When I pile the vegetables from my garden on the kitchen table, I am reminded of the extraordinary culinary heritage we’ve received from the past. The vegetables I grow are called heirloom, or heritage, vegetables, since they have been handed down from one generation to the next: the Cardon de Tours, a cardoon raised by Thomas Jefferson; the Ethiopian yellow lentil grown by farmers for thousands of years; the Lancaster Lad pea, which was developed in England during the early 1900s. All of these are delightful old cultivars with flavors that evoke their fascinating histories.
Yet the process of creating heirlooms never really stops. The newer open-pollinated varieties of vegetables, like the Green Grape tomato of the 1980s, promise a future of extraordinary culinary riches that anyone can grow and reproduce in their own backyards. The vegetable world is changing quickly, but there is a core of “classics” that represents the best of what has been: the Jaune du Poitou leek, the Arran Victory potato, the zucchini called Cocozella di Napoli, just to name a few. These are the plants whose personalities inhabit my garden, a garden with a special voice and mission. That mission is woven into the fabric of this book, for this is both a narrative about origins—where things come from—as well as a sampling of the vast array of tastes and aromas that make the world of vegetables so richly enticing.
My kitchen garden is situated in Pennsylvania on the site of an old property called Roughwood, an appellation it acquired in the nineteenth century. The Roughwood Seed Collection is the three thousand or so vegetables I grow on a rotating basis to explore and examine firsthand the vegetable heritage of many parts of the world. All of the vegetables discussed in the following pages have been raised in this garden. Each one of them is part of the Roughwood story, and each one has brought to the garden its own unique narrative about the cuisines and cultures of far off places. People sometimes ask me where I live and I tell them I am six hours and twenty minutes from London—for it takes just as long to fly to London from nearby Philadelphia as it does to drive to Boston from my house. For me, the world is indeed a very small place and the sampling of vegetables I have chosen for this book reflects my worldview: there are selections from every continent, except the frozen one.
The idea of limiting my choice to just one hundred vegetables was a difficult charge, since even the culls in my collection have merit. Yet I do have my favorites and for reasons not necessarily culinary. Take, for example, two rather unremarkable looking tomatoes of great rarity: Old Moyamensing (also known as the Fairmount Goal) grown by Philadelphia prisoners in the 1830s, and the tomate pomme rouge from the physic garden of the University of Montpellier in France. That Old Moyamensing was once prisoner’s food opens a whole chapter of social history about prison gardens and the kinds of foods convicts grew for their own consumption. In the case of the French tomato, it was discussed and illustrated in the 1813 treatise on solanums by Michel Dunal, one of the great French botanists of the nineteenth century. The prison tomato is a rustic gem; the other one is a great prize and doubtless similar to the sort of seedy tomatoes grown in America by enlightened gardeners like Thomas Jefferson or eighteenth-century plant collector William Hamilton of Philadelphia.
I suppose the lesson in this is that to understand the vegetable varieties that have been entrusted to us by past generations, as well as those that are being created for us today, we must look at the sum total of their biodiversity—the good, the middling, the less important, and the truly great. They all fit together when viewed holistically, for it is this sum total of those small pieces that makes the planet Earth tick.
In the following pages I tell the tales of other favorites, such as the Spotted Aleppo lettuce, which took me twenty years to find; the Alma pea recently sent from Sweden; the Chioggia sea pumpkin I first tasted in Venice as an architecture student; and the charming variegated winter cress from my friend Ulrike’s garden in Kent, England. Lest my readers who like to garden fret that such things cannot be found in popular seed catalogs, the seed companies listed at the end of the book carry most if not all of the vegetables discussed.
Of course, aside from their historical or gardening interest, all the vegetables chosen for this book also possess culinary merit. Indeed, I have picked out ones that soar above the run of the mill in terms of flavor and appearance. You might say that this is a garden book for cooks, or a cook’s guide to the garden, because the flavor principle is a dimension of nearly every sketch and to me a very important one. Assisting me in my culinary evaluations were my friends Ulrike Paradine and John Reed. Their cozy Edwardian house in Hythe, England, with its cats and bowers of kiwi fruit, rare breeds of ducks and chickens, fish ponds, splashing fountains, grape arbors, and bed after bed of unusual vegetables and herbs, is a hidden paradise with a magic fairylike atmosphere. There, high above the English Channel, we spent many hours discussing the flavors and virtues of the one hundred vegetables included in this book.
Plants sometimes undergo alterations when they are moved to or from the New World. Intensities of flavor change dramatically with soil types or quality of sunlight. The sunlight in my garden is nearly the same as that in Madrid, Spain, which is a far cry from the soft light and mild, misty atmosphere of southern England. Thus, over the years, I have recruited the good advice of another culinary friend, Valerie Andrews, who has spent endless hours in my gardens at Roughwood tasting, commenting, and matching flavors with wine. Just to reassure ourselves that my taste impressions were on target, we cooked with these hundred vegetables many times to test and retest their strengths and weaknesses. Valerie has also kept up the French conversation and flowing wines on my terrace, where a large fig tree and pots of flowering lemons, blood oranges, limequats, key limes, and even a citron called Hand of Buddha provide my friends with endless hours of pleasant culinary inspiration. But the core of our talk surrounds vegetables. Before my guests eat, there is always a tour of the garden, wine glass in hand. The labels by each vegetable provide their names; I tell their stories.