. More prosaically, how to define the experience of eating greens must lie, of course, somewhere in the combination of texture, flavour and appearance.
The texture of greens can range from meltingly soft baby spinach to the crisp ‘bite’ of Savoy cabbage and the satisfyingly chewy kales. Soft is good and I will happily sing its praises later, but the most prized greens in our canon have a tougher textural character.
The flavour is hard to pin down. I call it ‘green’, but that’s not really enough, is it? At the top of the scale, there is some element of a strong cabbagey character, earthy with a little bitterness. However, when cooked these greens reveal a sweet note underneath. This unique combination makes the best greens – such as sprouting broccoli and black or Chinese kale – a great partner for olive oil, various spices and the sweetness of tomatoes and peppers. Add some sheep’s cheese and you have a sense of what my heaven tastes of Of course heaven has a flavour! How could it not?
In this quixotic search for the ultimate green, colour is very important, and it may be the most telling element. Well, it would be, I suppose, given that we’re talking about vegetables that share a name with a colour.
The vegetables that rate highest in our admittedly very subjective quest have, in the raw state, a deep, dark shade of green, intense but self-contained. Toss them in a pan with some olive oil and they become vivid, glowing and translucent, a green unlike almost anything else in nature. Mind you, nature itself can get pretty vivid. One of the most electric greens I’ve ever seen lit up my journey one spring morning, while I was driving through the West Cork countryside. I was on my way to see my good friend Bill Hogan, to cook a dinner celebrating his wonderful artisan cheeses. I hadn’t been out that way in a while, but felt familiar enough with the area not to pay too much attention to the scenery. Just enjoying the drive, listening to Grant McLennan sing his beautiful melancholy. The morning had that peculiar mixture of thin sunshine and comically heavy showers that is typical, yet never quite expected, of West Cork in May. (Why does the rain surprise us? Have you ever met an Irishman with proper rain gear? Do we not expect rain in our lives or do we just not take any notice of it? Never mind, we could get stuck on that tangent forever.) Suddenly, I came to the top of a long rise in the road just as the rain took a short break, allowing the timid but still blinding sun a moment of glory. Unfolding in front of me, as I sped along, was an idyllic rural scene. For some reason, probably the music, my attitude was different and I took notice of my surroundings. Small fields of grass and meadow of the most vivid green, dripping with moisture, lit by striped sunlight, and marked out by hedgerows in which the creamy hawthorn blossom was dominated by the shockingly bright yellow, bright orange of gorse flowers. There is something in the gorse that turns the fields of West Cork to eleven on the monitor. I kid you not. Go look for it if you get a chance.
The essential greens are those on your doorstep
So much for the notion of‘green’, and the essence of what it is about green vegetables that turns me on so much. Perhaps it’s time to take a look at the specific ones that do it for me. As with all the vegetables in this book, what follows here is a study of those that have been closest to my heart over the past year. Most are long-standing favourites, but even then they have become new again to me in the way that I work with them, which is constantly evolving, and, even more so, in the way that I procure them. Green vegetables, more than any others, have to be fresh to give their best, and the only sure way to get fresh greens is to grow them yourself or to source them from a local supplier who can deliver what you need when you want it. The shorter the journey from field to kitchen, the more we can access the almost magical qualities of foods that, being so recently picked, are simply bursting with life. It is in the forming and nurturing of the relationships essential to that transaction that we can change the way we value our greens. When it comes right down to it, the ultimate reason these vegetables are so important to me is because they are grown close to where I work