My friend Judith sent me this link http://www.npr.org/programs/wesat/features/2002/apr/loaf/

to a story about prison food. If you misbehave badly enough, at Baltimore's Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center, you will be fed this loaf, which contains carrots, spinach, beans, tomato paste, and whole wheat bread among other things. With the bread, it reminds me of recipes for puddings of various kinds, except that there are no eggs. I suspect that the problem is not the vegetables, but the lack of moisture.

I am trying to be good about eating my vegetables. For lunch I had spinach, romaine, basil, nasturtium and sorrel leaves with sliced tomato, olives, and feta cheese. The nasturtiums are a first this year--they look like tiny lily pads, and taste like pepper. I recommend them. I also ate a cold slice of potato.

Sorrel is an easy to grow plant that behaves like lettuce, bolting, but the leaves do not become bitter. Instead they have a lovely, sour, lemony taste. For thirty-five years I have contemplated Julia Child's recipe for sorrel soup. Perhaps now is my opportunity.

As to the mouldering beets: someone took one out of the drawer, to call my attention to it, so I sliced the mouldy end off, and did the same to the second beet. Now they are both sitting on the cutting board. But, it's too hot to cook them.

Tomorrow I'll report on my investigation into why the word vegetable should mean both to quicken and to exist like a couch potato.

For the most part, the indexes in my cookbooks do include vegetables, along with "see specific vegetable types". So it's not as though there is something embarrassing about vegetables, requiring them to be hidden or ignored. But I do find the word somewhat awkward. It's ugly. The consonants are thick, the v, the g, the t, and the b. And the related words, vegetate, vegetative. Perhaps this is because the root is Latin, rather than Greek--I'm thinking of George Orwell's warning against too many Latin words, although since I don't know Greek, I can't say for sure, in this case, about vegetable.

As usual in these situations I turn to the dictionary, in this case a hard copy of the Random House unabridged c.1967. Under vegetable as a noun, we find not only definitions related to plants (any herbaceous plant whose parts are used for food) but, number 4, "a dull, spiritless, and uninteresting person." And the adjectival meanings include not only "characteristic of plants" but also, 10. "uneventful, dull, a vegetable existence."

How can this be? Especially since the Latin root, vegetare, means to quicken? (vegetare, to quicken, and abilis, able). Is it because some vegetables, the tubers and gourds, squashes and eggplants, are lumpish in appearance?

Perhaps the memory of your mother telling you to "eat your vegetables" brings an uneasy sense of an uneventful, dull existence. If you remain all your life under the thumb of your mother, perhaps this means that you are unable to quicken into a life of your own.

It may be I'm right that there is more to this vegetable business than meets the eye.

Vegetables the next day

July 26: I don't mean to imply that recipes are uninteresting. On the contrary! Kitchen-parade-veggieventure.blogspot has excellent vegetable recipes, short times, simple ingredients. Check out the beets sliced with butter and paprika.

Let me also refer you to the recent Wall Street Journal personal section on the health benefits of vegetables.

But what I wonder is, do you ever have vegetables mouldering in the bottom drawer of your refrigerator? If so, why? There are two beets in my fridge that are growing a soft cloud of mildew. They may or may not still be edible. How did they get lost, or is the word, abandoned?

And what about the eggplant that sometimes has to be thrown away, riddled as it is with elliptical soft spots? I have made myself a rule: no buying more of some vegetable until you've used what's already there. Perhaps I just hate eggplant, but feel that I ought to like it.

Here is Elizabeth David on eggplant, from French Country Cooking 1951, p. 159:
Aubergines en Gigot (the index has no mention of eggplant, so I looked up the French word)

"A recipe from the Catalan coast of France, and perhaps the best way of eating aubergines.

In each whole, unpeeled, aubergine, make two rows of small incisions; into these put alternatively small pieces of bacon and closes of garlic which have been rolled in salt, pepper and herbs, either marjoram or basil.

Put the aubergines in a roasting dish with a little oil poured over them, cover the dish and roast them in a slow oven for about 1 hour.

To be served as a separate course. They are also very good cold, split open, salted, and with a little fresh oil poured over."

Welcome to Vegetable Thoughts

Welcome to Vegetable Thoughts. With vegetables so much in the news (vegetables for health, vegetables in the context of sustainable agriculture, slow food, local consumption), I think it's time to do a little thinking about them in a literary or artistic context.

Do vegetables arouse anxious thoughts in you? Do you find it difficult to shift your cooking and eating habits to a greater consumption of vegetables? Are you hostile to eggplant? Perhaps, by examining our ideas and notions about vegetables, we can expand our enjoyment of them both as sources of health and objects of study and admiration.

Are there vegetables in Jane Austen's novels? The novels of Dickens? What did Mrs. Beeton have to say about vegetables? Elizabeth David? What are your favorite vegetable paintings? Are we limited to Dutch still lifes of squash? Can we find zucchini in Picasso? Should fruit be excluded?

Never mind recipes. Take a dip into the world of food for thought.