Wild Garlic, Gooseberries and Me: A chef’s stories and recipes from the land. Denis Cotter
is always spinach, the other greens come and go.
Spinach is also the benchmark of leaf greens, the one that the others are judged by. Is this or that kale softer or tougher than spinach? Sweeter or more bitter? Longer to cook? Easier to grow? Can it step into classic recipes that call for spinach or is it too strong, bitter or tough?
Recipes for spinach? There are thousands. For hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years, it has been served in tarts both sweet and savoury, curries, soups, inside ravioli, as a component of pasta dishes and even as a colouring for the pasta itself; in gnocchi and other dumplings, omelettes and endless egg dishes, pancakes, salads, and much more besides. Not forgetting that it is also wonderful served on its own, whether in the English style with butter, or with olive oil, as the Italians prefer.
There are many varieties of spinach, but it’s best to think of them as two types. The soft ‘true’ spinach, as it is sometimes called, can be used raw in salads, especially with the likes of soft cheeses or hard sweet ones, fennel, oranges and oily nuts such as walnuts or pine nuts. It can certainly also be cooked, and has a meltingly soft texture and beautifully dark, glossy colour. However, you have to be very careful, as it cooks very quickly and reduces to less than a tenth of its volume. The other type is generally known as ‘perpetual’ spinach. It has much larger, thicker leaves of a lighter shade. For general cooking, I prefer to use this one. The flavour is less exquisite, but it carries, and stands up to, other flavours very well. It also loses much less volume when cooked. Oh, it shrinks all right, but not so much that it breaks your heart and sends you scurrying to the shops for more.
There is one variety that needs to be looked at in its own right, however. It goes by the name of‘New Zealand spinach’ or ‘tetragonia’. Although I have spent a bit of time in New Zealand, I have no memory of this vegetable there. However, it is documented that the great (or terrible, according to your perspective) Captain Cook brought it back from his first voyage down under. Or perhaps I should say it came back on his ship. I don’t know if Cook was that interested in plants, but he was lucky enough to have someone on board who was – a certain Joseph Banks, a botanist with an appetite for exploration.
Back on this side of the world, however, despite its flavour and suitability to the climate, New Zealand spinach is still very rare, and little used as a vegetable. Unlike other spinach varieties, this one can tolerate dry, and even hot, conditions. This has sometimes been mistakenly believed to be because it doesn’t go to seed as easily as the others do when stressed. The truth is that the plant is forever going to seed, hence those beautifully sweet buds that add greatly to its flavour and texture. New Zealand spinach grows well in a tunnel or glasshouse in spring and autumn, and has proven to be perfectly happy outdoors during our warm but often damp summers. In fact, the only conditions it really doesn’t like is a combination of very hot and very wet. Should be safe as houses in Ireland, then. We can do wet with gusto, but hot is rare enough to be a tale for the grandkids. Both together would mean the whole island had slid down to the equator.
There are, I think, a couple of reasons for the lack of success of this spinach variety. New Zealand spinach grows as a creeping plant and covers the ground in a fiercely territorial way. The tips of the shoots, with the top few leaves and the tiny bud attached, are the best parts to pick and cook, though the lower leaves are excellent too. Because of the way it grows and the way it is harvested, it is never going to be well enough behaved to be of any use to supermarkets. And so it remains a defiantly domestic vegetable or, at a stretch, one grown by dedicated professionals for specific customers. I always admire that in a vegetable – one that is clearly great homegrown but can’t be tamed for the convenience market. When people ask in the restaurant where they can find this gem of a green, it is great to be able to say that the best thing is to grow your own.
The second drawback is that there comes a time when the sweet little buds become too coarse and tough. The leaves are still good at this point, but the work involved in preparing the vegetable, picking off the buds, is almost doubled. I’ve tried asking Ultan to do it, but only by leaving a phone message as I didn’t really want to hear his reply. It is no problem doing this at home for a small number, but in a restaurant kitchen, preparing for multiple meals, the cooks quickly grow to despise the chore. When it comes to that, it’s time to give up on the troublesome vegetable. A grumpy kitchen is no fun, and not much good at the sensitive job of cooking dinner either.
So why persevere with New Zealand spinach, then? Although it is very close in character to standard spinach, and it can be used in any recipe that calls for the latter, it has two important advantages. Texture and flavour. Yes, those two! The matter of flavour is subjective, of course, and I may well be taken to task for saying it, but New Zealand spinach is somehow richer and greener than other spinach varieties, yet still sweet and without any of the bitterness of the coarser greens. It really stands alone in terms of texture. The shoot tips, with a tiny bud and some leaves attached to a thin stalk, hold their shape beautifully when cooked, as indeed do the other individual leaves. This is a wonderful asset to a restaurant kitchen, where the aesthetics of food is always high on the agenda. A good-looking vegetable that doesn’t sacrifice flavour is a restaurateur’s dream.
Taking to the watercress: the holy herb
Watercress has been gathered from the wild for thousands of years, providing a source of essential vitamins and iron long before these qualities were isolated and recognised. Watercress is one of those foods that are so overtly good for you that it really doesn’t take a scientist to explain it. You can see it in the vibrant green colour and taste it in the punchy flavour: this is a loaded vegetable.
It has traditionally been picked from flowing streams and ditches and can be found all year round, except that it doesn’t really like extremes of temperature and often disappears temporarily during the coldest part of winter and the hottest summer months.
Because the plant will absorb any water-borne pollutants, especially agricultural slurry washing off nearby fields, I am not advocating the consumption of wild watercress. Liver fluke is a particular worry as it seems to thrive in watercress, and can pass to humans. While the idyllic image of collecting wild cress is attractive, it is essential that you really know the source and are certain that the water in which the cress grows is free from any pollution. For most of us, that means it is simply not a good idea to eat watercress from the wild. Similarly, if you are buying watercress from a market stall, do make sure you can trust the source.
Most watercress is now commercially grown in carefully controlled flowing water beds, an industry that already goes back over two hundred years. The watercress we use in Paradiso comes from a source that is somewhere between the wild and controlled. It is grown in a deep pond in the bend of a stream on a small vegetable farm in West Cork. The pond was created in the late 1970s by a number of very enlightened blow-ins who began their lives here as self-sufficiency advocates, moved on to trading and bartering amongst themselves, and eventually took the bold step of selling excess produce to the public. Fatefully, they formed a co-op. From there it was the usual slide towards outbreaks of feuding, accusations of capitalism, fascism and plain old fraud. The good ones are still round and about, still growing and sometimes selling great food. Luckily the stream and the cress survived not only the fall-out, but numerous changes of ownership of the property that the stream flows through. Each time the farm changes hands, I fear for the future of our watercress supply.
Somehow it’s not surprising that research is well advanced on the attributes of watercress that are believed to be cancer inhibitors. This is a very modern take on a plant that has been seen as a miracle for as long as humans have been eating it. Way back as far as Greek and Roman times, and continuously through the centuries since, watercress has been revered for qualities beyond its simple nutritional content. At various times it has been credited with the powers of everything from curing freckles and hangovers to reversing baldness and restoring lost beauty; and it has been extolled as, among many other things, an aphrodisiac and an intellectual stimulant.
Whatever the validity of some of the more outrageous of these claims, there is definitely something to be said for the plant’s ability to stimulate the mind. In Ireland, it has a special place in the mixture of folklore, myth and history that makes up what we know