The Reporter's Kitchen by Jane Kramer

Author:Jane Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

DOWN UNDER

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.