{"id":4216,"date":"2014-06-26T11:35:24","date_gmt":"2014-06-26T08:35:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/?p=4216"},"modified":"2014-08-19T08:40:58","modified_gmt":"2014-08-19T05:40:58","slug":"of-greens-and-beans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/?p=4216","title":{"rendered":"Of Greens and Beans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chengdu, China: June 26, 2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

Beans and greens, as I have written many times before, are among the hardest food plants to write about, if only because the plant families and genera are so large and diverse; common names add to the confusion. The cowpeas<\/a> of the southern United States are so varied, even today, that a favorite heirloom might be restricted to one farm in one county. Fava beans are so widely cultivated \u2013 and so different upon harvest — that even the experts in the same regions cannot agree on how best to cook them.\u00a0 Elizabeth Schneider, my dear friend and go-to expert on the culinary uses of fruits and vegetables, has written, “The common bean of commerce, the native American Phaseolus vulgaris<\/em>, is not just a bean but a world of beans, embracing almost everything we call ‘bean’ \u2013 from yellow wax to black turtle, from green (snap or string bean) to dried. The remarkable scope and multiple forms of this New World bean have made it among the most difficult plants to classify in either scientific or common terms.\u201d The aforementioned cowpeas, also known as southernpeas (including blackeyes, cream peas, whippoorwills, lady peas, and crowders), are of African origin and do not belong to the same genus. They are Vigna unguiculata<\/em>, another vast array of beans. Fava beans, also known as broad beans or Windsor or English beans, are Old World, but they\u2019ve been cultivated for so long (from China to England), that its origins are no longer traceable. They’re in an entirely different plant family.<\/p>\n

And then there are the leafy green vegetables, of which I am besotted. In Bulgaria, it drove me crazy that the fields were filled with mustard, beets, and turnips, the former grown for its seeds, and the latter, for their roots. Cabbage and spinach were common and an occasional wild green appeared at market, but I longed for the collards, mustard greens, turnip greens, and kale that I ate regularly in the States, and various wild greens that found their way to my table in Italy. Of Brassica<\/em>, the sprawling Mustard genus of leafy greens also known as the Crucifers, Elizabeth quotes Paul Williams, head of the Crucifer Genetics Cooperative at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, \u201cOnce you decide to put anything on paper about Brassica<\/em>, you\u2019re leaving footprints in the snow for all to see and step on. Scientists and produce marketers and seed companies function \u2013 if you can call it that \u2013 independently when it comes to Brassica<\/em> names.\u201d What you call \u201cbok choy\u201d may be someone else\u2019s \u201cchoy sum.\u201d Here in Western China, the Sichuanhua and Uighur words differ not only from Cantonese, but from Mandarin as well. In her seminal Food Plants of China<\/em>, Shiu-ying Hu notes, \u201cSeveral popular Chinese vegetables called bai-cai<\/em> are not included [in her essay on leafy shoots] because they are not available in most supermarkets. In North China bai-cai<\/em> (Brassica pekinensis<\/em> [Lour.] Rruprecht) is well cooked, pickled, or raw for salad. The South China bai-cai<\/em> (Brassica chinensis<\/em> L.) is used in American Chinese restaurants, both with meat or in soups.\u201d She, too, admits, \u201cTheir taxonomic status is confusing.\u201d Under Brassica alboglabra<\/em> (Chinese kale or Chinese broccoli), she lists eleven varieties. Under Brassica juncea<\/em> (Mustard greens, leaf-mustard, Swatow mustard, or Indian Mustard), she lists four major varieties plus zha-cai<\/em> (Sichuan Pressed Vegetable), a variety grown specifically to be preserved in a complicated process of salting, seasoning, and pressing. \u201cA town called Fuling in Sichuan is the center of production of this preserve which has worldwide circulation, hence the name.\u201d [An aside:\u00a0 I’ve not found collards, mustard, or beet greens, and salad greens are next to impossible to find. But there IS a world of leafy green vegetables here and I love them all.]<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A cell phone image of fresh fava beans with preserved mustard greens and Chinese cabbage with chick peas<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All this as a background to dinner the other night in a duck restaurant not far from our apartment. Imagine my delight (though I knew writing about it would be hell) when these dishes arrived at table (see the cell phone photo, above): fresh young fava beans with preserved mustard and cabbage cooked with chickpeas. I was dining with my friend Loubna, who is Syrian and who, I discovered several days after our meal, didn\u2019t even realize the beans were favas! (She had recently brought a cumin-scented fava dish to my house for a Middle Eastern meal I prepared.) She\u2019s one of those folks who has never peeled a fava bean. (See my blog on this eternal argument here<\/a>.) She thought they were another type of fresh bean that she did not know. Most surprising to me were the mustard greens. Though I have seen innumerable packages of pickled \u201ccai\u201d in grocers throughout Chengdu, and have been served several pickled condiments (most notably, pickled yard long beans, which are a type of cowpea!), never before have I had anything quite like these mustard pickles. They tasted just like wasabi. Xiaoyu, our Chinese friend dining with us, said that this particular pickle is peculiar to the region and is only available for a brief time in spring and summer while the supply lasts; it\u2019s made from tender young shoots. Shiu-ying writes that \u201cthe finished product is olive green and very spicy.\u201d Definitely \u201cspicy,\u201d but the color was a dark green. It looked fresh, not preserved. It was brilliant with the nuttiness of the fresh favas. Interestingly Shiu-ying\u2019s 900-page tome does not mention the use of favas as a fresh vegetable.<\/p>\n

I found both hers and Fuchsia Dunlop\u2019s essays on the various mustard pickles not only confusing, but totally worthless as shopping guides. I will never understand why publishers don\u2019t put the tone marks on the Pinyin, the romanized alphabet of Chinese; without them, there\u2019s no way to know how they\u2019re pronounced. \u00a0\u201cB\u00e1i c\u00e0i<\/em>,\u201d for example, which literally means \u201cwhite vegetable,\u201d is Chinese cabbage. But \u201cb\u01cei c\u00e1i<\/em>\u201d means \u201ca hundred talents.\u201d There are only 400 syllables in the Chinese language. Context helps, of course, but without the proper tone, you can be totally misunderstood. And it\u2019s not just foreigners who have a hard time. Because the beans and greens, as in English, are called x beans and y greens, even the locals are misunderstood. I\u2019ve had friends order cauliflower and get cabbage. Broccoli (hu\u0101 c\u00e0i<\/em>, or flower vegetable) and cauliflower (c\u00e0i hu\u0101<\/em>, or vegetable flower) are particularly confusing to me, especially since neither of them are called that here in Chengdu. And guess what? They\u2019re BOTH Brassica oleracea<\/em> var. botrytis<\/strong> L.!<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never had a dish quite like the b\u00e1i c\u00e0i y\u012bng zu\u01d0 d\u00f2u<\/em> (Chinese cabbage with chick peas, or, literally, \u201cwhite vegetable eagle beak bean\u201d).\u00a0 I was so surprised by it that I never thought to ask how it was made, but I\u2019m all but certainly the beans were cooked in a duck broth (we were in a duck restaurant, after all) and the cabbage added toward the end of cooking. I have never seen chick peas for sale here and Shiu-ying says they are rare in China. I\u2019ll keep you posted.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chengdu, China: June 26, 2014 Beans and greens, as I have written many times before, are among the hardest food plants to write about, if only because the plant families and genera are so large and diverse; common names add to the confusion. The cowpeas of the southern United States are so varied, even today, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4217,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1407,1406,1400,1408,1409,1388,481,18,1410],"class_list":["post-4216","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-archives","tag-bai-cai","tag-beans","tag-chengdu-china","tag-chick-peas","tag-chinese-cabbage","tag-fava-beans","tag-greens","tag-hoppin-john-martin-taylor","tag-preserved-mustard-greens"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4216","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4216"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4231,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4216\/revisions\/4231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4217"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoppinjohns.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}