Leafy Greens

I often come home from Chinatown with a squid and a bag of choy sum. The fishmonger will have done most of the dirty work for me, leaving me to give the body sac a final rinse before slicing. Squid is ideally suited to this quick, high-temperature cooking.

Bok choy or, better still, gai lan will be perfect here. Eat it hot and spluttering from the pan.

Of all the flavors that seem to bring out the rest of the cabbage family’s earthy greenness, few work as effectively as those of Southeast Asia. Ginger, green onion, and garlic have a natural affinity with chlorophyll-rich vegetables of any sort, but the saltiness of the fish sauces with which Thai and Vietnamese cooks season their food does much for cabbage leaves. I often serve this with roast duck, which appreciates such seasoning, or as a side order for a mushroom stir-fry hot with chiles and soy.

The purity of a leaf and its edible stalk, lightly steamed and served “naked,” is always somehow life enhancing. But occasionally I want a more sensuous treatment (a welcome lift in times of recession). The spiced cream with juniper and peppercorns recipe that I occasionally use with green leaves makes them a particularly sound accompaniment for grilled or roast pork, or for poached ham or chicken, but I also find it perfectly acceptable with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

Cheese is the savior of chard, as a crisp crust, a seasoning for soup, a luscious sauce, bringing out its qualities while introducing a note of luxury. Often, the bolder the cheese the more interesting the result, so a well-matured British cheese is a wise choice for something like a shallow chard tart. As a sort of double whammy, I add cheese to the pastry as well as the filling.

Bubble and squeak is an iconic British dish made by frying leftover boiled potatoes and cabbage to make a large, flat potato cake that is crisp outside and soft within. Bubble and squeak can be as simple as the traditional leftover cabbage and potato fry-up or somewhat more sophisticated, with the introduction of cheese, smoked pork, fish, or other vegetables. The bells-and-whistles versions can often successfully disguise the fact that your supper is made from stuff you found at the back of the fridge. Keeping the potato pieces quite coarse makes the texture more interesting.

On the right day, a deep bowl of lentil soup is all the food I need. The homey, almost spare quality satisfies me in a way fancier recipes cannot. The undertones of frugality, poverty even, are avoided by rich seasonings of unsmoked bacon, herbs, and good stock. The backbone of earthiness is given a fresh top note with mint and lemon juice. You can keep your beef Wellington.

Perhaps because of the thickness of its stalks, or the unruly tangle of leaves on the plate, chard always manages to exude a rustic quality. It is not really a vegetable for “fine dining.” Blanched and seasoned with young, mild garlic and a squeeze of lemon, the stems and leaves become a useful side dish for any big-flavored main course. Allowed to cool, they also work with cold roast meats, thickly torn chunks of mozzarella, wedges of warm savory tarts, or coarse-textured “country” pâté. In other words, a distinctly useful thing to have in the fridge.

The dressing is enough for four and will keep in the fridge for several days.

All of the brassica family have an affinity with cream and cheese, yet it is those grown for their heads rather than their leaves that seem to get the comfort of dairy produce. Cauliflower and broccoli have long been served under a blanket of cheese and cream, but less so cabbage and the leafier greens. The reason, I have always assumed, is that the cabbage would be overcooked by the time the sauce has formed a crust in the hot oven. In practice, the “white” cabbages that sit on supermarket shelves like rock-hard footballs can be put to good use in a gratin. Their leaves and stalks are juicy when blanched in boiling water and the thicker leaves hold up very well under a sharp cheese sauce, flecked with nutmeg and hot white pepper. I mostly use a cabbage gratin as a friend for a piece of boiled ham or bacon, especially one that has been simmered in apple juice with juniper berries and onion, but sometimes we eat it as it comes, as a TV dinner, like cauliflower cheese. My suggestion of Cornish Yarg is only because I have used it here to good effect. Any briskly flavored cheese is suitable.

There will be quite a bit of this left over for the next day. Lovely reheated with cold ham.

A preserved duck leg from the deli has saved my supper more times than I can count. Cased in its own white fat and crisped up in the oven or in a sauté pan, these “duck confit” are as near as I get to eating ready-made food. One January, arriving home cold and less than 100 percent, I stripped the meat from a couple of duck legs and used it to add protein to an express version of one of those lovingly tended cabbage and bean soups. The result was a slightly chaotic bowlful of food that felt as if it should be eaten from a scrubbed pine table in a French cave house. An extraordinarily heartwarming supper, immensely satisfying. An edible version of the sort of people one refers to as “the salt of the earth.” I am certain no one would have guessed it hadn’t spent the entire afternoon puttering away in a cast-iron pot.

February 2008. The garden is all frost and cabbages. Here and there the occasional fat seed head, some purple sprouts on bending stalks, and piles of sticks that I have pulled off the trees that overhang the vegetable patch. The earth is crisp underfoot. Soup days. The winter cabbages, especially Savoy and Protovoy, are blistered with webs and hollows that seem made to hold a sauce of some sort. At its simplest, this could be melted butter or hot bacon fat, but a cream sauce seems an especially attractive idea on a cold day, adding suavity to a coarse flavor and at a stroke tempering the leaves’ stridency. The juniper in the spiced cream that follows makes this a perfect accompaniment to ham or roast pork, though I have been known to eat it with brown rice as a main dish in itself.

The brassicas are much revered in Chinese cooking, and dealt with elsewhere in this book, but the white cabbage, with its waxy leaves and crisp stalks, makes an excellent candidate for seasoning with the saltier accompaniments. On cold, rather gray days, the sort of day when nothing much happens, I often crave robust, dominating flavors—perhaps in a quest to inject some vigor into the occasion. Strident greens tossed in lip-tingling oyster sauce can be such a dish. In the last four or five years, this has become one of those recipes I use as a “knee-jerk” accompaniment—an alternative to opening a bag of frozen peas. It is excellent with grilled pork chops, though I have also eaten it atop a bowl of steamed rice before now.

The frugality implied in the words “cabbage soup” appeals to me just as much as the fanciful descriptions of Michelin-starred menus. The words evoke a rich simplicity where nothing unnecessary intrudes. This is indeed a soup of extraordinary solace, gratifying in its purity. The stark fact that this was a meal formed in poverty is there for all to see. Portugal has a cabbage soup, perhaps the best known of all, caldo verde. It is made with couve gallego, a yellow-flowered kale, whose leaves are flatter and less plumelike than the kale we generally buy in the market. The other ingredients are from the pantry, but should include a few slices of chorizo if the soup is to have any authenticity. This soup works with any coarse-textured greens and eminently, I think, with Savoy cabbage.

Early January 2008 and I am having my annual tidy up of the pantry. The “lentil shuffle” as I call it, as that is basically what the job entails. Sorting out the pantry always results in my making something bean or lentil oriented. I think it must remind me of just how many I have. What follows is a rather hot bean curry. You could cool its ardor by skipping a chile or two. The greens offer a hit of cool freshness on top of the substantial and deeply spiced beans. A speedier version, suitable for a midweek supper, can be made with canned beans. There is no real reason why you shouldn’t use any dried or canned beans you wish here. Chickpeas will work well too. If I do decide to open a can instead, then I use three 14-ounce (400g) cans.

The sour crispness of red cabbage makes it a good ingredient for a relish. Something stirring—hot, sharp, sour, bright—to introduce to a gamey pâté or a wedge of pork pie with softly collapsing pastry. Not normally given to making pickles and chutneys, I find this startling relish manageable without feeling I am going too far down the preserving route.

Raw cabbage, especially the tight, white variety, would be good here if the idea of raw sprouts doesn’t grab you.