NOVEMBER 2010
When I was a girl, lost in poetry, the only root on my mind was the mandrake root in John Donne—the one that made you pregnant. Roots were scary, the cautionary stuff of fairy tales and folklore. Consider the girl with the long gold hair whose parents promised her to a witch in exchange for a basket of roots that her mother craved. The roots turned out to be a kind of rampion—a radishy-tasting taproot—which Germans call Rapunzel and my summer neighbors in Umbria, who crave them, too, call raponzolo. And while no one can say for sure if the root was named for the girl or the girl for the root, most people would agree that there is something dangerous about a vegetable so alluring as to be worth its weight in daughters.
My family lived on a leafy, manicured street in Providence, Rhode Island—then a city of 200,000 people—but around the corner cows still grazed in a small pasture at Cole’s Farm, the last farm left in what for three centuries had been a neighborhood of family farmsteads. Sometimes the cows broke fence and wandered across the street to nibble the grass under my mother’s dogwoods, and if I led them home, I had the run of the Coles’ kitchen garden, where I picked rhubarb in the spring and cadged tomatoes in September. But if their garden harbored root vegetables, waiting to be dug up and spend the winter in a root cellar, I never saw one.
Our own cellar was occupied by a freezer, a washing machine and a dryer, and a big, comfortable room with a couch, a dartboard, and a Ping-Pong table. Our vegetables arrived twice a week in the truck of a produce peddler known to the neighborhood as Louie—a man whose most exotic roots were carrots and potatoes. My mother’s nightly admonitions to eat my vegetables referred almost entirely to Louie’s iceberg lettuce and to the bowls of formerly crisp green things leached in the “boil, butter, and serve” style of New England kitchens of the 1950s. But she never said, “Eat your carrots.” She never had to. I loved carrots long before I acknowledged that they might once have been gnarly things deep in the ground, and may even have shrieked with pain and deadly intentions, as mandrake roots were said to, when they were pulled from the darkness into God’s fresh air. My father’s outsize edition of the Judeo-Roman historian Flavius Josephus, which I used to consult for the illustrations, included the chilling advice that the only safe way to procure a mandrake was to tie your dog to it, walk away, and let the dog do the pulling, and suffer the consequences for you.
Childhood habits of mind can be hard to break. I cooked happily with all manner of root vegetables—carrots, potatoes, and also parsnips, rutabagas, turnips, and sweet potatoes—for more than thirty years before I thought of them as a family or even put the words “root” and “vegetable” together. This changed five years ago, when I flew to Stuttgart on assignment and stopped at the Staatsgalerie, where my friends Renata Stih and Frieder Schnock, conceptual artists from Berlin, had installed two round potato patches, ringed by gilded metal acanthus leaves, on the museum’s front lawn. The patches referred to a lean winter early in the nineteenth century, when an art-loving local king named Wilhelm I of Württemberg petitioned the city to buy a choice collection of Northern Renaissance paintings (van der Weydens and Memlings among them), and was rebuffed by a politician who stood up in the city’s parliament and cried, “Who needs art? We need potatoes!” The collection went to Munich instead. But in Stuttgart, nearly two centuries later, Württembergers were enjoying a feast of art and potatoes—an occasion commemorated, inside the museum, by photographs of potatoes that, according to Stih and Schnock, resembled the heads of many of their favorite artists. (I have two hanging in my front hall: a smooth, perky potato called Dorothea Tanning and a wizened spud called Jerg Ratgeb, for the turn-of-the-sixteenth-century German painter.)
Walking up to the museum, past the patches, I came upon two gardeners on their knees, and was reminded of a family of rooting boar that my husband and I had seen a few nights earlier, driving along an old post road through the forest between Berlin and Wannsee. It occurred to me then, in what Homer Simpson would describe as a “d’oh” moment, that the only difference between the Stuttgart gardeners and the Berlin boar, as rooting descriptions go, was that the gardeners’ prehensile thumbs and small shovels put them at one remove from a snout and allowed them the use of the more delicate word “dig.”
A few months later, I flew home to New York and made a slow braise of root vegetables and lamb shanks. The recipe came from Jasper White’s Cooking from New England, a book that by the end of the nineties had transformed New England’s kitchens. And it was full of delectable things: garlic, shallots, tomatoes, rosemary, oranges and lemons, and a medley of serious root vegetables, braised in olive oil and simmered in white wine and a veal stock reduced to a demiglace. I had made it for years, with a little cheating on the vegetables. That day I didn’t cheat. I followed White’s recipe to the letter and, for the first time, went eye to eye with a celery root, which I cubed to simmer along with the parsnips and the rutabagas—root vegetables that appear in my New York greengrocer’s bins so improbably shiny and appealing as to belie their origins.
There is no way to disguise the origins of a celery root, or really even to think of it as a vegetable. It is a hideous-looking creature, and it takes work. You need a sharp knife and a strong arm and the composure to hack away at a warty and unyielding surface, made doubly unpleasant by writhing extrusions and matted, fibrous hair. The process left me bloody, but I got through it by reminding myself that the root leaping off my chopping board and onto the floor with every whack of my sharpest knife was the source of all the silky céleri rémoulade I ordered for lunch whenever I worked in Paris. The celeriac that emerged from my parings, much reduced in size and menace, was just as silky and just as good to eat. I cook with it all the time now. I can toss off the chestnut, apple, and celery-root soup in Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud Cookbook (if I buy the chestnuts cooked, peeled, and in a can) and have even produced a credible rémoulade; the moans and howls and alarming ouches that still punctuate my encounters with a chopping board and celeriac are usually sufficient to drive my husband from his study to finish the chopping for me. He is quiet, quick, and focused, chopping, but my cubes are neater.
Botanists distinguish root vegetables morphologically. There are true roots: taproots (celeriac is one, carrots are another) and storage roots (sweet potatoes). There are modified stem roots: corms (Chinese water chestnuts, say, or taro); rhizomes (arrowroot, ginger); tubers (as in yams and potatoes); and finally, slipping just under the botanical wire, bulbs (from garlics to onions, and everything in between). Forget those categories. For kitchen purposes, a root vegetable is any vegetable where all or most of the part you eat grows underground—or as the food writer and historian Anne Mendelson describes them, “a bunch of people who happen to be named Smith.” But my old distinction between kind roots and cruel roots was not so fantastical, after all, although the difference has nothing to do with the way roots look but, as it turns out, with the amount of oxalic acid or hydrogen cyanide—prussic acid—they produce. (Rapunzel, despite the folklore, are quite benign. Mandrake roots, which, as Vladimir tells Estragon in Waiting for Godot, sprout from the ejaculations of hanged men, can kill you.) A plant of any kind can be toxic: try eating a rhubarb leaf and see what happens. There are, as the food scholar Frederick J. Simoons memorably put it in a book title, “plants of life” and “plants of death.” I would add that they are often the same plant.
The manioc root—otherwise known as yuca or cassava—is one of the most important food staples and sources of carbohydrates in the world, and if you happen to be a Quechua, farming in the western lowlands of Peru, your manioc is sweet and harmless. But if you are an Amerindian in the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin, the root is bitter, and you have to soak or boil it for hours to extract its deadly juices and make it safe to eat. Years ago, in Brazil, I bought a six-foot-high basket called a tipiti—a long woven tube, really, with a loop for a pole at each end. It was a lovely, mysterious, and as it turns out, essential object, having been used by the Canela Indians, a small rain-forest tribe isolated for centuries in the basin, for squeezing the cyanide out of shredded manioc before pounding it into flour. And given that I am addicted to moqueca de camarão—a rich shrimp stew, traditionally cooked with urucum berries, chili, onions, lime juice, coconut milk, and palm oil, dusted with toasted manioc flour, and served on rice—which I ate for the first time that year at a restaurant in Ipanema, I keep my tipiti in the living room as a memento mori of all the Canela who must have died looking for ways to make their manioc roots safe and tasty. I have never used the basket. Today you can buy manioc flour, not to mention the tiny pearls of manioc starch called tapioca, at any Brazilian grocery in New York.
But imagine New York in the mid-eighties, when I brought my tipiti home. The only manioc you could find north of the ethnic-food emporium called Kalustyan’s in Murray Hill was instant tapioca-pudding mix. And practically the only kinds of potato besides “boiling” or “baking” on sale south of Fairway, on the Upper West Side, were in the bins of Dean & DeLuca, a new grocery store in SoHo, where the man who chose the market produce was an aspiring sculptor from the Midwest named Lee Grimsbo, whose father happened to be a horticulturist and potato researcher at the University of Minnesota’s North Central Experiment Station. Grimsbo left Dean & DeLuca after seven years, but many New Yorkers still refer to “the Grimsbo years” as the city’s root-vegetable awakening. He began by raiding the produce stock room at Fairway. Soon he had two assistants and was driving up to the Hunts Point wholesale market, in the South Bronx—the distribution center for most of the farm produce entering the city. “Seven circles of hell,” he called it when I caught him at his apartment, about to leave for the art-supply store where he works now—a short, brisk walk from the best root-vegetable stand at the Greenmarket in Union Square. He found daikon radishes at Hunts Point, and Japanese turnips—“little snowy white things that look like radishes but taste like turnips”—and salsify and its cousin the long black-skinned white-fleshed root called scorzonera. He even discovered white carrots. His explanation: “Something’s in them, but it’s not beta-carotene.” He started adding those carrots to the potatoes he used when he made vichyssoise for supper—which was fairly often, because by then he was also flying to San Francisco for Dean & DeLuca and coming home with five or six varieties of gourmet potatoes that most native New Yorkers had never even heard of. His best trip, he told me, was to the sprawling wholesale food market in Rungis, outside Paris, which had replaced the central market called Les Halles by the 1970s but still served coffee with cognac when the farmers arrived in their trucks at three or four in the morning. Rungis was a treasure trove of root vegetables. “I almost wept,” Grimsbo says, talking about that visit. “It was heaven. Root heaven.”
Late last spring, I asked Nach Waxman to give me a capsule history of root vegetables. Waxman is the anthropologist turned food scholar and bibliophile who owns the bookstore Kitchen Arts & Letters in New York. He carries the contents of twelve thousand volumes in his head—they run from facsimiles of ancient cuneiform recipe tablets to the latest vegetarian offerings from the London chef Yotam Ottolenghi—and the first thing he told me about root vegetables was that in twenty-seven years in the business, he has come across “maybe half a dozen root-vegetable cookbooks, at most.” It saddened him, he said, to see a food that we eat all the time so conspicuously unacknowledged.
Waxman is a lover of roots. He collects root-beer labels and root-beer lore from the nineteenth century, when root beer was the hot new patent medicine—a miracle elixir with just enough alcohol in it to convince you that your dyspepsia or quinsy or “female complaint” was gone—and it was brewed, as Waxman put it, in its purveyors’ “caldrons, the ingredients secret beyond belief.” The labels said things like “sassafras plus,” and the recipe that Waxman cherishes most, from The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, which was published in 1901, calls for a half pint of root-beer extract to “ten gallons of lukewarm filtered Mississippi River water.” He told me that by the middle of the 1890s root beer was such a huge business that in one year alone, the Philadelphia pharmacist Charles Hires sold enough of his own extract to produce sixteen million gallons of elixir—a figure that translated to about four glasses of Hires Root Beer for every man, woman, and child in the United States.
Waxman’s favorite root vegetable is horseradish. He grows his own, in shallow pots in his living room on the Upper West Side. He nourishes the roots with rinse water from the dinner dishes and then, come spring, trims them and sets them, with their leaves intact, in the middle of his family’s Seder platter—a bit of commemorative decoration he describes as “a little patch of sod with greens on top.” Meanwhile, he grates and pickles the best horseradishes he can find at the Korean markets on Upper Broadway, and produces the bitter Passover herb known in Hebrew as maror—after which, he says, it’s good for a year of roast beef and bloody marys. “I’m utterly persuaded that the real history of root vegetables is that there’s no ‘history,’” he told me. “I mean, they’re simply part of the history of who we are. Primates dug for them. The hominids—chimps—even made tools to get them out. So it followed that when our brothers and sisters, out hunting and gathering, saw what the other animals were doing, they did it, too. They knew that the roots were there and they valued them. Aside from the fact that their great-great-great-ancestors ate them, they saw that root vegetables had a lot of advantages.”
The obvious advantage is that we might not have survived without them. For millennia, root vegetables were the most dependable source of nourishment that most people on the planet had. For one thing, they kept better than any other plant form. For another, you could take what you needed and leave the rest underground. “Storage in situ,” Waxman called it. “Plus, you could keep the competition away by not telling anybody where they were.” The result was that thousands of years before anyone had even heard of a carbohydrate, people knew that they needed root vegetables. And for equally obvious reasons, those people were extremely wary of roots that were not their own—a fact of culinary history that I used to think of as early man’s “beware of Greeks” syndrome. Then I discovered that it was modern man’s syndrome, too, because the wariness persisted well into the sixteenth century, when newly discovered root vegetables filled the hold of every ship returning to Europe from the Americas.
By then the problem was less digestive than theological—born in large part of the coincidental arrival in Northern Europe of the potato and the Reformation. Anne Mendelson told me that to Europe’s newly minted Protestant peasants, and to their cousins settling in North America, “God-fearing vegetables were seed vegetables, plants that ‘looked up’ to heaven, like wheat and barley—the kind of plants that were cultivated by Christians like them, by the sweat of their brows.” She said that not only were potatoes regarded “with puzzlement and suspicion”—too many people having sampled “the wrong ends,” as she describes the potato’s poisonous leaves and berries—they were also known to Protestants as “the lazy root” (in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was the devil’s root), because all you had to do to grow them was dig some holes, put in the pieces of spuds with eyes, cover them up, wait for five or six months, and dig them out and eat them. Potatoes, in short, were something Catholics did, and there was some truth in that, since the Spaniards had taken to root vegetables with huge enthusiasm. So, for that matter, had the Anglican upper classes. In 1610, the gentlemen farmers who wrote “A True Declaration of the Estate of the Colonie in Virginia” were happily eating potatoes—along with the parsnips, carrots, cucumbers, and turnips that they had brought from home—and praising them as food “which our gardens yeelded with little art and labour.” (There is no evidence as to whether they burned in hell for that one phrase.) Still, as late as 1845, when the Great Potato Famine hit Ireland, preachers all over England and America were warning their impressionably evangelical flocks that the Irish had brought suffering upon themselves with slothful and ungodly agriculture.
A few of those preachers may still be around. Late last summer, when I was working my way through a plate of Ibérico charcuterie topped with sliced black radishes—taproots—at a small Paris restaurant called Le Basilic, a vegetarian from Norway at the next table, who had been eyeing my plate with a certain horrified interest (I’d assumed that it was the ham), announced that she never touched radishes. We started talking, and I asked what root vegetables she ate at home. She replied, “I don’t eat things that hide in the ground. I eat only things that grow in the light, toward God.” “Not even potatoes?” I asked her. “Especially not potatoes!” she said.
I have always had problems with potatoes, though admittedly this has nothing to do with God. I love potatoes when other people cook them, but my own repertoire is limited (unless you count sweet potatoes, an entirely different root family and, more to the point, nearly impossible to ruin). True, I can bake a potato, fill it with butter and sour cream, and plate it next to a rare, juicy porterhouse steak. And I am particularly fond of making rösti—a foolproof Swiss potato pancake whose ratio of butter to grated potatoes rivals Joël Robuchon’s famously fattening purée de pommes de terre (a quarter pound of butter to each pound of potatoes). But for years the sight of a plain potato—so humble, unpromising, and eager for attention—filled me with kitchen jitters. I had mastered a lamb en croûte, a cloud of raspberry angel-food cake, and a seafood risotto of such mysteriously delicate flavor (the secret is fresh fennel) that even Italians asked for the recipe, long before I attempted the layers of the milky, cheesy, but hardly complicated casserole called gratin dauphinois. And even then it took years more for me to produce one in which the potatoes were neither rubbery nor mush.
That happened at last one summer after I discovered that my erstwhile Italian gardener had been planting huge potato crops in a field hidden behind my kitchen garden and selling them at a produce stand the minute I left for New York each fall. I demanded my potatoes and went to work under the tutelage of my friend Caroline Moorehead, an inspired potato cook who happened to be staying in our guest room at the time, working on a book. Caroline could slice the potatoes, chop the garlic, grate the Gruyère, and produce a gratin dauphinois in less time than it took me to open my Julia Child to “vegetables.” Watching her, I got the recipe under control, and we even turned it more or less “Italian,” with the addition of Parmesan and pancetta. But I have yet to attempt it for a dinner party. When I have friends for dinner and a sack of new potatoes in the kitchen, I take the smallest ones I can find, boil them in their skins until they’re just tender, add them to a pot with olive oil and garlic—a lot of both—crush them slightly with a pair of forks, toss them for a minute over a low flame, add some parsley, and that’s that. (Crushing is the essential part; it adds an illusion of creativity.) Better still, I turn off the voice of thrift in my head—my aunt Beatrice intoning “Waste not, want not” as she dried used paper towels in her oven on Sutton Place—and ignore my potatoes entirely. When that happens, I make a purée of turnips or carrots, with a sprinkle of cardamom, fresh savory or chervil, and an unhealthy amount of cream. Or the parsnip-and-walnut fritters in Jane Grigson’s exemplary cookbook Good Things. I never have problems with roots like those.
The Romans loved roots; Apicius cooked a mash of parsnips, red wine, cumin, and rue. The Babylonians loved roots, too; Nebuchadnezzar is said to have grown carrots in his Hanging Gardens—that is, if you believe that there were hanging gardens in Babylon. In those days, most carrots were a skinny deep-purple forked wild root. (The others came from a faded mutant strain.) They stayed purple for a couple of thousand years, even though nobody really liked their carrots purple—perhaps because the color bled into soups and sauces, turning everything else in them purple, too. I gleaned this bit of culinary history from a conference paper called “The Carrot Purple,” which the Washington food writer Joel Denker presented a few years back at an Oxford Symposium on vegetables. It wasn’t the only paper on roots. There was one on a tuberous root from the Dutch Caribbean called a pomtajer (which tastes a little like taro, a little like potato, and is sweet enough to have been used in Holland in a clafoutis), and even one on potatoes in Ireland, which contained the surprising news that before the potato arrived, the Irish were eating more butter than anybody else in Europe, and close to the largest amount of meat and cheese. But Denker’s paper got the most attention, because so few people had suspected that, botanically speaking, orange carrots were brand-new carrots—a seventeenth-century Dutch invention and a product of the same entrepreneurial enthusiasm and scattershot genetic engineering that produced the tulip bubble.
Denker, who at the time was also pursuing the history of horchata (a drink that Spaniards make from a root they call “earth almonds”), told me that food scholars were still debating whether orange carrots were a shrewd tribute to the House of Orange or the result of an equally shrewd assessment that a bright, sunny color like orange would make more people want to eat them. Everybody did. Today, some three hundred and fifty years later, purple “heritage” carrots are just starting to appear in the more expensive groceries of New York. New Yorkers, of course, eat root vegetables because they like them. Sandy Oliver, who writes books about American foodways, told me that living on an island in Maine, as she does, means eating roots, whether you like them or not. She said that the Europeans who first settled there had had to get up so early and work so hard—clearing woods, building stone walls, plowing fields, and raising livestock, not to mention children—that they needed the calories. Oliver put it this way: “Now, what vegetables were going to be truly satisfying to those folks, with their urgent, exhausted life? I’ll tell you, it wasn’t lettuce!”
Like most year-round Maine islanders, Oliver has fashioned a root cellar of her own. “You’re not going to eat vegetables like that in the summer,” she says. “You’re going to make them last as long as you can, because in winter, if you eat any vegetables at all, it will have to be the root vegetables.” She and her husband, who comes from a Cape Breton family and is no stranger to the culinary privations of North Atlantic winters (his mother cooked turnips every night from October to April), store onions, potatoes, beets, carrots, rutabagas, and turnips in their cellar, and she gave me instructions, should I ever happen to have a root cellar in Manhattan. “It’s not a very beautiful arrangement,” she said. “We use big white five-gallon plastic buckets. I heave them into the cellar and make cardboard tops so the air can circulate, and hang them up on a nail from the beams to mouseproof them. But our cellar is an ideal storage space—first of all, because it’s a stone-walled cellar with a cool dirt floor, and second, because we don’t have central heating.”
I have neither of those advantages in New York, but my apartment building does have an unused roof, and I have heard that many similar buildings, not to mention corporations, are going fashionably green with rooftop vegetable gardens. Can root cellars be far behind? The board of my building has already made a foray into root status by planting—depending on which doorman you ask—either potatoes or sweet potatoes around the trunks of twenty topiary boxwoods that sit in an alley of stone urns on the way to the front door. (Back in September I was told that this year, when the potatoes were dug, every apartment would get one.) Oliver goes “grocery shopping” in her cellar, the way I go past those potted potatoes to my neighborhood farmers’ market. The only roots she doesn’t cellar are the fresh spring parsnips in her garden. She digs them up in April, and the day they are out of the ground they go into a traditional parsnip stew—a “yummy ceremonial dish,” she calls it—that you make like chowder, but with parsnips instead of fish. She gave me the recipe, more or less, which is to say, in the “some of this, some of that, and a sprinkle of something else, if you have it” style that I first encountered reading the great English food writer Elizabeth David. I made Oliver’s chowder this fall, feeling my way through her bracingly vague instructions: “You cut up some bacon, sauté it, add some onion, some parsnips, a few potatoes, and some water, followed by milk and cream.”
The turnip is one of my favorite root vegetables. I braise turnips in broth and ras el hanout whenever I make a couscous, for their smooth texture and curiously tangy sweetness. I glaze them whenever I roast a duck. If I come across a lonely turnip, in the vegetable bin of my fridge, I figure that it is waiting there just for me and I slice it and eat it raw. But at the top of my list are parsnips and sweet potatoes—never, I’ve learned, to be confused with the ubiquitous and lowly yams that appear at my corner store marked “sweet potatoes” around Thanksgiving. Yams (orange-fleshed doppelgängers from an entirely different root family) are native to West Africa and Asia, sweet potatoes to South America. More to the point, yams are usually a lot sweeter than the native American sweet potatoes that a proper Thanksgiving casserole or pudding calls for. For years, I had no idea.
In New York, September is the time when the sweet potatoes I buy are really sweet potatoes, and the fall parsnips are young and fresh. In Oxford, they are still at their best in November—which is where and when I first sampled my friend Patricia Williams’s “chicken-with-both,” as I have come to call the most satisfying comfort food I’ve eaten since warm rice pudding with maple syrup. It was a raw, drizzly day. I had been out since early morning, interviewing Anglican clerics on the subject of women bishops, and by the time I got back to Patricia’s house, where I was staying that week, I would have settled for a sandwich or, this being England, a cold pasty. Instead, I was greeted by a medley of the most captivating smells, and naturally I wanted to know what was in the pot. “Oh, just a chicken and things,” she said. “A simple one-pot dinner.”
I asked her what things. The list was so long that I gave up listening and made her promise to e-mail the recipe, leaving nothing out, as soon as I got home. But peering into the pot, I could see at once that we shared an excellent culinary principle: only the foods you like and more than you need of the ones you like best—in Patricia’s case (as in mine), sweet potatoes and parsnips, plus a good deal of cumin, coriander, garam masala, and turmeric—and it doesn’t matter at all if the result is a little India, a little Morocco, a little South America, and a little England. There were chunks of oranges, carrots, red onions, and garlic in her pot, too, submerged and simmering slowly in chicken stock and white wine with the sweet potatoes and parsnips, the spices, and of course the chicken, a plump local bird that sat in the middle of them all, breast up, nearly submerged, and draped with rashers of streaky bacon. It was a memorable meal—made more so when Patricia sent the recipe and I read a disclaimer that, like Sandy Oliver’s instructions for parsnip chowder, put her squarely in the Elizabeth David tradition of whatever works. “I know this is not a helpful thing to say,” she wrote, “but I do vary the amounts and ingredients of this according to how I am feeling … this is roughly what I do.”
This fall I cooked it for friends. I hadn’t intended to. I had ordered a rabbit, which I was planning to stew in a parsley-root, carrot, and spiced Marsala sauce—a Berlin-doctored recipe from the kitchen of Renata Stih’s Croatian grandmother. Parsley root was the last vegetable on my list of “new” root vegetables to tackle, but it turned out that no greengrocer in my neighborhood sold parsley roots or had even heard of parsley roots—nor, in fact, had I until Renata cooked her grandmother’s stew for me a few years earlier, in Germany. (All I can really tell you about parsley roots is that they are white, shaped like parsnips, taste a little like celeriac, and are reportedly easy to peel.) Then my butcher called to say that his rabbit supplier’s truck had broken down.
It was noon by then, so I thought fast and—given the basket of Yukon Golds that had sat accusingly on my kitchen counter since my last trip to the farmers’ market—ordered a chicken to roast and serve with rösti. I also decided, by way of a symbolically local-produce gesture, to claim my allotted potato from my building’s potted patches and add it to the potatoes I was about to grate. But when I asked the doorman if I could dig one up, he told me that I would have to wait for the “distribution.” What’s more, he said, the super had it from the gardener that the potatoes this year were in fact sweet potatoes, which have similar pale-green leaves. The thought of sweet potatoes, potted or not, sent me off on some serious root shopping, and I started the peeling and chopping for a chicken-with-both. My spice shelf was somewhat depleted, but I heeded Patricia’s second disclaimer: “I put in something like a tablespoon of each if I am using a big pot and a lot of liquid. But I also sometimes use a mixture or some or all of them, depending.” The truth is, you can never miss with a pot full of root vegetables. And never mind that last week, when my building’s potatoes were finally dug, they turned out to be neither true sweet potatoes nor even—as a Norwegian might put it—Irish potatoes, but a twisty sweetish cultivar called a Margarita. The leaves were the same, but bigger. “Ornamental,” the gardener said.