Sunday, September 18, 2011

Getting a fix on the leek

I just did another event, this one outdoors at a food and plant festival. Since the featured book was How to Fix a Leek and Other Food from Your Farmers Market, the organizers, owners of a new organic farm, thought they should garnish my table with fresh leeks. I cleaned the most beautiful of their gift and set it out as a bookmarker--although when kids came by, I must confess, I waved it and claimed it was my special wizard wand.

That, of course, stopped the kids in their tracks. But more unexpectedly, the sight of that leek stopped almost every passerby, and I was treated to a continual counterpoint of: "Oh, I love leeks!" and "I've never eaten one of those." As with the current political system, there was nobody in the middle. Nobody who maybe just a little bit liked leeks or had just tasted maybe a little once. I've never encountered that with any other vegetable but then, twenty years ago, as I was picking up a leek from the supermarket's grocery collection in Bath, Maine, an elderly woman stopped in her tracks, screwed up her nose and said bluntly: "My God, what is that nasty thing?"

Mellow is more the word I'd use. Leeks are cousins in the onion family, the ones without the pungent bite and with textural softness. They're too polite to overpower, say, expensive mushrooms so they're perfect to sauté in butter with that precious fungus, as I did last week when I found black trumpets and hen of the woods at the farmers' market. And they're very sweet with ham and eggs, in an omelet or frittata.

Now that they're plentiful, I use leeks to make risotto--with mushrooms, of course, or perhaps with those other autumn wonders, Brussels sprouts and Jerusalem artichokes, which are not from Jerusalem and not artichokes but the tuber from which our sunflower grows. I've also chopped them up and sautéed them in olive oil with celery, bits of smoked ham or bacon, and a pile of minced flat leaf parsley, stirred in some soft ricotta cheese to hold everything together and spread the mixture on the underside of a portabello mushroom to bake as a yummy no gluten/no bread pizza.

Venerable is another word for the leek. "Eat leeks in March and ramps in May, And all the year after the physicians may play," is an old English proverb. The stalk has always been prized for its medicinal magic. Hippocrates, the so called father of Western medicine, supposedly prescribed it for nosebleeds. During medieval times, it was thought to cure a sore throat, to be an antidote for certain poisons, and a diagnostic tool.

The hardscrabble people of the British Isles actually revered the leek. It's not only still the national symbol of Wales, key ingredient in the infamous Scottish cockaleekie soup. It's given names to many an English town. Leighton, Leyton, Laughton, Leckhampton, Loughrigg and Lawkland all mean something like "land of the leek." It's also endowed that far more pungent bulb with the name we English speakers recognize: garlic--as gar-leek.

Aristocratic is another good description, since the leek stands tall and elegantly straight above ground. Then too, it is not so coarse and smelly as the onion or garlic down under. The moneyed Romans ate leeks many ways while the hoi polloi had to make due with onions. Nowadays at fancy supermarkets, they cost three to four times more than onions. But right now while they're in the harvest spotlight, leeks are value priced.

And right now while the weather vacillates from chilly to sweaty is the perfect time to make the famed French vichyssoise: leek and potato soup with cream. You can serve either hot or cold. There really is a lot of magic in that wand.

P.S. If you want to read more about the leek in history, try the newly published Words to Eat By, written by Ina Lipkowitz.

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