Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A chef’s stories and recipes from the land

Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A chef’s stories and recipes from the land
Denis Cotter

Following the successes of Café Paradiso and the award-winning Paradiso Seasons, Denis Cotter is back with an evocative, witty collection of tales and a superb range of exciting and delicious vegetarian recipes.Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me cajoles, informs and questions our relationship to the land and the vegetables we eat. We go on a personal journey with Denis as he shares his passion for his favourite foods.Denis drags us into muddy fields and introduces us to the growers of the best produce imaginable. Through heart-felt and charming text, he informs and amuses. The excitement of a robust blackberry jam becomes a passionate argument for us to go out into the countryside, the dazzling sight of high-trailing borlotti beans ignites a discussion on the future of artisan growing.Whether creating a restaurant masterpiece or foraging in hedgerows and woods, Denis searches for a new connection between food, people and land … oh, and he also teaches you how to search for mushrooms, wild greens and sloes, how to cook asparagus and take on an artichoke with attitude.Divided into four themed chapters, 'It's a Green Thing', 'Wild Pickings', 'A Passionate Pursuit' and 'Growing in the Dark', each including information and anecdotes about the vegetables that feature as well as many delicious recipes. There are simple salads and soups as well as more challenging main meals and mouth-watering desserts.Recipes include:Fresh Pasta with Abyssinian Cabbage, Pine Nuts & Sheep's Dressing;Courgette Flower, Pea and Chive Risotto;Samphire Tempura with Coriander Yoghurt;Grilled Portobello Mushrooms with Potato Pancakes and Tarragon Cream;Cabbage Timbale of Celeriac and Chestnuts with Porcini and Oyster Mushroom Sauce

Wild Garlic, Gooseberries…and Me

Denis Cotter

To the memory of my father, Michael Cotter, a frequent and often unexpected guiding presence during the writing of this book.

The greatest service that can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture.

THOMAS JEFFERSON

Table of Contents

Cover Page (#u26af9066-b872-558c-b458-b94a75a2a91c)

Title Page (#u21944abe-f39e-5860-9cb1-65894695f7a4)

Dedication (#uedc779f5-696e-5d09-a126-35bdb1cc66fe)

Epigraph (#u9cc96752-6fdf-57ee-b534-7f6909a5c502)

Introduction (#u267bf321-dbb5-5090-91dd-e43d413556bd)

It’s a green thing (#u8e195d2e-d873-5a06-8f84-eb0bf93cc6b8)

Wild pickings (#litres_trial_promo)

A passionate pursuit (#litres_trial_promo)

Growing in the dark (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Introduction (#ulink_0f93564c-d65f-5ae7-9984-e0cef8d5e6f5)

While I was writing this book, most people I know learned not to ask two particular questions: ‘How is it coming along?’ and ‘What is it about?’ Some kept asking anyway, which was actually much appreciated. The answer to the first question was almost always a moan, often very long, sometimes monosyllabic. To the second question I would answer simply, ‘Vegetables,’ and most of the time I really felt that it was enough of an explanation. Caught on a good day, I might have added that the book is also about my relationships with the vegetables I work with as a professional cook, and with the people who grow them. It is also about the place where this happens, and my place in that place.

Now that the book is done, I guess that’s still the answer I would give. Food is life. We all know that intuitively but often forget it or lose touch with the importance of food in our lives beyond the basic need for sustenance. A healthy culture needs a healthy food culture, one that is built on trust and making the connections and relationships that shape a community.

I have been living with the structure of this book for so long that it seems completely natural to me, and I have to remind myself that it may not be quite so obvious to others. The vegetables I have chosen to write about are not listed in alphabetical order nor arranged in a pattern that reflects the seasons of a year. Instead, they are grouped according to shared characteristics, whether that be their colouring, as in the opening chapter ‘It’s a green thing’, or their habitat as in both ‘Wild pickings’ and ‘Growing in the dark’.

In ‘A passionate pursuit’ I suppose the grouping is less obvious, but these are the vegetables that are currently a major source of interest, even obsession, both to me and to Ultan Walsh, the grower who provides much of the local produce we use at Café Paradiso.

Very early, back in that innocent but hugely enjoyable stage of just sitting around talking about a potential book, I visited Ultan often, to pry further into something which I took for granted: the hows and whys of his work as a grower. I already knew that we shared a special affection for certain vegetables, such as the artichokes and asparagus that were thriving on his new farm. I knew too that we were both excited by the possibility of producing vegetables that might be thought of as non-native, or those that are difficult to grow in this part of the world. During those conversations, I came to understand better the deeply personal way in which a grower works with his produce and his specific piece of land. It was when he burst my linear notion of seasonality that I realised I needed to look at the produce from a new angle and to dig deeper into the characteristics of different vegetables and their potential.

The result, this book, is therefore a very personal take on the vegetables I have encountered in a year and a bit of concentrating on the possibilities of one small corner of the southwest of Ireland. It’s a combination of things I know or believe to be true, things I have learned in the process, and some stuff that you might find amusing. Oh, and a pile of recipes that I hope you will find useful in the kitchen if the text gets your juices going.

It’s a green thing (#ulink_e13be8f4-33a9-580b-bdfc-22dbe79f469a)

It all comes down to the rain in the end. Of course it does. How could it be otherwise? Of the many clichés and myths surrounding Ireland, two of the most unavoidably true are that it’s a green place, and it rains a lot. These are facts. It’s a simple equation. The rain makes the place green. That, and the temperate climate, which means the land never gets scorched in summer or frozen in winter. The damned grass never stops growing.

Coming in to land at Cork Airport, you will still occasionally hear stifled gasps and hushed exclamations at just how green the fields are down below. Not just from first-time tourists – they expect it, they’ve read the brochure – but also from returning natives who’ve popped abroad for a spot of weekend shopping and martinis. We Irish may be a moneyed lot these days, but we still get excited at the sight of our little green home.

Those who know and care about these things say that green is the colour of hope. Hmm…I like that. Hope is a very strong force in life, nothing like the wishful thinking it is often taken for. It is a positive, purposeful energy, and in my green-tinged world, that connection makes sense.

Green has long been an obsession of mine. The colour, that is. My eye is drawn to flashes of green in every visual setting. Artwork, furniture, a row of books, crockery on a shelf or shoes in a shop window; clothes especially, whether on a body or hanging on a rack. I wear a lot of green, and feel comfortable with myself in green more than any other colour. I took to it quite young, glorying in its many shades – and there are so many, far more than the forty that the hoary old Irish ballad glorifies.

Some greens are fun in a shocking way, most just merge into the background – literally, in a rural context, of course. The ones in the dark green-black, olive-tinted sphere are almost soberly elegant. Almost. There are dozens that seem bearable when viewed in an indoor mirror, but in the light of day make you resemble a lost American tourist looking for Killarney. I actually love them all, in the way a good parent likes his children equally, or a cat lover pampers every one of her disdainful feline fold.

In the vegetable world, greens have long been lumped together. Mind you, now that I think of it, the political Greens are usually treated in the same way – tolerated, patronised, thought of as vaguely good for you, an off-centre sideshow to the real focus of the political table.

Green vegetables, if they are eaten at all, have very often been taken as if they were medicine, a source of some necessary but unidentified nutrients, and swallowed as such without any expectation of pleasure. ‘Eat your greens’, that familiar old war-cry, translates into: ‘Enjoy your dinner but eat that dull but healthy stuff I put on your plate too; it’s good for you.’ It was inevitable that this attitude led to greens being cooked as though they were medicine too, with little care given to how they might taste.

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 by people I know and trust.