Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
Cooking Greens
Some vegetables are born to be stars; others are better suited to ensemble roles. There is no
better example of the latter than winter's hardy cooking greens. While you can cook mus-
tards, chards, collards, kale and even the leafy parts of turnips and beets individually, they
are best prepared en masse, or, as your mama might have said, "in a mess." Taken one at a
time, each of these greens has something to recommend it. But cook them together, and the
result is extraordinary. The flavor of mixed greens is full and deep, rather than sharp and
pointed. Cook one type of green, and you have a string quartet. Cook a mess, and you have
an orchestra.
Moreover, a carefully prepared mix of greens is not only delicious; it has the power to
heal. If you're feeling beaten down, peckish, fluish or even just a little mulish, nothing re-
stores your equilibrium like a bowl of greens. "What is patriotism but the love of the good
things we ate in our childhood?" Lin Yutang famously observed, and the same could be said
for tonics. If you were raised in the South, when you're in need of sustenance, everyone
else can keep their chicken soup.
Most greens have a deep, slightly sweet flavor with a wonderfully biting bitter back-
bone. In the South it's traditional to simmer greens for a couple of hours with a good-size
chunk of fatty pork. This is the kind of perfectly realized rustic dish that if it had origin-
ated in, say, Liguria or Provence would now be offered in every upscale trattoria and bistro
between Berkeley and Manhattan. But that's hardly the only thing greens are good for. They
make a great bed for cooking Italian sausages. Or you can add greens to your favorite soup
or stew a few minutes before serving for a vibrant bit of color and texture. They are even
surprisingly at home in elegant surroundings. Fold them into a souffle, for example, or bake
them in a tart.
It used to be that greens could be found only in specialty markets in certain neighbor-
hoods. Now they're in every upscale grocery. Can gourmet bacon grease mixed in with
all those extra-virgin olive oils be far behind? And with the current trend toward precut,
"preprepared" produce, you can even find cellophane bags of cooking greens, both indi-
vidually packed and mixed, that have already been washed and chopped. These are not
quite ready to cook - a machine can never do as good a job of sorting and trimming out
stems as a human being - but they are still a convenience.
