More than a baked potato

When I was at university in the late 1830s a couple I knew, flatmates of a friend of mine, decided to turn vegetarian. Which is to say she decided, and he acquiesced. Sadly neither of them had a clue about cooking, or diet, and so every meal I saw them eat, and others reported by my friend, consisted of baked potato with a bit of cheese and/or butter. Within a few weeks they both looked distinctly ill, pale and blotchy, irritable, tired... It's such people who in times past gave vegetarian diets a bad reputation.


I hope that the multitudes nowadays turning to vegetarianism and veganism have far better culinary skills. I worry about that, though, and about the rapid rise of ready-meals to cater for new converts to those causes. I've tried a few of them, including one well-known brand name, and have not been impressed. I'll make my own bean-burgers thanks.


The Dear Leader (may her enemies be trampled beneath her feet) and I are not vegetarians, and I for one have no intention of ever being so. But as noted before we eat far less meat than was once the case (in a £120+ shop yesterday I spent £3 on some cooking chorizo, the only meaty item in my trolley). That's for environmental and health reasons, but increasingly for reasons of flavour too, and, linked to the latter cause, thanks to our kitchen garden providing some great ingredients, none of which is steak.


The very excellent Ursula Ferrigno has been a particular inspiration in that regard, her Italian-focused cooking simple and delicious: yesterday the DL picked and blanched some frisee chicory, I cooked and pureed cannellini beans with loads of garlic, lemon zest and juice, olive oil, and a good handful of oregano fresh from the garden, with a few pitted and chopped black olives to garnish it. The warm puree on top of the drained green leaves made a very fine dish indeed. And so simple.


Our health, already good, has I think improved with the change, though as over the last few years we've also increased our exercise levels it's hard to say what has been most important in that regard.


We eat a huge variety of fresh vegetables, salads, herbs and fruits, many of them home-grown but others sourced in SE Asian and Chinese stores as well as three or four different supermarkets. I wonder how many new vegans are just cutting out foods, and not adding to what they ate before? So meat and two over-cooked boring veg becomes two over-cooked boring veg, or worse still burger and fries becomes fries. I know we are lucky to have the space, but as importantly we have the DL with the skills to grow such excellent produce, and me with the experience and curiosity to transform it into a huge range of different dishes. I really hope that this generation of newbie vegans has the oomph to do more than reheat packet-meals, or try to live on baked potatoes - without even the cheese or butter if they're true to their principles.

Changing Tastes

Now in my very, extremely, exceptionally late thirties I find that my tastes have changed. Or has the taste of the things I taste changed?


Two specific examples. First, chicory/endive. A few days ago I cooked an Italian-ish dish as a starter, the basis of which was purple-tinged chicory picked fresh from the garden. It was served with griddled bacon and mozzarella, but that's not to the point. A good thirty or forty years ago when I first encountered chicory (not something that featured in my 1960s and 1970s Norfolk childhood and youth) it was so much bitterer. Before ours was usable I bought something very similar from Waitrose, and regularly purchase the version with yellow highlights from a variety of sources. They all taste sweeter than they once did.


That could be my taste buds becoming less sensitive - certainly children have far more discerning TBs than adults - but I think it is the bitter quality being bred out of the shop stuff and the seed stock alike.


Same thing with grapefruit, that even ten years ago was sharper and again bitterer. Sadly, though ten years ago I may have been childish I was not a child.


Given that the bitter quality of chicory, and the mouth-puckering sharpness of grapefruit were their defining virtues this is rather sad. To suit palates perhaps trained by the processed and fast food industries to like sugary sweetness in all things we are losing - we are being robbed of - character in our food, or some of the ingredients at least.


I am not a complete Luddite as regards changes to the stuff we grow and eat. Apples have definitely been bred to brown more slowly when cut into. That's fine by me. But I also think that along with breeding nearly tasteless varieties like Golden Delicious, the ultimate misnomer as they're light green and lack flavour, growers have reduced the sharpness in many (but not all, so it's not my taste buds) apple varieties found in the supermarket.


Sadly my usual remedy - grow it ourselves - does not fully resolve this problem. Apples perhaps, as we have established trees whose fruits remain sharp and tasty, with their own individual character, not just a vague apple-ness and different colours. But not chicory, as the experience recounted above demonstrates. Except - maybe this is pushing me to rejoin (again) Doubleday Research, or Garden Organic, or whatever they are called now. The joy of membership there is that once a year you get a small selection of 'heritage' seeds, chosen from a fairly long list. Part of the value of that is retaining bio-diversity; part that the vegetables grown from the seeds have individual character. Yes, I have to rejoin, on both counts.