Enriched Vocabulary

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (a Washington non-profit), publishes Nutrition Action. Brigitte reads it in her role as Secretary of Health and Wellbeing around here—and I read what she points out to me. Today she pointed out an amusing regular feature in Nutrition Action, side-by-side columns of which one is headed “Right Stuff” and the other “Food Porn.” In the current issue, Right Stuff is Organic Garbanzo Beans, Food Porn is Denny’s Macho Nacho Burger. Mind you, Nutrition Action may not have enriched our vocabulary by introducing food porn, but I credit them with giving that phrase some juicy illustration.

Occurs to me, reading Ellis Peter’s series of Cadfael novels again (something analogous to organic garbanzo beans in the literary realm), that foods you’d never find anywhere in the twelfth century of Brother Cadfael’s England should be avoided in the here and now. All else is safe to eat.

No Day Without Fabae

I was just driving out of a garden store the other day. I’d just purchased three new dill plants to add to those Brigitte had already coaxed into early rising in small pots. We are preparing the nectar for the butterflies. As luck would have it—and as a kind of underlining of our own current concerns—came a story, just then, on the radio, about Thomas Jefferson’s great gardens at Monticello, which have been reconstituted, as it were. Jefferson ate little meat and, a passionate grower, cultivated 330 vegetable varieties. Brigitte has always been of the same bent and persuasion, and I am, as it were, her acolyte. Our diet is quite Jeffersonian. No day without fabae in our house. The word is Latin for beans.

Beans came to mind yesterday as I was having my usual vegetable soup for lunch which—along with peas, carrots, broccoli, celery, leeks, and such—always has one or two varieties of beans. It suddenly occurred to me that, though I eat them daily, I’d no idea how beans grow in the garden. In fact, such is my ignorance, briefly I imaged them sort of clustering, out in the open in bunches, like grapes—but that thought didn’t last. My next notion was: Surely they must grow in pods, like peas. Confirming that impression was that green beans, so called, do, don’t they, suggest that those longish green things have something inside them—but we don’t bother shelling them out. Right on. And the suspicion that then arose simultaneously, that peas might also be beans, also turned out to be right. Great idea for an acolyte’s research. I set to work.

Looking at nature counters the harm produced by looking at humanity. Beans belong to the Kingdom of Plantae (no surprise there). Next they are members of the Order of Fabales, the flowering plants. Within that order they belong to the Family of Fabaceae, called the legumes. That last word already tells the acolyte a lot if he bothers to trace the roots of that word. It comes from the Latin legere, to gather—thus to gather into pods. Those pods, it turns out, are the ovaries that develop in the center of the flowers. They emerge from the bloom itself and then, as this “pregnancy” advances, although the babies resting in the ovum are actually just seeds, the object becomes very large and long: the pod.

As my diagram shows, quite a rich array of protein-rich edible plants come from this family, including my most favorite foods: peas, beans, lentils, and peanuts. It surprised me to discover licorice and alfalfa in this tribe. Licorice, however, yields a flavor and it is the alfalfa plant itself, not its beans, that are the mainstay of livestock diets; both plants, however, feature, like the others, seeds that are gathered into pods.

My illustration is from Wikipedia (link) and shows the common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). Phaseolus is the Greek for kidney-bean.

Eat Fruit

Brigitte has always excelled in getting us to eat healthy food. Once it was greens hidden within pancakes and omelets, now it is fruit using pudding (sugar free, fat free, and all the rest) as the temptation. Today’s artful decorations are home-soaked rum raisins, bananas, apples, strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and peaches (the last home-grown at Monique’s). Mint crowns the mandala.

Deep Memory of Quince

We planted a quince bush in our garden, a Father’s Day gift—one that surprised and specially delighted me. I encountered quince when I was five in the gardens of a vast, cold, impossible-to-heat old house we moved into on one of my Father’s frequent transfers. But summers there were like Paradise. The yellow, pear-shaped quince, and especially what Mother made of it, remained sharply imprinted on my memory. When Monique and John, entirely on their own, discovered quince and bought their own bush, my enthusiasm was evident. And they decided that I should have my own.

Soon after we planted ours, I went to the Village Market. It is a small but very potent store in walking distance of our house. I had a talk with the manager there—we often talk—and asked him if anyone produced quince jelly. Schmuckers had done so long ago, no longer. The Village Market’s manager had learned his trade at the knees of his grandfather. In my opinion he is the most knowledgeable grocer certainly in Detroit and environs. He said at once that the Trappist Monks in Massachusetts sold it; then he also found another outfit in his huge printouts. Trappist sounded good to me. Friday last I picked up our jars at the market. They’d arrived from St. Joseph’s Abbey, Spencer, MA (founded in 1950; the order itself goes back to 1098 in France). Now I’ll tell you honestly: This was just a pious gesture because I know what a jelly is. But what I remember eating 70 years ago was not a jelly but something you could slice. But what it was and might be called was buried too deep in memory.

I had some of that jelly for breakfast today. “It’s all sugar, mostly,” I told Brigitte. “Lord. I wish I could remember what it was Mother used to make back in Cegléd. Too bad we can’t just call Heaven by cell phone.” Brigitte also remembered something you could cut and, just sitting there, she invented a recipe she thought would work when, finally, our bush produces fruit. I said: “I’ll just go and try to find out what quince is in Hungarian. We live in the age of the Internet now.” Before I went I made my second cup of coffee. As I was stirring the cup, suddenly into my mind came the word birsalma. (The s is sounded as sh, the a as in awl.) And no sooner had this thought arrived than came a combination: birsalma sajt. Sajt means cheese. I knew at once that now I had it! Yes! Birsalma meant quince. And the solid something I remembered eating was called a cheese. Just calmly stirring my coffee, my memory finally brought the words—or my Mother got the call in Heaven and whispered the answer; no need for cell phones in such communications.

The rest was easy. Soon I had a recipe for birsalma sajt in Hungarian. Then I discovered that the phrase translates into English directly. Quince cheese is a well-known product to those in the know. Therefore soon I had multiple recipes, Spanish-style, Turkish-style, Hungarian-style, all in English, too. And one site, this one, also brought me a picture that confirmed it all visually. Yes, sir! That’s what it looked like. Quince is yellow on the outside but red inside. And quince cheese is quite firm, easy to slice, and lasts for a long time. Seventy years ago…

Repast Recalled

My gourmet chef she served me beets royale!
Their stems, dark lush, were still attached,
Their sectioned halves a rouge cabal
Of morsels octopus.

The soup with parsley’s rich mirage in bowl
Of steaming broth above
The cous-and-cous affirmed her role
As chef splendiferous.

Last came a fruit compote, a dish divine
In which the berries made of straw
And other fruit combined to brine
Nicely acidulous.

Truly her art is purest elegance
And carried off with flourish light
To minimize its relevance
To her own genius.

BLT Ghulf-Style

August has fled—and a busy if also happy and rewarding period it has been! Now vactations are ending abruptly all over the extensive Ghulf domains. Children are returning to school. For the adults the pace of professional life will most likely intensify. Alas and alack.

I must close this period on a colorful note, celebrating my new camera and some of the perennial delights of ordinary life, which this lovely BLT will symbolize, one of Brigitte's casually accomplished arrangements in which the visual matters as much as the health, the taste, and the ambiance.

With September can begin the slow absorption of the events that marked our summer of many changes.