Grouping things into categories – including plants – helps us to make sense of the world and to respond to their similarities and differences. This book focuses on ten botanical families that are dear to the heart of Australian farmer and market gardener Paulette Whitney. She provides thorough and thoughtful information about the members of each family, introducing both their English and latin names. (Petroselinum crispum sounds much grander than ‘parsley’.) Part-cookbook, part-gardening handbook, and part-memoir, this is an engrossing read.
Some plants in the top ten families are well-known, others are much less familiar. The Amaranthacea family, for example, includes beetroot, spinach, silverbeet, and the edible weed known as fat hen, but also the medieval sounding goosefeet and glassworts. There’s also a chapter covering an assortment of other plants that ‘refused to sit tidily’ elsewhere in the book.
Whitney encourages us to think about the produce we grow, eat, and buy, to consider the land on which it is cultivated, and to find out about its cultural roots. She and her family run Provenance Growers, a market garden and edible plant nursery in Lutruwita | Tasmania. They grow seedlings, herbs, vegetables and seed crops, as well as making pickles and preserves. They sell their goods from their farm and at a local outdoor market. Home cooks, chefs and gardeners are regular customers.
Whitney and her partner, a former chef, are generous with their knowledge and their harvest, often sharing meals with friends and colleagues. They respect and acknowledge the cultural significance and traditional owners of plants and are committed to sustainable practices. ‘Nothing goes to waste on my watch,’ says Whitney. She encourages foraging (despite snakes and spiders), composting, recycling, and op shopping.
I’m quite sure ghosts of the capable hands of cooks past guide my cooking every time I reach for my vintage dishes.
The recipes in this book range from simple and rustic (e.g. Peas and carrots; Cauliflower mac and cheese) to more complex dishes such as Crisp roast oca with labneh and Skirret and bone marrow pie. Many recipes are plant-based, but not all: Calf’s heart with herbs and Slow-cooked goat with rosemary and saltbush, for example. There are plenty of main dishes and also cake, desserts, drinks and dressings. Whitney encourages substitutions, suggesting that brown sugar can be used if rapadura sugar is not on hand – or raspberry jam instead of cochineal. There’s sometimes a suggestion for a setting that will complement the meal, or the type of company who might most enjoy it.
I’m intrigued by Whitney’s alternative methods for preparing common vegetables, such as grilling lettuce on the barbecue. I’m keen to try her simple – and apparently addictive! – dressing made with the fresh leaves of an electric daisy (Acmella oleracea).
Whitney is philosophical about her successes and failures in the garden and the inevitable ‘experimental hiccups’. She writes about Ron, the chain-smoking, tea-sipping, friend of a friend who hot-wired Whitney’s not entirely pest-proof electric fence. She tells of her disappointment when crops struggle or bolt and her frustration when seedlings are attacked by marauding possums, birds and rodents. She has some regrets about the land where her family has chosen to live, which is buffeted by wind and has poor quality soil. Both mental and physical stamina are required for her winter work outdoors, when she is challenged by chilblains and freezing rain. Biosecurity issues – such as disease threats – are not uncommon.
Despite setbacks, Whitney remains optimistic and inquisitive. When she meets a new-to-her plant, she applies her ‘feasibility, flavour and ethics filters’: Will it grow here? Is it invasive? Delicious? Interesting? Ethical? Before she commits to planting a new seed or cutting, she considers each question. The weather must be taken into account and she has learned the best time of year to plant to ensure successful crops.
Spinach is a crop that needs the gentle shoulders of the season to begin life, that little space where the weather is gentle – bold but not scalding sunshine, cool but not icy air.
Whitney writes with passion and humour about her family’s food-related rituals and experiences, including the ‘dangerous eruptions of molten quince paste’ that have left a permanent stain on her ceiling and the crushed mint garnish that can result in green-flecked teeth. Whitney observes that allowing her children to be flexible about what they eat has given them ‘an easier, healthier relationship with food’.
Give foods a second chance, Whitney advises. There’s no comparison, she says, between rich and earthy beets grown in a humus-rich soil and the over-sweet and vinegary tinned beets of our childhood. Nor can the ‘ancient and well-travelled minty dust’ in commercial tea bags compare with a herbal brew made of peppermint, chamomile or lemon balm leaves picked moments earlier from the garden.
Vivid descriptions throughout the book appeal to all five senses. Whitney remembers the time when an appreciative chef offered her a forkful of Jaune du Doubs carrot:
[The carrots] sat in the oven’s last gentle warmth becoming tender, snug in their blanket of almost-smouldering hay. The skin was a late-sunset gold, and the flesh inside, cooked so gently, was headily sweet, tempered by the salty smokiness from the butter and hay. [p78]
She recalls a crab apple tarte tartin prepared for one of her culinary heroes and her anxiety about whether it would turn out okay. Would it have enough sticky, buttery caramel? Would it be a lump of soggy pastry with apples that stuck to the dish? She need not have worried.
We opened a bottle of cream and enjoyed the perfect thing that an apple tarte tartin is – crisp and yielding, savoury and sour, burnt-sugar bitter and caramel sweet.
The title of the book comes from Whitney’s devotion to broccoli. As a child she tolerated her mother’s unappealing broccoli ‘cooked to a bland shade of khaki’ with the occasional trespassing caterpillar on the side. Eventually both she and her mother upped their broccoli game and now hold this versatile vegetable in high regard.
[Broccoli] responds to hard bone-jarring frosts by becoming sweeter and more delicious … yields florets, shoots, leaves, succulent stems and edible flowers, provides spring forage aplenty for the bees and also happens to be very, very good for you…
Whitney’s ‘early commitment to a home, a dog, a piece of land, a family and a farm’ has limited her ability to travel. She is grateful that she ‘can taste the world through [her] garden’. She’s a keen reader as well as a writer, observing that all her ‘favourite books have food as an anchor’.
Food can act as a signifier of culture or status, climate or season, and as a gathering point—where better than around a table to bring your characters together and show their foibles and desires?
She mentions food passages by her favourite authors, including Murakami, Dahl, and Tolstoy, with a nod to Jack and the Beanstalk too.
The text is complemented by coloured photos and simple line drawings, sometimes alongside a tip or observation.
Topped with a few dollops of goat’s cheese, zucchini are the tired gardener’s friend.
Towards the end of the book there’s a short reading list, grouped according to whether the books and other resources will help us to think, to meet new plants, to garden, to forage, or to cook. A comprehensive index is structured according to key ingredients and alphabetically by recipe title. It’s odd that there are no numbers on the pages that have key facts about each plant family, as the associated page numbers appear in the Table of Contents. However, coloured pages indicate where each new section starts, and the category that each plant or recipe belongs to is shown on the outer edge of each page.
Whitney expresses her gratitude for the support she has received from friends, family and online forums, and the information she has found in ‘obscure and beautiful corners of the internet’. I’m likewise grateful for the knowledge and new perspectives she shares within her book, and for challenging me to become a more thoughtful consumer and gardener.
Anne Kerslake Hendricks
Murdoch Books
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