Le Weekend Roundup...

From the frozen, earthy depths of my brain and somewhere near the Belgian border.

Yes, it's still winter, so yes, more winter veg!

If you cannot stand to read another word from me about the subtle and stubborn beauty of winter vegetables, then today’s post is not for you. You may close the page and step away. I’ll be ok, I know it’s nothing personal. Come back in May when the soil is warm, the sun is high, and the veg gettings are stupidly easy. Maybe while you wait you can instead read a post by Dorie Greenspan or my new acquaintance David Lebovitz? Both Paris-based, both with excellent Substacks. Both apparently capable of writing about things other than gnarled roots pulled from the frozen earth. Sexier things. Things like chocolate and baking and cocktails and the highly subjective topic of “the best”. Me, I’m stuck down here in the dirt, still obsessing over roots and tubers.

I just can’t seem to pull my head out of the ground, literally, it’s quieter down there, and cool and dark, and it feels safer. There’s a lot going on, but it’s dark and you can’t see it occuring. It happens on a microbial level, lightless and silent. Kind of like deep under the ocean where the sun doesn’t reach but life continues. Starches convert to sugar in the cold in some plants, like a special winter bonus. Above ground foliage freezes and wilts, but just below the surface, as sweetness is ramping up.

Soon enough, my friends, soon enough I’ll be exalting in the tender buds of spring, but for now, what choice do we have? Sure, buy the tomatoes and peppers from the far-away sunny regions, the greenhouses of Holland, it’s fine, I do it too, and I buy bags of mixed lettuces and lemons and citrus, all having travelled a million miles to my table, to break up the monotony of the winter’s offerings. Think about what it would have been like to eat in a cold city like New York or Paris two hundred years ago. Endless potatoes and all their underground neighbors, salted meats and fish, cured pork products, bread, cheese. Not a bad menu, actually, similar to how I’m trying to eat now, but only if it had been a bountiful summer and plenty had been stored away. One weather disaster, infestation or disease and that was it. Nothing stored, nothing eaten. Until long-distance refrigerated shipping came along in the late nineteenth century, you were out of luck, baby. And out of food, if you were a rural-dweller. I know, I read The Long Winter, part of the Little House on the Prairie series. It left a deep, deep impact on me. The images of the Ingalls family, freezing and starving as they frantically ground their wheat seed for flour. One bad summer’s crop disaster or endless blizzards leading to a winter of near starvation. Terrifying.

But back here in the twenty-first century and our abundant, seemingly boundless food, I took a day trip yesterday to Lille. A lovely, charming little city near the Belgian border on the recommendation of my new pal Jane Bertch, who also has a Substack you should read. Lille has an old quarter that is beautiful and full of little shops and restaurants serving Flemish food, like Belgian boeuf carbonnade, a beef, beer and onion stew and waterzooi of chicken, a creamy braised chicken dish enriched with eggs. And also horse and tongue were on many menus, but not horse tongue, just beef tongue. I did not partake of either of those. I have eaten horse, as sashimi in Tokyo years ago where it tasted like venison and iron, and smoked, thinly sliced deli tongue served cold with rye bread and mustard was a Saturday lunch staple at my grandparent’s house after synagogue services. I also love lamb’s tongues, which are small and velvety-textured, but you just can’t think too much about what they are when you’re eating them, especially if you are at all sentimental.

But both of those classic Flemish dishes I learned to make thirty or so years ago because I was asked to fill in for a friend who was personal chef to Maurice Templesman, and make lunch for him at his office a few times. He’s Belgian, so I made him Belgian food and he was happy. Do you remember him? He’s often referred to as Jackie Kennedy’s final partner, but he was a diamond merchant and political operator, to put it lightly. Read that Wiki link I added, oooh boy, what a story, I’d forgotten half of what he’d been involved with over the years, other than Jackie. Anyway, I made both of those things for him the week I cooked. Seeing as he was Belgian and all. He gave me no diamonds in exchange, though.

I didn’t order either one of the Belgian classics, I ordered pork sausage and red cabbage, because, well RED CABBAGE. Braised until it was as tender as a lamb’s tongue, vinegary, and covered, both it and the sausage by a creamy, grainy mustard sauce. (this would NOT have been served at my grandparent’s house on shabbat) And mashed potatoes, but they were the yellow bintje variety of Belgian potato, nutty and floral, potatoes grown for flavor, not for industrial bulk. It was a great lunch, I also drank a little twenty-five centiliter (deciliter? gotta look that up) glass (like a half-pint) of Pelican, the local beer. Which, three sips in gave me an immediate buzz and made me suddenly fluent in French. Which was convenient because I was seated at a table partager, a shared table. I was happy for that, eating alone is fine with me most days, but I also like being thrown in with strangers sometimes. It was a large table already seated with three couples, they all politely said bonjour, but when the waiter started speaking to me automatically in English, and they all started automatically asking me questions about where I was from and what I was doing in Lille and we all became best friends and had ourselves a lively old half-pint-of-beer-fueled party. In FRENCH. No, not really, I made a mangled effort, helped along by two ounces of beer, and they all complimented my efforts and spoke enough English to make it work.

Before lunch though, I walked to the Lille covered market, which is not in the beautiful, historic part of town and was a thirty minute walk from the train station in the freezing, windy weather. I will often, when arriving in a new place first thing check out a town’s local market, to see what people buy and eat, and to maybe get a snack. I bought some cheese from two young sisters who coached me on the most local cheese to Lille, which is Maroilles, but they could only sell me a whole one and I didn’t want to stuff that into my sac a dos, my backpack and promener all day with a stinky cheese on my back, so they gave me another suggestion. A Trappist-style cheese, cow’s milk, washed in beer. I love this style of cheesemaking so they cut me a little chunk, and I gnawed on it as I walked the market and scoped out the local goods, especially the produce. It always comes back to the produce with me, doesn’t it? If you;re ever wondering what in the hell my actual point is, just wait, there’s a turnip coming down the road. I have to tie this all together somehow, even if sometimes it’s a very circuitous route.

See the two bottom-right images in the photos above? Those roots? They’re what today’s post was supposed to be about. More damn roots, I know, I know. But, as usual, I digressed, probably for the better, and probably to the sound of many you you silently cheering or maybe rolling your eyes at the pictures. So listen, I just want to briefly talk about these two roots, really quick, ok? Because they both sparked memories for me that I’d long forgotten, and then I’ll wrap this up. It’s 8:30 pm here, I mean 20:30, and I did decide to take another week of French with the creepy teacher. He’s kind of grown on me, and we make each other laugh, despite his creepiness, so I have to get up early.

The vegetable on the left is called salsify, it’s a long thin root with white flesh and black skin. Sometimes it’s called oyster plant, no idea why. It’s milder and maybe nuttier than parsnips, without their peppery bite. I rarely see it in the US except maybe at the Union Square farmers market in Manhattan and then it’s like $10 a pound. I never buy it, and rarely see it on menus. The other are parsley roots, which are exactly that, the root of parsley, and not parsnips. Same, sometimes I see them at USQ market, but not much. Rarely on menus but I don’t eat out at the high end much anymore.

There was a restaurant a few blocks from Union Square called Verbena many years ago, that I loved. It was one of the earlier market-focused restaurants and the chef-owner was a woman. What was her name? I cannot remember, but it was where I went when someone else was paying. I only ate there a few times because of that, but one time I did the vegetarian tasting menu just for fun, and she had a parsley root flan as one course. I had never seen a savory flan, it was jiggly, creamy and light, peppery like parsnips but herbal too. It was probably served with some little salad or something. I very, very rarely remember individual meals or courses I’ve had, but this is something I’ve always remembered, nearly thirty years later. It was that good. It was also the first use of parsley root I’d ever come across. So seeing them in the market yesterday was exciting, if one can call a Proustian memory about a root vegetable exciting. It’s very French, at least.

Salsify was a vegetable I had never heard of until I started teaching culinary school in 1998. The curriculum at the time was straight-up classical French, mainly lifted straight out of, like directly, word-for-word from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Julia Child’s seminal first book. It’s how I learned about all this traditional French cuisine stuff. The kitchens I’d worked in up until then were all “New American”, rooted in the French techniques, but far from the old school classics, and in the fat-phobic 90’s…think olive oil mashed potatoes and carrot-juice reductions. Lots of light sauces and grilling, nothing polished and finished with cream or butter, and nary a foie gras.

When I started teaching I had to catch up on the classic stuff, fast! One lesson in the curriculum had little batons of glazed salsify paired up with I think a squab or guinea hen, maybe? I had literally never heard of it, and thought maybe it was a typo or mistake in the lesson. I have no idea where we sourced it from, I never saw it anywhere, and it was years before I saw it again. I thought it was a made-up vegetable when I was cramming to teach it that morning on the subway, the first time I had to do the lesson. There was a lot of that. One thing I’m loving about being here, which I also wrote about in October when we came on our Burgundy and Bordeaux trip, was that it was like a trip back in time, through the greatest hits of the Peter Kump’s School of Culinary Arts, late 90’s curriculum. I see things on menus in France that I really thought someone on the faculty had just made up to be faux French and annoying.

But yesterday, there they were, right out there with the pedestrian turnips and carrots, the plebian squashes and the rutabagas, just sitting there, two more roots, doing their quiet winter root things. Just being their Frenchy rooty selves, and silently judging everyone who passed them right by for the shinier, brighter, seasonless peppers and tomatoes. I felt bad for them, but also good for the French, who know how to cook a root, who can appreciate how to coax them into deliciousness, and how to really respect the ebbs and flows of the seasons. It’s all about patience, so just wait. Just think about Laura Ingalls and her family. Soon we’ll be wallowing in basil and zucchini, for a brief, bright, sunlit moment, and then we’ll dig deep again, back into the dirt for another long winter slumber. I can wait, it’ll be worth it.

Oh and just a note, if you read last week’s paid post I mentioned the restaurant Marilou, where I had the fantastic celery root soup. Well, I’ve been checking their daily menus online, and tomorrow…the soup is topinamabour aka sunchokes or Jerusalem artichokes! I know I wrote about them earlier in the fall, I love them so much, and I am so excited! Guess where I’m eating lunch after class?