Pickled Kohlrabi Chinese Style

In my continuing quest for uses for kohlrabi, I tried the recipe for pickled kohlrabi in my Chinese cookbook. It worked.

First, a story. The first time I ever saw an actual living kohlrabi was when I visited the home of some colleagues, one of whom was Chinese. We were all young instructors at a small college in the Midwest, and Gene liked to cook. We were fortunate because he and his wife invited us over for some homemade Chinese food. (This is how I learned to stir-fry.)

They had recently bought their first house, a new house in a subdivision. They had a very small garden in the back. The only thing growing in it was kohlrabi. He didn't prepare it for us but I wondered for many years why, of all the possible vegetables, that was the one they grew. I am now convinced that it was so they could make this pickle.

Actually, it is not quite a pickle but the product of short fermentation, like sauerkraut but for a shorter period. The result is a pleasantly tangy product that is somewhat radish-like and somewhat reminiscent of kimchi. I think that it might be something one would serve alongside many dishes, and like kimchi, it could become a regular part of daily meals.

Kohlrabi Pickles (Pow Tsai: Szechuan)
slightly modified from
"An Encyclopedia of Chinese Food and Cooking"
by Chang, Chang, Kutscher and Kutscher,
Crown Publishers

For a 1 quart Mason-type canning jar, prepare a solution of 2 cups boiling water and 1 Tablespoon salt (not iodized). Allow to cool.

Peel 3-4 kohlrabi, depending on size (recipe says 1 pound) and cut into slivers.
Cut fresh ginger into slices. Use 4.
Peel 2 cloves garlic, slice.
Place all these vegetables into the jar.
Optional: also 1 "red-hot pepper", seeded and sliced.

Pour cooled salt solution over vegetables. Add one tablespoon wine (I used a dry white wine.) and screw down cap. Place on counter. After three days, refrigerate.

Notes: Carbon dioxide bubbles form by the next morning. It appears to be a classic lactic acid fermentation. Best not to screw down lid too tightly, since some pressure might build up.

I substituted a tablespoon of Sambal Oelek for the hot pepper. A little too hot for my taste. One could use a red dry "Japanese" pepper instead.

First Fruits

We've been eating lettuce for many weeks and finished off the first crop of spinach and arugula some time ago. But for some reason, it feels more real when you start to get the big substantial vegetables. It seems only yesterday that I put the kohlrabi into the ground, and suddenly it is huge. Time to start picking it before it gets too big and fibrous.

Kohlrabi is the version of the cabbage family that produces thickened stems as its major food offering. (The fresh leaves are also edible, like kale or collards.) I love to plant the purple variety Kolibri (Johnny's Select Seeds) because it is fun. It looks like an alien from outer space. It also seems to have a fine quality. In kohlrabi, that means a mild, slightly nutty taste and fibrous material limited to a little near the base.

As I reported before, seeds were started March 20, and the seedlings placed in the cold frame April 12. I was too busy to record the day they were planted into the row but I would guess it was the first week of May. Now suddenly they are huge! It is so satisfying to harvest the fruit of my efforts. Now to find good ways to use it.

Conventional recipes based on Anglo/American tradition are not very inspiring. They begin with cream sauce and end there. Here's what James Beard (American Cookery) had to say about it: "This is rather a bastard vegetable...to me it is a mystery why people really care for it...Mrs. Rorer felt that kohlrabi was more nutritious than turnips and that it was pleasant served with Hollandaise sauce." He mentions cream sauce "gauge one per person" and also serving it with melted butter. For an updated version, see this from the New York Times.

The way I have usually begun serving it is peeled, sliced, cooked until tender in minimal water, then with butter, salt and pepper. We consumed three for two people without any effort last night. It is mild but has a pleasant distinct nutty flavor. I expect that I will use it in a gratin before the season is over, probably with onions and some of my frozen roasted red pepper.

But where it really comes into its own is with pickling. I found a recipe that apparently originated with Shepherd's Garden Seeds that worked very well a couple of years ago. It makes a fresh delicious pickle that can be served as a side dish. This year I'm also going to try the Chinese version in which kohlrabi is subjected to a short-term fermentation and seasoned with ginger, garlic, and hot pepper.

Pickled Kohlrabi (Shepherd's, 1994)

Peel and slice 3 kohlrabi, 1/4 inch thick. Peel one carrot and slice into thin sticks. (I think I sliced the kohlrabi into equivalent sticks last time.) Parboil the carrot briefly (should yield to a fork but not be soft). Place raw kohlrabi, carrot, 2 crushed garlic cloves, 1 bay leaf, and a sprig of fresh dill into a quart canning jar. Heat pickling mixture to boiling and pour over the vegetable mixture in the jar, filling the jar completely. Let cool, then refrigerate for 3-4 days before use. Will keep for several weeks in the refrigerator.

Pickling Mixture

3/4 c white vinegar
1 1/4 c water
3 Tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon dill seed
1 teaspoon mustard seed
1/4 teaspoon red chili flakes

Note: the original version of this recipe called for two carrots. I found that this made it into carrot and kohlrabi pickles instead of the other way around, so reduced to one carrot. The carrot itself is very good in this treatment and provides color, but to me the point is the kohlrabi.

My Grandmother's Kitchen

My friend Kim recently had a post titled "Grow Some of Your Own Food" that asks questions beyond just food to general self-sufficiency. It echoes to some extent the principles of the Transition movement that encourages a focus on community resiliency, partly based on supplying needs at the community level. All this started me thinking about how just a couple of generations ago, this would have been taken for granted. It made me think of my paternal grandmother and her life.

The generations ran long in my family. My father was born 13 years after my grandmother, Alice Victoria Young Nix, was married, and he was in his mid-30s before I was born. So I have some memories of a woman, born in 1879, who was married before the turn of the 20th century (1897) and how she organized her kitchen and garden.

I was too young to notice much about how things were done when my grandparents lived on a little farm near Comanche, Oklahoma. I remember that they had a cow and chickens. I think the farm was only for their own subsistence; my grandfather ran a furniture store in town. By the time I spent a couple of summers in Comanche, my grandmother was widowed. They had moved into town, where she had a fairly small plot of land (using my memory and my mature estimation, I'd say about 3/4 acre or less).

Grandmother had worked much of her life outside the home as well as in it. My grandparents were married in Texas and moved into Indian Territory before Oklahoma statehood; she once told me that they drove a covered wagon in the move. She mentioned to me that she had worked in the post office, and also that she and my grandfather had been the distributors for government commodities. I would guess that that was during the New Deal. My grandfather always seemed to have operated small businesses like furniture stores or general stores. But I think that their livelihood was relatively precarious and that what food they could grow for themselves was important.

The house I visited in the town sat roughly in the center of its lot. On one side (just outside the kitchen door) was a chicken yard and coop. The chickens roamed around that part of the yard, scratching and pecking, and were fed cracked corn (I enjoyed throwing it on the ground for them). There was a rooster. Grandmother collected a lot of eggs and may have sold a few of them; from my memory, I'd estimate she had a couple dozen chickens. The chickens were also for eating. When my grandfather was still alive, he cut one's head off, using a hatchet and a wood block. I remember seeing the decapitated chicken running around frantically (that metaphor has always had real meaning for me). Then she plucked and cleaned it. It was probably fried chicken, since that was a specialty of hers.

On the other side of the house, there was a substantial vegetable garden. What I remember most about that was the two rows of strawberries, which I found to be messy, with runners everywhere and needing weeding. She had a few flowers near the house, like four-o'clocks and hollyhocks, and some lilac bushes, but most of the property was given over to food production.

I was too young to take in much of the operation of the kitchen. But I remember that they had a real icebox. Once a week someone delivered a block of ice from the icehouse, and there was a little tube near the bottom where melted water had to be captured. I think the stove was some kind of gas, certainly not wood-burning. To the end of her life (when she had a kitchen of her own), Grandmother kept a flour drawer. Instead of keeping flour in a canister, it was in a drawer of the kitchen cabinet. She didn't have one of those fancy Hoosier cabinets, but you get the idea.

I'm sure that one reason for the drawer was that baking was an important part of daily routine. She made mostly short breads (namely, biscuits and cornbread). When she spoke of yeast-risen bread, it was as "light bread", with the emphasis on "light": LIGHT-bread. It wasn't so usual on the menu. She bought white flour in large sacks (25 lbs or more). The sacks were made of a flowered calico fabric which was then recycled into aprons, tea towels, and even quilts.

When they had their own cow, they made butter, but there was a local creamery and I think she bought her dairy goods there once they moved into town. She rendered her own lard, though, producing wonderful pork cracklin's from the skin. I'm pretty sure that was used for the biscuits.

She moved into a small apartment of my parents' house in her 80s and cooked rarely after that, except some things for herself (I was horrified by her love for brains and eggs). I didn't learn many recipes from her. But her special cornbread dressing (lots of sage) lives on in our own Thanksgiving tradition. Another thing she made for every Thanksgiving was "ambrosia". I recall that as thinly sliced oranges layered with lots of sugar and coconut. We didn't make it after she stopped cooking altogether. I did love her sugar cookies. They were light and pillowy, not heavy and fatty. When I was a teenager I once asked her for the recipe and she took me into her kitchen and "commenced" (as she would have said) to pull fistfulls of flour out of the drawer, and measured sugar by handfulls and salt by pinches. I quit in disgust. Wish I could tell that impatient teenager to go back and try to measure those amounts, because I've never been able to find an equivalent recipe.

I don't think my grandmother thought of herself as a special cook, or of her garden and chickens as a special hobby or avocation. She simply made her own domestic food industry that supplied a high percentage of their needs. It was modest, ordinary, and taken for granted as the way one lived.

Southern-style Cornbread Dressing

1 recipe cornbread (NOT corn muffins!) - extra credit for using bacon fat or lard to make it
1 cup stale light bread, cubed and dried
1 medium onion
1-2 stalks celery
2 eggs
turkey drippings and broth from boiling the neck
(I now supplement this with homemade chicken broth from my freezer.)
Dried sage, rubbed just before use
salt, pepper

With hands, reduce the cornbread to crumbs and mix in the dried light bread, also reducing that to crumbs. Chop onion and celery and add, along with sage, salt, and pepper. Mix in the two eggs. Stir in as much turkey drippings as you can spare and the broth from the neck. Add more boiling water (or homemade broth) if the mixture seems too dry. You are making something like a savory bread pudding and it should be quite moist but with no free liquid standing.

This may be used to stuff the turkey but we always baked it in a greased pan on a rack under the bird. It should cook for at least an hour (contains raw eggs).

Addendum:

Cornbread comes in many varieties.  Some make a very dry cornbread that is almost nothing but cornmeal, leavening,  and fat.  Some make a sweet concoction that is almost more like breakfast muffins.  My family has always used a middle path.  This recipe was originally published in Ann Pillsbury's Baking Book (Penguin edition, 1961) and is our standard.

Perfect Corn Bread

Mix

1 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup corn meal

1/4 cup granulated sugar

4 teaspoons baking powder

3/4 teaspoon salt

Add

2 eggs

1 cup milk         and mix with a spoon until well combined.

Add 1/4 cup oil.  OR  melt about 1/3 cup bacon fat or lard in a 9" iron skillet. (Or use a kitchen balance to weigh out 2 oz of nonhydrogenated lard (your own rendering or a local source).

Mix the fat into the batter, make sure the skillet is well oiled, and pour into the skillet.  If not using a skillet, grease a baking pan.  (The iron skillet is both the most authentic and the best functional choice.)

Bake at 425° F for 25 minutes and decant from the pan to cool.

(The bacon fat or lard will yield the richest and most authentic cornbread for this dressing.)

Extreme Planting

Late May is the moment of truth in the vegetable garden. All those appealing pictures in the catalog, those seedlings lovingly raised for transplant, those visions of harvest and culinary preparation of new varieties, are for naught if they are not planted. We are between the threats of frost of early May and the likely heat waves and thunderstorms of mid-June. Now is the time.

So I find that I am doing as farmers have done forever - planting and working the soil from dawn to dusk, or as nearly as I can. No problem getting to sleep at night - I fall into the bed and turn out the light without ceremony, only to wake with the birds thinking of what to plant where and the other tasks that must precede that. Last winter my (non-gardening) husband announced that he would help me to expand the vegetable garden by removing the turf from more of the back lawn (it is composted and the topsoil used in future years). This had several consequences. I expanded my reach by ordering more varieties and twice as much garlic. Then I decided to plant things I had not tried before (the potatoes are looking fine, not sure if I should have gotten those onion sets), and of course it seemed reasonable to plant more of everything. Now the original garden is nearly full, but with several rows of direct seeded vegetables to go, plus the squash and cucumbers. Meanwhile, my husband sprained a muscle so now I am removing the turf myself from the area where all the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants (plenty of each), currently waiting in the cold frame, are to go.

But the kohlrabi was planted and the stems are starting to swell already.

And we are eating lots of salads from the lettuce, arugula and spinach planted back in March.

The Transplant Conundrum

The gardener's holy grail, right up against yield and taste or quality, is getting the maximum out of the growing season. Season extenders like row covers, plastic mini-greenhouses, and even hoophouses have become popular. So it seems natural to get a jump on the season by starting plants indoors and transplanting seedlings once the weather is more favorable. Another garden blogger in my area reported planting her kohlrabi by direct seeding and I proposed a race. We planted at about the same time - my germination log says I planted Kolibri (Johnny's Select Seeds) on March 20 and her blog report is dated March 22.


The seedlings (now about 3 weeks old) were pricked out some time ago and yesterday I put them into the cold frame for hardening up. They mostly have two true leaves by now. I'll probably plant them into the row in about another two weeks, depending on how the weather goes. My cold frame has an automatic opener so that when the internal temperature gets too warm, it opens to vent. Meanwhile the seedlings are being treated to fluctuations in temperature (but not below freezing) and real sunshine. I know from past experience that they will really take off once into the row.

But as simple and elegant as this process (which I use for all my brassicas, or cole crops) is, I was startled to find that it is controversial.

Recently I purchased a book, "Gardening When It Counts", subtitled "Growing Food in Hard Times". Its stated purpose is to explain subsistence gardening, that is, growing vegetables out of necessity rather than fashion. The main point - and a valuable one - is to use plant spacing rather than intensive gardening, to reduce necessary inputs of fertilizer and water. Unfortunately the book also contains a number of diatribes. One of them is against the use of transplants. The author, Steve Solomon (who founded Territorial Seed Company and now lives in Tasmania, apparently for the fine gardening to be done there), has nothing good to say about use of transplants for any but the most frost-sensitive plants (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants). I was particularly dismayed to see his criticism of growing brassicas from transplants. He claims that the harvest is not much advanced and complains that everything becomes mature at once. He hit home with his mention of cabbages splitting, since I've had that problem. But his advice to plant just a few seeds every week for a while sounds burdensome.

I first saw the practice of growing cabbage from transplants in visiting fields in Wisconsin where cabbage was grown for commercial kraut production. They planted transplants as early as possible, using a mechanical planter. I've always done it and been happy with the result. So I'll probably continue, but I'm going to be more observant. In particular, I'll be interested to know how my gardening acquaintance's kohlrabi advances. I'm guessing that right now her kohlrabi looks a lot like the lettuce I planted on March 18 and grew under row cover. The little seedlings are just now beginning to put out a true leaf.

Pollan's Progress

Michael Pollan is the prophet for the local food/real food movement, to the extent that there was a serious effort to have him named as Secretary of Agriculture in the Obama administration. He is probably the person most single-handedly responsible for shifting the perspective of a significant proportion of our nation regarding food and how it should be produced. If he did not coin it, he has clarified and explained the concept of "industrial agriculture". Reading his book, "The Omnivore's Dilemma" (2006), has been what many have described as the signal moment when they realized that they had to redefine their relationship to food, and how it is produced. He has certainly had a profound influence on my thinking.

I've become more and more interested with his progression to where he has arrived. I was intrigued by his statement on a recent TV interview that he had reached this place because of his experience as a gardener. If I recall correctly, he said that gardening had made him think about food and how it was produced. I've been reviewing his books and his personal evolution, as reflected through them. The books are remarkable in that they are both intimate and lofty. While he poses big, universal questions, he then muses aloud, relating his own personal experience (with sometimes embarrassingly self-revelatory snips, like reading The Selfish Gene while stoned on pot), and yet manages to place the subject within an extensively researched and broad historical context (most of his books have a comprehensive bibliography) .

Pollan is a journalist who wrote extensively for the New York Times Magazine before beginning with books. But he bought a piece of an old farm in Connecticut in 1983, began to garden, and then to write about it. This eventually led to his first book, "Second Nature", first published in 1992. The book made quite an impression on me when I read it shortly after its publication. It is a personal exploration of his own evolution as a gardener, with chapters on miscellaneous subjects like choosing a tree to plant (alas, it was a Norway maple), the politics of garden catalogs, his grandfather's garden and what he learned from it, lawns, weeds, and rose gardens. There are some amusing stories, some that are touching. But Pollan gives away his real identity as a seriously serious writer in the Introduction: "...I soon came to the realization that I would not learn to garden very well before I'd also learned about a few other things: about my proper place in nature...about the somewhat peculiar attitudes toward the land that an American is born with...about the troubled borders between nature and culture; and about the experience of place, (and) the moral implications of landscape design..." He then somewhat bashfully admits, "It may be my nature to complicate matters...to search for large meanings in small things...". Yup.

Probably the most significant chapter in the book is "The Idea of a Garden", in which he explores most of those questions from the Introduction. He tells a sad story of old-growth trees in a Nature Conservancy tract that were felled by a tornado. What to do? Remove the trees, which would make the forest pretty again, and less likely to be a fire hazard? Or let "nature" take its course by leaving them in place? The final decision in such cases is destined to meet some human desire (whether for a pretty scene or a sense of untouched wilderness). This leads to a musing on what the real "nature" of such a place really is, and what is the meaning of wilderness in the presence of humans. The overall conclusion is that we treat all of nature as a garden, even when we are trying to "preserve" or to "restore" it.

His next book (if we skip over a book about building a house) was The Botany of Desire (2002). Here again is the theme of the interaction of humans and nature. But a new insight is expressed here - that we are interacting with plants, influencing their evolution while they influence us. Pollan chooses just four plants to discuss, the tulip (a discussion of tulipomania and our fascination with flowers), the apple (Johnny Appleseed, wild and heritage apples), marijuana (humanity's need for intoxication), and the potato.

Particularly in this last chapter, we see the present Pollan emerging. He discusses the spread of the potato across Europe and the effects of the late blight epiphytotic in Ireland in the 1840s, while also traveling to Monsanto in St. Louis to learn about genetic engineering. Talk about going into the belly of the beast - just as he would later buy a steer and follow it all the way to the slaughterhouse, he obtains potatoes that contain the gene for Bt resistance and plants them in his own garden (he would later discard them rather than serve them to the unsuspecting). He later visits a potato farmer in Idaho, where he sees the many baths of pesticides that potatoes grown conventionally must be treated to. (A moment of hilarity ensues when he is served a potato salad made of freshly dug potatoes that include the genetically engineered variety as well as some presumably pesticide-treated ones.) Afterwards, he visits an organic potato farmer, whose complex adaptive strategies are described at length. And then for the first time, he uses the phrase "industrial agriculture", as he discusses the efficiencies of monoculture and the problems it creates. (Of which the Irish potato famine is again presented as a prime example.) After musing on our collective responsibility for demanding perfect McDonalds' french fries and thus perfectly industrially produced potatoes ("the problem of monoculture may be as much a problem of culture as it is of agriculture"), he goes home to harvest his own (untreated) Kennebecs.

So - the perfect circle, from the gardener to the front lines of the food system, and back to the garden again, where it all begins.

Green Mystery

Ah, spring, thou art come at last. I am in my garden, and the students are drinking green beer. Both of these are related to the celebration today of St. Patrick's Day. Who or what St. Patrick was is scarcely relevant to the fact that it gives us all a chance to wear or consume green. But it is also the day on which I aspire to be planting my first crop of the year. I didn't quite make it today because my vegetable garden is still a little too "mudlucious" (apologies to e.e. cummings). Since it was in the mid-60s today, I'll see tomorrow whether I can cultivate a row of soil and sow some lettuce seeds. Some years I have been able to do this on St. Paddy's day. I cover them with row cover and after the obligatory late March snow storm, I find little lettuce seedlings smiling up at me. It means we can enjoy early salads.

I think every human being must notice and rejoice in spring. But to a gardener it is truly like a universal rebirth. There is nothing to make the heart rejoice like the first flowers. I found snowdrops and winter aconites blooming under the shrubs on our east border just a few days ago. But what is even more notable is that our plants are preparing to do their work again to make possible human life and all animal life on this planet for another season. Pretty generous of them, all considered. Although I am thoroughly enchanted by the flowers, another important discovery was that the garlic I planted late last fall is sending up sprouts. The garden has begun.

As a botanist, I've studied details of the miracle of photosynthesis, by which plants convert the energy of sunlight into carbohydrate and thus food. Think about it— our entire global economy is based on it. It is the basis of our "growth strategy"—without a continual energy input, nothing we recognize would exist. And though this process varies in some qualities within organisms that practice it, it always requires chlorophyll, where the actual energy capture occurs. And that is green.

It is surely not an accident that many ancient religions made spring into a special event. And many of them celebrated the green. Most notable of these were perhaps the Druids. From my extensive reading of the literature— er, that's the English mystery novel literature—I know that the Green Man is still regarded as a mythical figure in some English recreations of rituals.

The "mystery religions", secret societies that celebrated the renewal of life, often through the rebirth of a dead god or emissary, have often been cited as the precursors of Christianity. Of course this has been controversial but many Christians, including Martin Luther King, have taken the trouble to rebut this concept. As one of these explained, "The annual vegetation cycle was often at the center of these cults. Deep significance was given to the concepts of growth, death, decay and rebirth." It might be noted that we of the Christian tradition celebrate Easter in the spring, with eggs a symbol of new life. Zorastrianism, another religion sometimes credited as a predecessor of Christianity, made the first day of spring as the beginning of the New Year. Persians (Iranians) still celebrate this festival, called Nowruz . Though they are mostly Moslem now, this ancient Zorastrian holiday (at the spring equinox) is very important in Iran, and is celebrated among other things by having a bowl of wheat, lentil or barley sprouts on the table, as well as an egg for everyone.

My own belief is that all of these rituals and celebrations indicate a deep understanding that those first green sprouts of spring mean that the universe will continue, the plants will bring it to life around us, and we will also persevere, by grace of the green. Lift a mug to it, if you will.