didn’t exactly grow up on a farm. I grew up in Birmingham and, like most big cities, it’s a place dominated by concrete and shopping centres. I was as particular an eater then as I am today. While nowadays I get fussy about finding the sweetest peas and the prettiest carrots, back when I was little, I got fussy about liking my bacon sandwiches with the slices still a bit floppy and a good dose of HP sauce. I insisted on eating my fish-finger sandwiches with butter and ketchup. When my nan skewered pineapple and cheddar chunks for a party, as people used to back then, I’d always steal the pineapple but leave the cheddar. To eat my Cadbury Flake, I’d squeeze the long package to crumble up the chocolate, then I’d open one side and tip it all into my mouth at once.
Like many working-class people, my parents didn’t always have time to shop for fresh vegetables, let alone peel them. I ate plenty of cauliflower, broccoli, and carrots that came from freezer bags. I’d cram these horrible veg into my cheeks like a chipmunk does, because I knew I had to eat them but I wanted to delay the chewing and the tasting. Frozen peas, however, I loved. I still do.
When the vegetables were fresh, they were often cooked in the English manner of the times – that is, for too long, until they were squishy and a little grey. I still remember some godawful Brussels sprouts, which at the time I just loved, boiled to buggery in a pressure cooker. England has come a long way since then.
We’d occasionally eat marrow, a sort of watery, overgrown courgette, as big as my forearm. My mom would scrape out the seedy middles to make canoes, pack in minced meat, and bake them. I quite liked these, the way the marrow got creamy and you could just shovel it into your mouth with the meat without thinking that you were eating the vegetable. For a spell in the ’80s, after we moved house and got our first microwave, my family lived on potatoes ‘baked’ in the futuristic oven. Imagine, putting something as lovely as a potato in the microwave! Even as a girl, I knew how wonderful potatoes could be, thanks to my school’s cafeteria. I might have been horrible at my times tables – while the rest of the class was on 6s, I could barely make it through my 2s – but I was quite good at eating steamy boiled potatoes bombarded with butter and black pepper.
My early vegetable mentors weren’t chefs obsessed with the perfect tomato or blokes who plunged their hands into the cool dirt to pull up carrots. One of them was my granddad. When I was a girl, he ran a small café called Lincon Road. His customers were a mix of Mods and Rockers. Mods wore suits with thin ties, rode mopeds, and listened to dub music and The Who; Rockers wore leather, rode proper motorcycles, and listened to Elvis and Eddie Cochrane. When the two factions weren’t fighting each other, they were trying to drill a hole in the café’s pinball machine to get at the coins inside. My granddad tried to keep the peace with tea and toast.
He loved his café. And he was a good cook. He was particularly proud of the fry-ups he cooked there, which along with the mandatory egg, bread, sausage, and bacon included lowly vegetables like button mushrooms, Heinz tinned baked beans, and pale tomato halves browned slightly in hot fat. While I loved the meaty bits, I had special affection for those tomatoes. Just when you thought you couldn’t take another bite of sausage, the tomatoes’ acidity would revive your palate and you’d go back in for more.
My nan, who passed away more than a decade ago, also put thought and attention into her vegetable cookery. She made the best Sunday roast, which was less about the lamb or pork she made than it was about the unromantic array of carrots, parsnips, peas, sprouts, potatoes and swedes – none of the Treviso, ramps and Romanesco that get me giddy these days. The pile on my plate, so high it nearly reached my chin, was mostly veg. She was really good with mise en place: growing up, I delighted in visiting her house and seeing the stove arranged with little pots, each filled with peeled vegetables ready to be cooked.
My mom might not have been the world’s greatest cook, but she did have a little garden. My parents didn’t have much money, but they were quite house-proud and always kept our modest terrace house in Druid’s Heath looking nice. In the garden, my mom planted pretty little plots of pansies and strawberries, tomatoes, and spring onions. I loved the taste of her tomatoes straight off the vine, though when she made salad with those same tomatoes and her spring onions, I’d still douse the whole thing with Heinz Salad Cream, like a proper kid. I wish everyone had their own garden. I wish I had my own garden. In New York City, I don’t even have a pot on the fire escape.
Things changed after I finished my first cooking job, at the carvery station at a Holiday Inn. I was lucky to work for chefs with an affection for produce, like Rowley Leigh and Simon Hopkinson. But my own affection for veg really took off when I started at the River Café, working for Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.
I was swept up by all of their obsessions, especially the vegetables that they sourced from Italy. There were proper Florence fennel and artichokes and celeriac that Rose and Ruth brought in by the pallet. Until then, these were things I liked all right but didn’t really understand. I knew celeriac to be a pleasant, if unremarkable, root whose main distinction was that it was knobby, and a bit homely. Not at the River Café. There it was dense and sweet. A sniff at the base would yield that floral aroma, just as it would when I sniffed a ripe melon.
Besides rediscovering old friends, I also met new ones, like the Roman delicacy called puntarelle, a highly seasonal chicory whose slender leaves are very, very bitter. Because Rose and Ruth adored it, I ate it again and again in order to understand the pleasure they took in it, in the same way you want to try lager because your dad drinks it, then next thing you know you see past the bitterness and actually enjoy it yourself.
After five years at the River Café, I moved to Berkeley, California. The first day I arrived at my flat on Shattuck and Folsom, I was too chuffed to just sit around, so I dropped my bags and had a wander. I didn’t know my way, but next thing I knew, I was staring at a big peace sign made out of garlic heads hanging on a gate outside a restaurant. I had stumbled on Chez Panisse, where I had come to work. My new boss was Chris Lee, and his kitchen was filled with people who had been cooking there for ten years. That told me a lot about the place, straight away. Jobs in restaurant kitchens are typically high-turnover, because of the intensity of the work, the low pay, and cranky-knickers bosses like yours truly; but there, no one seemed to ever want to leave.
Chez Panisse, if you haven’t heard, was a pioneer in simple, ingredient-driven cooking. Working there, you couldn’t help but develop a close connection to the ingredients at hand. In fact, part of the job was learning how they were grown. That’s how I came to visit Green String Farm (then called Cannard Farm) in Sonoma County, which supplied much of the produce we cooked with at Chez Panisse. I met an engaging man called Bob Cannard, who taught me how much work and passion it takes to grow wonderful vegetables. I learned that not all soil is created equal and that you could alter its mineral composition (Bob enriched it with pulverized oyster shells, old crops left to die, and something he called ‘compost tea’) to give the vegetables what they needed to grow and be tasty. I learned that bugs weren’t necessarily the enemies of vegetables. Bob considered bugs to be helpful little critters – seeing them ravaging a plant told him that the plant itself wasn’t healthy enough to ward off the fellows. It’s funny, but toiling in a windowless restaurant kitchen, it’s surprisingly easy to forget that vegetables come from seeds in the ground and not from boxes brought by your purveyor.
I might never have left California with its vast variety of produce, available almost all year round, if I hadn’t been offered the job at the Spotted Pig. I’m happy I did leave, if only because I like the East Coast and its more dramatic seasons. Every time you turn around, there’s something new to be excited about: Ooh, ramps are coming in! Fantastic, pumpkin is back!
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