practical peace

A Recipe for Radishes

I used to write recipes for a living. Every day a half dozen culinary arts students would troop into the kitchen at the community college, tape up 8½ by 11 inch sheets full of my hand-printed amounts, ingredients, and procedures, and make lunch, including vegetables, for two hundred people.

In the world of professional cooking, it is easy to fall under the spell of the exotic, the luxuries like peeled asparagus spears, tiny artichokes, hot house tomatoes in winter. Sometimes, to bring things down to earth, I would tell the students, “Watch. I am going to make people line up and pay money to eat turnips and rutabagas.” I am sure that most of my students had never read Tobacco Road or lived in tenements whose halls filled with the sulfur odor of overcooked vegetables all winter. Somehow they still knew that those roots were a scorned food, too poor for the fine tables they imagined filling.

But there is a technique called etouffee that perfectly brings out the tenderness and sweet meaty depth of strong flavored vegetables. From the French etouffer, to smother, it starts over high heat with a small amount of fat and finishes with closely covered steaming in the vegetables’ own moisture, no added liquid. The flavor of the butter or other fat permeates every bite without adding a greasy finish or a lot of calories. The smothering, by keeping oxygen out, prevents the development of the sulfur compounds that can make these vegetables disagreeable.

Cut equal amounts of carrots, turnips, and rutabagas into julienne or fine dice. Heat a large sauté pan with an ounce of butter. Add about a quart of the vegetables, to a depth of one inch. Cook over high heat, shaking the pan frequently, until the vegetables are heated through and have started to cook, about two minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Reduce the heat and cover the pan with a round of buttered parchment paper. Cook ten minutes more, shaking the pan occasionally. Stir if necessary to move pieces from the edge to the center for even cooking, but re-cover right away. For larger quantities, use the tilting braising pan.

We offered samples, and by the next week, this had become one of the most popular vegetables we served.

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In all my years of being an affluent gardener with plenty of land and plenty of cash for seeds and plants, it never occurred to me to treasure radishes. They seemed a token, obligatory planting, sprouting quickly, tolerating frost, useful as a marker row for slower germinating chard. In the Pacific Northwest, gardeners have exactly three weeks after the sprouts break the soil before cabbage root fly eggs become little maggots that bore into the roots and ruin them. The aggravation has always seemed far out of proportion to the payback—small, pungent balls, not at all like the bland crisp products of aggressively irrigated and fertilized commercial agriculture that could be had at three bunches for a dollar in the store.

But in the prison garden project, with its haphazard supply of outdated seeds, everything was precious. One day early in the season, I had an hour in the garden and not much to look at but the radish patch with its four-leaved red-stemmed sprouts all crowded in on each other. Thinning is completely counterintuitive. You have to pull perfectly healthy plants out of the row to make room for the remaining ones’ roots to develop. To make myself do it, I have always had to repeat to myself Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s story from Reindeer Moon, about the spirits’ greediness in trying to send twins to a young woman in her first pregnancy. She died in childbirth and so did the babies; the spirits lost everything and had to start over. I have learned to give each radish, carrot, or beet its inch.

I had always read that the thinnings of tap root crops can’t be transplanted. I would eat my beet thinnings and send the carrot thinnings to the compost heap. But that day in the prison garden, I had nothing to lose. I dug them out gently, scratched new holes deep enough for the whole threadlike length of the root, pressed down the soil, and soaked them with water I scooped with both hands from the bucket and dribbled through my fingers. Three hot days later, they were still alive. They grew slowly for three weeks and finally started to round out and show their shoulders above the soil. For the first time in all my gardening years, I had a succession crop of radishes.

Thanks to the transplanting, our garden produced so many radishes from just one packet of seed that we really had to think up something creative to do with them. One of our garden neighbors, whose people were country, said that they used to cook radishes in with their collard greens. I thought that cooking them in liquid would make them too strong tasting and thought of etouffee.

With a plastic knife, cut radishes into quarters. Heat a tablespoon of bacon fat in the large frying pan and add the radishes. Cook over high heat for about two minutes, shaking the pan frequently. Season with salt and pepper. Cover closely with the lid from the small frying pan (it should sit right down on the radishes), reduce the heat, and cook for about 8 minutes more. Shake the pan occasionally. Dream of serving with a roasted haunch of venison and garlic mashed potatoes in a country inn on a cold late fall day, or, if cooked with butter, with a roasted chicken in the spring.