The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [52]
“I hope you like bitter greens,” he warned us after we had each tried a taste of the common plantain, “because that’s what we’re going to be finding a lot of now.”
Bitter greens, however, seemed to be just fine with everyone in the group. Maybe a generation ago this would have been different. But the national palate has softened in recent years to bitter greens. Arugula is strikingly bitter, and it’s a favorite for fresh salads among gourmets. Broccoli rabe has become a darling in Italian restaurants and recipes. Many of my friends and foodie acquaintances agree that it’s the vegetable’s strong bitterness that makes it special and places it above its mild cousin, plain broccoli, in the taste lexicon. Another thing that distinguishes these two vegetables, broccoli rabe and arugula, is their steep price tags.
“The important thing about a lot of these greens, especially if you live in the city, is that they’re detoxifiers. They have a lot of chemicals that help your body fight against all the smog and city air,” Tim went on.
Next, he identified a patch of dandelion. I remembered helping my father pick them from the lawn as a child. Their long, sharply serrated leaves grow in petal-like clusters around the yellow dandelion flowers, which appear for a few weeks each year in early spring. They’re easy to spot, these familiar-looking weeds that grow in the cracks of sidewalks from here to Sydney. Like arugula, they were also enjoying the embrace of haute cuisine as a salad green. Just as they were popping up in nature, dandelion greens were appearing on more and more menus that spring. These are biologically identical plants to the wild version that we were now picking in the park.
“It’s really the same thing they have at the Union Square Greenmarket?” someone in our tour group asked. “I just saw them there going for three-fifty a bunch.”
Tim nodded. The woman shook her head and began collecting more.
It’s funny how leaves, when you don’t know what you’re looking at, seem to blend as one on the ground. Once my eyes were reacquainted with the dandelion’s shape, I could pinpoint them immediately, tucked amid the grass and other weeds. I began filling my plastic bag with them.
“Poor man’s pepper,” Tim said, pointing to another plant in the same patch just outside Grand Army Plaza. “It tastes really peppery, which is why it got its name. Kind of like arugula,” he said.
An appropriate name in more ways than one, I thought. I took a leaf that the person standing beside me passed to me from a bunch that Tim had plucked for the group. The leaves had sharp, spiky teeth and very faint hairs on their surface. Most leaves of any plant have fuzz if you look close enough, Tim explained. I would find this was true throughout the tour, though I suspect that the more prominent fuzz on the poor man’s pepper is one reason why this plant didn’t become an overnight sensation in the culinary world. Once my front teeth bit down on the leaf, I detected a grasslike sweetness at the tip of my tongue. The leaf felt silky in my mouth, very thin and delicate. As I chewed some more, I could see what Tim meant—it was pleasantly spicy, like a kick of black peppercorn.
“Yum,” I said, and passed the plant to the next person.
“These should get a lot more bitter as the season goes on; same with most of the plants we’ll be finding here today. So they’re best to eat now. Otherwise you can cook them,” Tim added.
While people busied themselves picking sprigs of the plants they’d just learned about, I found a moment to ask Tim a question.
“How do you usually cook these plants?