Greens and Beans: Unfamiliar territory

Cardoons, jerusalem artichokes, salsify greens, chicory — none of those sound like familiar vegetables to me. Neither do alexanders or lovage.

Unfamiliar though they may be, they’re not new-fangled inventions but old, old foods. It’s curious to me how they somehow got dropped from the diets of many Americans over the centuries and decades, while others became predominant. Broccoli, spinach, lettuce, carrots, peas, tomatoes, eggplants — how is it that they became “normal” vegetables, while cardoons and lovage became something strange and exotic?

And is it better to find or not to find strange vegetables in your recipes?

It’s tiresome, certainly, if what you want is simply to be able to quickly and economically put something together for supper from what you have on hand.

On the other hand, running across the mention of lovage in Deborah Madison’s recipes convinced me to try actually eating the odd herb growing lavishly out under the plum tree.

Voila. A source of food and seasoning, hitherto invisible. Lovage tastes something like a parsley-celery cross, making it a useful soup ingredient.

Perhaps the best thing, as a friend suggests, is to have a cookbook that calls for unfamiliar foods, but explains that in their absence, you can perfectly well substitute parsley or celery or whatever similar, familiar facsimile is at hand.

Meanwhile, here are a few new old vegetables to ponder, though of course, it’s possible the gardeners in the group will be laughing, having grown some of these oddities for years.

Alexanders, at least according to the “Wild Garden Seed” catalog, were named for Alexander the Great. They predated celery as a vegetable. The seed company says that alexanders are similar in flavor to celery, but milder. It’s not clear whether they mean milder than the nearly flavorless grocery store variety of celery, or the considerably more flavorful homegrown type.

Speaking of which, I learned that year that celery comes in red, as well as green, with the fun of growing red celery in the garden. The stalks weren’t anywhere near grocery store size, but they were fine for salad - and very flavorful. Now the garden isn’t complete without celery, and I feel as if I’ve discovered something brand new.

Cardoons are another Greek contribution; they were popular with both Greeks and Romans, and are still popular in some Mediterranean countries.

A relative of the artichoke, cardoons have edible flower buds too, but people also eat the stalks, which supposedly taste like artichokes. Do they? I don’t know. There are some sitting in the refrigerator, but I haven’t tried them.

Did try the salsify greens, however. They’re mild. Very mild: A nibble of a raw piece revealed they taste ... green. They were lovely, however, sautéd with leeks, rapini and garlic to go under a breakfast egg.

Salsify greens are, of course, produced by salsify roots, which are also called vegetable oysters. Do they taste like oysters? Could not tell you. Oysters are one thing I’ve never had the slightest desire to taste.

Jerusalem artichokes were one of the many gifts of the New World. They are the tubers of a sunflower variety native to the eastern United States. Who thought a sunflower could provide edible tubers, as well as seeds?

Try a few cooking adventures this year. Whether you find your new edibles at the market or grow them in the garden, they may open up whole new vistas.