Buckley Richard - Plants Taste Better: Stunning recipes which celebrate plant-based eating from root to fruit

Take a carrot and hold it in your hand. Its a carrot, right? Yes, but before that it is a root vegetable and before that it is part of a plant. Broadly speaking, all plants are the same. They have roots in the ground, stems to connect and support the various parts, leaves to capture the energy from the sun, flowers to help them reproduce, and fruits and seeds to create more plants the same as themselves. There is infinite variety within this, but the structure remains the same.

When we talk of a vegetable, herb, fruit or seed we are really just talking about a part of a plant that, either through chance or cultivation, we find is well suited to our diet and culinary traditions. We eat plant parts that share similar characteristics. We only eat taproots that swell with sugars and starches to provide energy for the next year. We dont eat the spindly or woody roots of grass or hazel trees. We eat the leaves that are large and mild in flavour as salads, and those that are small and strongly flavoured as herbs. The seeds surrounded by fruits we call nuts, and those that come from pods we call beans. Those that are small and intense in flavour we call spices, and those that are high in starches we call grains.

The ingenuity and craft traditions that have emerged and evolved over the centuries in our treatment of plants are for me some of the fascinations and deep pleasures of cookery: from stone-grinding flour to fermenting cabbage, the connection of the cook to the ingredient, and through it the processes of the natural world, are a source of endless wonder. That said, these traditional processes tend to make use of the same characteristics of the plant part they are using and we tend to use the same techniques for each part of the plant. We roast nuts and seeds to release their intense flavours: there is little difference between roasting almonds and toasting cumin in terms of what we are trying to achieve and the methods we are using. We cook beans and grains with water to hydrate and modify the starches and make them more digestible; soaking and boiling beans is essentially the same process as combining water with flour and baking it to make bread you are hydrating and heating. We slice stems across their width to break the chewy fibres that give them strength as a plant and we cook leaves lightly to preserve their delicate colour and structure. An in-depth examination of each plant part and the best cooking techniques for them is well beyond the scope of this book; however, your cooking will improve instantly and for ever if you simply begin to think of the ingredients in front of you as parts of a plant with certain characteristics and the cooking technique merely as a way of enhancing and manipulating those characteristics to suit our appetites and those of our guests.