Blossoming and Burgeoning

Why on earth am I going to post on vegetables?

Because my children plan to inscribe their mother’s headstone with my mantra “Eat your greenery” and I’m reading Jane Grigson’s English Food, that’s why.

In last night’s chapter on vegetables Jane got in impressive cultural references to Shakespeare, W.S Gilbert and the metaphysical poet Andrew Marvell, who wrote of his ‘vegetable love’ to his coy mistress at a time when vegetable meant the whole burgeoning and blossoming natural world and not a shrivelled grey green knob nestling in a plastic bag at the bottom of the freezer.

Only two vegetables are actually native to Britain, sea kale and samphire, both found on sea shore shingle and cliffs, and both of which most people now would find harder to recognise than kohlrabi and celeriac.

We usually holiday on the Suffolk coast, and on one of our walks along the beach last summer I suggested picking and trying to cook some of the seakale, which looked to me pretty abundant on the shore just above the tide’s reach. Dismay turned to triumph when my girls learnt from their dog-walking companions that sea kale is a protected species so no nipping along the beach instead of to the Co-op. Oh, and by the way, it isn’t sea kale anyway, it’s sea poppy. So there, Mum. Can we have fish fingers and peas?

But the coast still isn’t clear; I’ve discovered sea poppy is good for coughs, so here we are in January, flu and colds everywhere. Maybe I'm on to something.

Pictured: sea poppy. Nasty. Poisonous roots. Don't feed to children.