Everything in her apartment seems to be dedicated to it as well. Most of her walls are booked-over with reference texts, and the ones that aren't hidden by bookcases and file cabinets are hung with pictures of vegetables, all done by her friends and family. Schneider's office appears to have been carved out of the kitchen—there's a refrigerator among the bookcases, right next to the legume books. (The magnets on the fridge are shaped like—well, see if you can guess.) Titles like The Gourd Book, Edible Leaves of the Tropics, Just Weeds, Cooking with Sea Vegetables, and Bush Foods are neatly lined up next to seed catalogs and back issues of Economic Botany. On the coffee table are a couple of what look like ornate chair finials but turn out to be a species of water chestnut; they weren't included in the book because Schneider could never figure out how to get them open. "There are so many things I explored. And very few I couldn't figure out what to do with. This is one of them."
She managed to open just about everything else, though. "I have a procedure for every produce critter that follows me home," she says. Working with one vegetable at a time, Schneider went to several markets to make sure she was getting a representative sampling. "And then I'd try to look at it afresh."
First, she cut each vegetable open and created a "profile sheet" containing a basic description and photo. That way, she'd be able to compare her notes with future samples. Next, she cooked each vegetable in the simplest way possible—baking, boiling, steaming—and compared the results of each cooking method. "Then I'd say, 'Okay, what would be the finest method to communicate this subject's vegetable raison d'être?'" Once she had developed recipes, she would give them to ordinary home cooks to test and comment on. "If you know how different slow-baked beets are from parboiled ones, how different beet stems are from beet greens, how different potatoes are when you start them in cold water instead of boiling—" Wait. They are?
"Oh, yes. They have much more creamy integrity."
Some of the most difficult vegetables to work with, says Schneider, were the ones she hadn't grown up with. Not because she found them intimidating, but because her sources tended to provide only traditional cooking methods. "People would say, 'Oh, you just boil this, or you just fry it.'" With familiar vegetables, on the other hand, Schneider found that she sometimes had to pry herself away from her own culinary traditions. "I had to say, 'Okay, now try and forget everything you've learned.' We had such a glut of cookbooks! I didn't want to add to the literature with another sautéed garlic treatment if that's not the essence of the vegetable."
As in the casablanca marketplace, doing research even in Queens was not without its difficulties. A visible outsider with a notebook, Schneider was often mistaken for a health inspector and left severely alone by shopkeepers.
"But if there were mommies around, or grandmothers, I'd try to open up a conversation with a few words they'd know in a language that was likely," she recalls. "Something to show that I was familiar with their traditions. I'd say, 'I've learned a bit about where you come from, and it interests me a great deal. If you would normally prepare this vegetable with dal or fish sauce, do you make it any other way now that you're here in this country?' And they'd brighten up." Over the years, Schneider has witnessed the same reaction when she's lugged vegetables into restaurant kitchens to teach chefs new methods of preparing them. Kitchen workers have sometimes wept to see foods from their homelands; grateful chefs have suddenly remembered vegetables forgotten since childhood. In turn, Schneider has picked up tips she might not otherwise have learned. While chatting with a chef, she might notice a busboy over in the corner preparing his own lunch, or a kitchen worker washing a vegetable in a way she'd never seen before. Lots of this out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye research found its way into her pages.
Using such a variety of sources naturally meant that Schneider had to sift through an avalanche of information. This is clear in the book's very first entry. Amaranth, we learn, is called Chinese spinach by some people. By others, it's called Joseph's coat; by others, tampala, yin choy, callaloo, quelite, quintonil, bledo blanco, chaulai, bhaji, pirum namul…Another font of confusion: conflicting reference materials. When Schneider sampled taro leaves that she had cooked for 15 minutes—the time specified in several books—her throat constricted, her breathing shortened, and she began to wonder if she had done her final test. Turns out that taro leaves must be cooked for at least 45 minutes to break down the potentially toxic calcium oxalate crystals.
"Taro is just fine if you cook it enough," says Schneider loyally. But long cooking does turn taro leaves gray-green, a color many people don't like to see on their plates. Schneider finds this narrow-mindedness upsetting. If there's one thing she faults in a portion of the vegetable-buying public, it's the constant quest for visually striking foods. "If it isn't red or green, and bright, people think it couldn't be good. Most food cooks brown! It's only raw vegetables that look like bouquets of flowers." Another thing that drives her crazy: the produce-sprinkling systems in many supermarkets. "I'd like to bop a lot of grocers on the head and tell them to turn off that pouring rainstorm. It soaks the vegetables to death. It robs them." As a vegetable advocate, she also finds "useful" vegetables a hard sell. A talk-show host once excoriated her for calling jicama useful instead of outrageous. "It has become customary to expect unfamiliar vegetables to deliver out-of-this-world taste," she writes in Vegetables. "People hope to be transported at the first bite or even at first glance. If all vegetables were measured by these criteria, imagine the fate of such modest—yes, useful—earthlings as zucchini and potatoes in this day and age." Which isn't to say you should just dump these earthlings into a pot and forget about them. Even potatoes have their own strong personalities: The Ruby Crescent, for instance, may not be well suited in a salad because it can taste fishy when cold; the Ozette ("narrow, knuckly, with tissue-thin pale gold skin and yellow flesh") is better boiled than baked; the Caribe's "metallic" skin should be peeled.
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