Someday the Edible French Garden

"Having mastered many French cooking techniques, I was on my way to enjoying great French food at home, but it wasn't until I had my own garden that I could duplicate many of the true flavors of France." – Rosalind Creasy, from The Edible French Garden







It's downright fun to be a newbie in so many realms at once. Like many other home cooks who try their hand at semi-gourmet, I have dabbled in French cooking in the past, taking a cue here and there from Julia Childs (as Creasy had also to begin) and another favorite Dorie Greenspan among several others. There is so much history and depth to the style that as we move through French food writing (I think of Elizabeth David's masterpiece), we see that French culture and French food are often one in the same thing. Add a beautiful language and the luminous Provence, and we are bound to be wrapt by a dream of dabbling a bit more whenever possible.

The edible French garden is a wonderful avenue to get a second look at the underpinning of all those great French recipes. Living in the American midwest, the French edible garden is, of course, not entirely a possibility, but I have always believed that there is a little bit of dreaming involved with cooking inspired from other countries, other cultures. Creasy begins by pointing out three techniques that seem to be of the most importance to cultivating the French garden: precise harvesting, growing baby salad greens, and the practice of blanching vegetables in the garden. And so that seems like a good place to start for the newcomer.

Precise harvesting, she suggests, has to do with the gardener knowing exactly when and how often harvest a variety of delicate vegetables such as haricot verts, the famously named French filet bean, which are "exquisitely tender if harvested when tiny (a sixth of an inch across), but tough and stringy if larger or more mature." This seems like an interesting place to make a quick comparison as we consider our standard vegetable purchasing and usage, which is more than likely dictated by the very maturity that she suggests, and then clumped, usually, into those great bins on the produce shelves at the grocery store. Now I imagine an artful batch, handpicked, tied and well stored, cooked as they should be, and I dare say I would predict a difference in flavor that might be shocking to most eaters of the standard green bean. 'The French go to great lengths to monitor harvesting because they feel that perfect haricot verts, petis pois, and melons are worth the extra wait."

Growing Mesclun Salads has a long tradition says Creasy. This is another word for a Provencal salad that combines many flavors and textures of greens and herbs. "The object is to create a salad that is a concert for your mouth by including all the elements your palate can experience." One can can imagine walking the corridors of the Villandry garden that Creasy pictures at the beginning of her book and picking and choosing that very symphony based upon what looks brightest and most beautiful and that would likely match together well. We see this now with many packages of salad varieties in our own grocery store – the baby argula and spring greens is a good example – but one that could not logically stand up to the creative mixture of the Mesclun. I would imagine that this creative picking is really an another way to get to know your garden and would likely create a sort of partnership that was far more interesting than the head lettuce variety.

Garden blanching is a process whereby the French sort of choreograph the amount of sunlight a particular vegetable receives, also called forcing, and used to actually reduced certain overly strong tastes. These vegetables, she says, are "lighter in color than nonblanched and in most cases more tender. Vegetables most commonly blanched are asparagus, cardoon, cauliflower, celery, dandelions, romaine lettuce, and the chicories, including Belgian endive." We can imagine the process of blanching coming into being by settling our imagination back to a time when it would have been found that some vegetables, although edible, were bitter, stringy, or astringent, but that if they were handled in a different way, placed under some cover, became considerably more manageable. In a way, she points out, we blanch simply because some vegetables are less civilized. For our time, in our grovery store garden, vegetables such as parsips, for example, or rutabega and turnips, are all vegetables that few of us would eat raw, but which when cooked in unison with either other vegetables or a stock, are some of the most satisfying that we can cook with.