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.
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.
To be fair, there are so many charming discoveries and startling details packed into Vegetables that it's sometimes hard to keep the usefulness of the basics in mind. The book's whoa! factor (as in "Whoa! I didn't know that!") is exceptionally high. If you squeeze a fresh artichoke, it "protests with a noisy squeak; a flabby one barely mumbles." Bottle gourds, or calabashes, "have served for centuries as protectors of mankind's manhood in the tropics"; an Italian chef she knows has used them as life preservers. Morels are called molly moochers in the Appalachians. Red-in-snow mustard is actually green. The pink oyster mushroom has a shelf life of about two hours.... Despite its heft, Vegetables is a book some readers will want to keep on the bedside table.
"Vegetables have very specific biographies and significance for the people who love them and grow them and cook them," says Schneider. "They're a wonderful excuse to learn about the world. You can be an emotional and scholarly snoop without interfering with people's privacy. I think vegetables are enchanting, I think they're beautiful, I think they're enjoyable." If Schneider's "critters" could talk, they would certainly return the compliment.