Vegetables - Sophie Grigson

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is a repeat recipe, originally printed in my book Taste of the Times, which is now out of print. It is so good, however, that I have no qualms about including it again here. As the celeriac roasts, it absorbs some of the raisiny flavour of the Marsala (but not the alcohol, which just burns off), whilst caramelising to a golden, sticky brownness. Excellent with game, in particular.

      Serves 4

       1 medium-large celeriac

       a little sunflower oil

       a knob of butter

       5 tablespoons sweet Marsala

       salt and pepper

      Preheat the oven to 180°C/350°F/Gas 4. Cut the celeriac into 8 wedges, then trim off the skin as neatly and economically as you can. Toss the wedges in just enough oil to coat. Smear the butter thickly around an ovenproof dish, just large enough to take the celeriac wedges lying down flat (well, flattish, anyway). Lay the celeriac in the dish, season with salt and pepper and pour over the Marsala.

      Roast for about 1 hour, turning the wedges and basting every now and then, until richly browned all over and very tender. You may find that you have to add a tablespoon or two of water towards the end to prevent burning.

       Chervil root

      The rarity of chervil root is a small tragedy. I have come across them a mere three or four times in my adult life and I regret profoundly that they are not more common, for they are nothing short of delicious. I first discovered them in a market near Orléans in France. This is their home region. However, even in France they remain bemusingly rare. This may partly be due to their appearance. They don’t look at all promising. Small, brown, dirty cones, looking for all the world like a pile of rough-hewn, old-fashioned children’s spinning tops, they don’t exactly shout ‘buy me’. It may well be that you or I have strode past them without even noticing their presence. Oh that it weren’t so. These insignificant morsels are blessed with a remarkable flavour, something like a cross between a chestnut and a parsnip, and if only you could lay your hands on them, I have no doubt that they would soon become all the rage.

      Practicalities

      BUYING

      There’s no point angsting about freshness – just grab hold of them if you are lucky enough to find any. Ideally, they should be pleasingly firm, but personally I’d snap them up even if they were just a mite softer and wrinklier – the taste is still good, though they are harder to peel in this state.

      COOKING

      Give them a good scrub to remove any dirt (however much elbow grease you employ, the skin will remain unappealingly grubby-looking). The skin is edible, but not especially so. Peel the little darlings before cooking for the best results. They taste fab just simmered in salted water until tender (like a parsnip, this is not a vegetable that benefits from the al dente school of cooking), drained well and then finished with a knob of butter. Even more devastatingly divine, however, are roast chervil roots. Again peel before cooking, then roast in a little olive oil or oil and butter in the normal fashion, until tender as butter inside, lightly browned and a little chewy outside.

      PARTNERS

      Cooked this way, they go spectacularly well with roast beef, or a good steak. I dare say that chervil root has enormous potential and could be mashed, chipped, souped and so on. One day, maybe, I’ll get to find out, but that will just have to wait until the day I can source them regularly, and easily. Roll on that day.

       Hamburg parsley

      As entries go, this one will be very short. Not because Hamburg parsley doesn’t rate, but more because it has become increasingly hard to find. I don’t think I’ve seen it for sale for the best part of a decade, more’s the pity. Therefore my aim now is merely to prime you, just in case you stumble across a tray of Hamburg parsley unexpectedly. If you do, please buy some and encourage the seller/grower to spread the word.

      Although it looks like a shocked parsnip, colour washed out to ghostly off-white, and is about the same size and shape, Hamburg parsley is actually nothing more unusual than a form of the commonest of herbs, parsley. They share the same Latin name, Petroselinum crispum, but the energy flows down to the root of the Hamburg variety, swelling it out to a satisfying girth. Not for nothing is it also known as parsley root. It is far less sweet than a parsnip and does have a distinct parsley zing, which is surprising at first.

      COOKING

      Although you could serve it as a straight vegetable, just boiled and buttered, the flavour is strong. In practice, it is more usual to add it in moderation to stews and soups, cut up into chunks. In this context, it blossoms, imparting something of its parsley scent to the whole, and absorbing other flavours to mollify its own in a most beguiling manner. If you have only one or two roots, you might prefer to boil and mash them with double or triple quantities of potato and plenty of butter to make excellent, parsley-perfumed mash to accompany some dark, rich, meaty stew.

       Jerusalem artichokes

      Once upon a time, many centuries ago, intrepid explorers crossed the Atlantic Ocean at great peril and discovered all sorts of miraculous things. There were potatoes and tomatoes and chocolate and gold. There were chillies to make up for a dismaying lack of black pepper. Less lauded and celebrated, however, was the discovery of the Helianthus tuberosus. It belongs to a later period of exploration and intrepidity, when the pioneering spirit of the first settlers in North America led them to the flaps of Native American tepees. This time, along with turkeys and cranberries, they also sampled the delights of one of the windiest vegetables known to man, the knobbly Jerusalem artichoke.

      Not as celebrated as potatoes or tomatoes and never exported with quite the same passionate love/hate devotion, nonetheless the Jerusalem artichoke was a significant addition to the greater vegetable repertoire. It has since gone in and out of fashion and now hovers amongst the bevy of vegetables that are almost but not quite popular, but still beloved by many devotees.

      I count myself amongst them. Jerusalem artichokes are delicious and special and still remarkably seasonal. This is a crop that belongs to the late autumn and winter, a root vegetable with the gorgeous natural sweetness that slow growth in the darkness of moist earth imparts. Knobbly they may be, but the texture of the cooked tuber is smooth and gently crisp, defying comparison with others.

      There is, as the name suggests, a passing resemblance in flavour to globe artichokes but there is no way you could confuse the two. The Jerusalem artichoke is very much its own man. With one half of the name explained, you might then wonder why a native American vegetable has acquired a Levantine moniker. The answer is simple: corruption. Not fraudulent illegal corruption, but verbal. The Jerusalem artichoke is closely related to the sunflower and, like the sunflower, its open-faced flower follows the sun from morning to evening. The Italian for sunflower is ‘girasole’, translating literally as turning towards the sun. ‘Jerusalem’ is merely a mispronunciation of this, lending an added exoticism to a vegetable that has travelled far.

      Not so exotic is its propensity to flatulence. Theories abound as to how to minimise the after-effects, but to be frank I’ve never been that bothered. Except once, when I was breastfeeding my first child.

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