Food - Bee Wilson celebrates the first sprouts of spring
What is it with food writers and purple sprouting broccoli? Why do they adore it so much, this straggly member of the cauliflower family?
"One of the glories of spring . . . Love it," writes Nigel Slater.
"Sprouting broccoli is the hardy variety of broccoli that we choose to cook with," insist the River Cafe double act of Rose Gray and Ruth Rogers.
Purple sprouting broccoli is one of those foods "whose short season it would be criminal to ignore", claims Nigella.
In his new book on seasonal cooking, Spring into Summer (BBC Books, £18.99), Gary Rhodes adds his voice to this chorus of sprouting evangelists, arguing that it "carries a distinctive flavour that the more tailored variety just cannot match".
One of the reasons that purple sprouting broccoli is so revered is because it represents the seasonal, locally grown eating on which those interested in food are now so keen. Great green forests of calabrese or ordinary broccoli are available all year round, wrapped in trees of cling film, whereas purple sprouting is excitingly rare, in the markets for only a couple of months, and grown in Britain. Unlike imported green beans from Kenya, sprouting broccoli does not travel too far or outstay its seasonal welcome. It helps that its season falls in March, not one of the most stimulating months in the food calendar (as Nigel Slater laments, "the low point of the cook's year and I could almost scream at the mundaneness of it all"). The word broccoli comes from the Italian brocco, meaning sprout or shoot. Like those cuckoos that retired Daily Telegraph readers are endlessly trying to spot, the green-and-purple shoots of sprouting broccoli seem like one of the first indications of real spring.
The pleasure of purple sprouting broccoli is more about the stalk than about the flower. It is a reminder of the time, centuries ago, when broccoli was, like all cabbages, grown and eaten for its stems. The danger with those pretty clustered heads of calabrese is that they lull you into thinking that the flavour is all in the top part. As Marcella Hazan, the inimitable mistress of Italian cooking, writes: "On many distressing occasions I have seen people eat the florets and leave the stalks on the plate. They are evidently under the impression that they are choosing the more delectable part. Actually it is just the other way round." Broccoli stalks, whether from calabrese or sprouting, have a more rounded, sweeter, cabbagy flavour than the flowers, which can taste a little watery and nondescript.
Another thing that worshippers at the temple of the sprouting broccoli love is its bitterness. It has a more "challenging" taste and is texturally more varied than calabrese, which has a baby-food mellowness. Food writers are almost honour bound to prefer dark chocolate to milk chocolate, creme fraIche to double cream, rhubarb to raspberries, Pain Poilane to Hovis, shrimps to prawns, leg to breast, bone-in to bone-out, bloody to well-done, bitter Seville oranges to Navels, rump steak to yielding fillet. They like food that can answer back. It flatters their intelligence. The preference for purple sprouting broccoli over calabrese fits into this category. It is good paired with other aggressive flavours - anchovies or pancetta or garlic with strong olive oil. There is something challenging, too, in cooking it a point, until just tender but not so soggy that it falls apart. Some cooks recommend steaming it, others tie it in string bundles and boil it like asparagus.
Sprouting broccoli looks wonderfully rustic, straggling on a plate. By contrast, calabrese seems a little too staid, a little too neat. Since it has become a mass-market vegetable, some of the poetry has gone out of it. Until the middle of the 20th century, calabrese was quite rare, except in Calabria, and purple sprouting was the common kind in Britain. In America, calabrese was popularised by GIs returning home from the war, who had tasted it in Europe. It has since become "one of the most important frozen foods in the world", according to the Cambridge World History of Food.
Purple sprouting broccoli is never frozen, to my knowledge. Yet despite its seasonal rarity, it is also cheap. It has long been known as the poor man's asparagus, good served as a separate course with hollandaise or melted butter, and is perversely sought after partly because of its seeming lack of pretension. As Nigella puts it: "Purple sprouting broccoli is avoided by those who think that good food has to be fancy. Clearly they don't deserve it." But ideas of fanciness are all relative. Purple sprouting broccoli might not seem fancy to the eminent food writers of Britain, but it surely would to those Midwestern American citizens for whom frozen calabrese is an all-purpose folksy side dish, and any other kind of broccoli alarmingly foreign. When George Bush Sr offended half of the US by saying that he hated broccoli, he was referring to ordinary calabrese. I wonder whether he might not have offended the other half of his nation had he added: "But I do love a nice plate of purple sprouting."
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