Elizabeth Schneider had been warned not to visit the food market alone. But there she was in Casablanca, and she couldn't resist. She knew there would be plenty of people at the market, and she didn't have any money to be stolen. What could possibly happen to someone who just wanted to do a little research on Moroccan fruits and vegetables? "So I strapped on my camera and took my notebooks," she says. "The market was lovely, and I was wandering around when all of a sudden I realized that I had a large group of people around me. They were an ominous-looking crew—about a dozen of them, all men." Schneider, who is approximately the size of a scallion and whose mien is deceptively delicate, decided it might be a good idea to head for the exit, but her pursuers didn't agree. They closed in—"I was scared," she says—and their spokesman strode up to her.
"Madame," he said, in French, "we have listened to the questions that you have asked in the marketplace, and we wonder if you can help us with recipes." The men were produce vendors, and they wanted to know how to introduce their vegetables and fruits to a European clientele.
"I sat down with them," Schneider says, "and they started bringing out things like feijoa and passion fruit—and earnestly asking questions." At the end of the impromptu class, the men asked Schneider for her address. "And they sent me Christmas cards!" (Also Hanukkah cards, to cover all the bases.) It's the kind of thing that often happens to Schneider—especially since, in her line of work, she's basically the only person on the job. This winter sees the publication of her 800-page tome Vegetables from Amaranth to Zucchini: The Essential Reference, and it's a book that should lead the pack for a long, long time. It's chattier and more anecdotal than an encyclopedia but just as informative. Besides, encyclopedias don't have recipes. Vegetables has 500 of them, as well as cooking suggestions from hundreds of chefs, and 275 photos. Most importantly, it introduces the reader to some 350 vegetables—as familiar as onions and beets, as exotic as horseradish tree and tetragonia—that are all found in the United States. And it provides more than just a handshake introduction: It turns vegetables into friends. It's hard to believe that it was written by a single person.
"At the start of the 21st century, it is my good fortune to live at one of the earth's great vegetable crossroads: New York City," Schneider writes. "A short subway ride takes me to one county, Queens, where the most diverse population in the United States is represented by over 167 nationalities and 116 languages—and more vegetables than those two numbers combined. On Main Street in Flushing, I pluck ivory lotus, fuzzy gourds, and Chinese broccoli from bins as varied as Taipei's. Nearby, on Northern Boulevard, I find fragrant chrysanthemum and water celery in the Korean supermarkets. In Jackson Heights, where Indian and Bangladeshi shops cluster, I gather up curry-scented fenugreek greens and tiny, crunchy tindora. At a bodega one block away, I bag cush-cush yams, sweet boniato, and arracacha." To Schneider, vegetables are one of the best routes into a culture. With this book, she hopes to help the American public go beyond tomatoes and bell peppers. "I want to make these fascinating characters a part of everyday life." You get the feeling she'd like to make the vegetables feel at home, too.
This would be a daunting job for anyone who felt less comfortable in the vegetable realm—which, to the outsider, looks a lot like the Tower of Babel. According to Schneider, vegetable geneticists generally don't really know what's in the marketplace; vegetable sellers don't always cook what they sell; the people who do cook them don't understand how they're grown; the people importing them don't know what they're called ("they may not realize that what they're selling is growing in the backyard under another name in New Jersey"); farmers often know their crops only by their seed names. Schneider may have been put on earth to set everything straight—a task that, to put it gently, she doesn't shy away from. Who else knows the head of the Crucifer Genetics Cooperative personally? (Who else knows that there is a Crucifer Genetics Cooperative?) Who else has 5,000 Rolodex cards filled with vegetable experts and a plant press so that she can send samples to scientists overseas? Who else gets ten faxes a day from restaurant distributors alerting her to the arrival of lemon cucumbers and fuchsia flowers? Who else has a huge mamey sapote tree—grown from seed—in her Upper East Side living room? Who else has a daughter whose first ailment was a rash from eating too much puréed spinach? Who else once had a dog that loved persimmons? Of course, persimmons are a fruit, and so is the mamey sapote, but you get the point.
Schneider grew up in the Italian section of Greenwich Village. Her parents, both educators and authors, were the center of a large artistic community. "Those were the days when schoolteachers could buy brownstones, and we had a garden in the backyard." They were also the days of truck farmers. "They'd bring in their produce from New Jersey. As a kid, I just figured everybody in the United States had arugula in their salads."
Before she began work on Vegetables, Schneider spent 30 years as a food writer. Her produce columns for Eating Well and Food Arts won James Beard Awards. She is the author of four earlier cookbooks, including Uncommon Fruits & Vegetables: A Commonsense Guide. ("I had to write this new book because the marketplace has changed so dramatically.") She's worked as a recipe developer and a produce consultant to restaurants and other businesses. In other words, everything she's ever done has been leading up to Vegetables.
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