Wright - Mediterranean vegetables : a cooks compendium of all the vegetables from the worlds healthiest cuisine, with more than 200 recipes

The Harvard Common Press
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Copyright 2001 by Clifford A. Wright

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Printed in the United States of America
Printed on acid-free paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, Clifford A.
Mediterranean vegetables : a cooks compendium of all the vegetables from the worlds
healthiest cuisine, with more than 200 recipes / Clifford A. Wright.
p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-55832-775-7 (pbk.)
1. Cooking (Vegetables) 2. Cooking, Mediterranean. 3. Cookbooks. I. Title.
TX801.W75 2012
641.65dc23
2011050223

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BOOK DESIGN BY DEBORAH KERNER
BOOK COMPOSITION BY JACINTA MONNIERE
COVER PHOTOGRAPHY AND PROP STYLING BY SABRA KROCK
FOOD STYLING BY MARIANA VELASQUEZ

www.cliffordawright.com

T HIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
TO AN INTREPID TRAVELER,
A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW,
EATER OF MANY VEGETABLES,
THE LONG-SUFFERING B OYD HEY, IS THAT CASSOULET I SMELL G ROVE ,
WHO ACCOMPANIED ME OVER MANY A WINE DARK SEA

T HIS BOOK ORIGINATED AS A SIMPLE APPENDIX TO MY BOOK A M EDITERRANEAN F EAST . O VER TIME I REALIZED THAT IT COULD AND SHOULD BECOME a book on its own. The people I would like to thank are truly the same people I thanked in my previous book. But there are at least five people who made this book so much easier to conceive and write: Doe Coover, my agent; Pam Hoenig, my editor; Professor Marion Nestle of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University; my friend and fellow cookbook author Martha Rose Shulman; and Susan Chapman of the National Agricultural Library.

R ATATOUILLE, HUMMUS, AND GAZPACHO ARE NAMES OF M EDITERRANEAN VEGETABLE PREPARATIONS PROBABLY KNOWN BY MOST A MERICANS, ALTHOUGH IN BASTARDIZED FORMS THAT might not be recognized in the Mediterranean. But these three recipes (), as good as they are, are like the mere glow of a firefly when one considers how truly dazzling the pantheon of Mediterranean vegetable preparations is.

The Mediterranean is alluring and, as a traveler, one encounters a fascinating range of cuisines that find vegetables at their center. Everyone has had a bland hummus, but a Mediterranean experience isnt complete until youve whipped together not only an authentic hummus ().

Did you know that ratatouille is only a single example of a class of vegetable relishes and stews that are found copiously throughout the Mediterranean? If a Lebanese cook prepared his or her ratatouille it might be called cUlab Bdhinjn (eggplant ragout) and would be a room-temperature dish of eggplant fried in olive oil with onions, ripe tomatoes, green bell peppers, a dozen garlic cloves sliced thinly, and a bunch of chopped fresh mint leaves (). The bottom is layered with a kilo of garden-fresh tomatoes. On top are layers of very thinly sliced onions and finely chopped fresh parsley and dill. The dish is drizzled with olive oil; sprinkled with lemon juice, thyme, and a little sugar; and baked until it is a dense ragout. It's as memorable as any ratatouille found in Provence.

The fact that we Americans experiment so freely with what we eat is a testament to both the popularity of Mediterranean cuisine and the openness of American palates to new culinary flavors and ideas. High on everybody's list of foods they want to eat more of are vegetables. Strangely, we seem to have a hard time doing it. In the Mediterranean, a world of vegetable dishes exists all but unknown to Americans. They run the gamut from A to Z, and you will encounter more than two hundred of them here.

A Mediterranean vegetable preparation can be as simple as some bright green steamed broccoli, slightly crunchy and served with a drizzle of velvety olive oil and a spritz of lemon juice. But if that is the only way one knows how to prepare broccoli, boredom will quickly curtail the appetite, for variety is the spice of life. The variety of Mediterranean vegetable cookery goes well beyond olive oil; it encompasses an intriguing Qaracbil-ana, pureed pumpkin stirred with sesame seed paste, which the Lebanese enjoy as a kind of appetizer with warm flatbread ().

But what are Mediterranean vegetables? Are they the vegetables that are native to the Mediterranean, or are they the vegetables used in Mediterranean cookery? For the purposes of this book, I embrace the latter definition, which means that the New World tomato as well as Old World spinach are Mediterranean vegetables. The inspiration for writing this book arose from a need I experienced over the decade I spent researching and writing my last book, A Mediterranean Feast: The Story of the Birth of the Celebrated Cuisines of the Mediterranean, from the Merchants of Venice to the Barbary Corsairs, What I wanted was a reference book for cooks rather than gardeners that would give me essential information about the vegetables used in Mediterranean cuisines: the name of each vegetable in various languages, its botanical Latin binomial, short paragraphs on its history and origin, as well as practical information on the essentials of how to grow, harvest, store, and cook it. I found countless gardening books, and they were indeed helpful, but there was no book for the cook who tended a vegetable garden and who was cooking Italian, French, and other Mediterranean foods. There were, of course, vegetable cookery books geared to particular countries and regions, nearly all French and Italian, but none that focused on the whole of the Mediterranean region.

The most exciting thing about Mediterranean vegetables is that the majority of the most popular vegetables in the Mediterranean are popular in the United States as well and easily found in an American market. This book is meant to be a comprehensive catalog and will introduce you to all of the vegetables in the Mediterranean, some of which you are unlikely to find not only in an American market, but also in the Mediterranean, unless you happen to be a Greek shepherd, Sicilian farmer, or Bedouin nomad. The reason is that many of these vegetables are not cultivated but rather gathered in the wild, an activity that fades with each passing year as Mediterranean peoples become ever more modernized.

The delight of Mediterranean vegetable cookery is found in the combination of ingredients that have given birth to a surprising treasure of delicious and thoroughly new tastes for Americans. Ive crisscrossed the Mediterranean for over thirty years, uncovering culinary treasures in small isolated villages, in the kitchens of Italian trattorie and Greek tavernas, and in the home kitchens of my own extended Italian family, not to mention my ex-wifes extended Arab family. A Syrian dish called Brn sounds at first blush like another spinach dish, but it is a magically spiced dish with cool yogurt spread on top to complete a beautiful preparation (). Fresh flat-leaf spinach is first wilted gently with steam, then drained and sauted in olive oil with garlic. Next a freshly ground pungent spice mixture made of allspice, nutmeg, cardamom seeds, cloves, cinnamon, coriander seeds, salt, and black pepper is stirred in, and the spinach cooks for a bit. Meanwhile, a rich yogurt is whipped together with mashed garlic, then it is spooned over the spinach with a sprinkle of crushed walnuts.