Kale

My Oz pal and her first kale

... is not my favorite food

I tolerate it in much the same way that it does me - a lesser mortal unappreciative of the other's wonder. Why then blog about it?

• a classmate had no idea how to deal with it
• the tyranny of the veg box (CSA)
• I am a notoriously anti fad-food foodie

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I always wanted to like the member of the brassica family called kale. My mother from Galway talks of many greens, the Irish love them. But the culinary approach in the 1950-60s was to boil them until the cellular structure gave up. Broccoli jus was an overcooked, homemade, green sludge long before it was a trendy, locavore restaurant item. Kale seemed different: long stems of dark velvety green almost black. Just before I left Britain I discovered cavolo nero (USA: lacinato or dinosaur kale) and despite the look of cabbage, it tasted really quite good. Of course this may have been the Italian soup La Ribollita more than the kale. Ursula Ferrigno, a wonderful food writer, would have cavolo nero in her bridal bouquet because of its color and elegance. Nigel Slater, another favorite food writer, opens his kale chapter in Tender with: "From a distance, huge undulating pillows of green and dusky blue." Who could not adore this creature?

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I refer you to the excellent Wikipedia site for the history, cultivars and nutrition details. Kale was loved by the Romans and Greeks, used throughout Europe from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean since the 4th century, and then fell out of favor until the last decade.

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What does kale mean to people? I emailed friends across the globe and the essence of their experience is that those under 45 had never heard of it until recently. Whereas for those closer to my age it was more often a parental threat. Historically kale was used to supplement meager diets by the poor. A mother's tale of kale in a sharecropper family (c. 1920): "People just used to throw it in a pot and boil it.  They weren't very imaginative.  Of course they were busy, they were tired, and they had just come in from the fields and didn't have the energy to get creative... like most poor folk's food it's inedible but you ate it because it was good for you and it was all there was."

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Currently it is a "superfood": nutritious but perhaps a passing fad (Broccoli vs. Kale). I received guilty confessions: "I've tried my best to like kale...  that deep green has to be good for me..." and surprises: "Tried it because it's good for you and found it to be tasty." It is nutritious in the way most green leafy vegetables are but has risks (goitrogen). My favorite caution (from a kale-ophile no less): "Let's be honest, it's no tomato."

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Kale has become a symbol at a grand level such as the name for a wholefood forum (Kale U - seriously?) and for those hoping to improve the health of a nation (Kale heroes). At a personal level is it like buying fairtrade/organic/small farm coffee - a message about my values? But think on... what does it signify for others, not a marker of modern cool but a reminder of hard times?

Tamed

For me perhaps I have finally found a way to obviate the tyranny and instead of my differential consciousness approach whereby I used to feed it all to my husband with mustard...

I can grow my kale, admire its beauty, and eat it.

Class Cavolo Nero from potluck, I used 2 bunches of what American's call Dinosaur kale but only one quantity of dressing. And yes I really massaged this by hand What we actually ate

Voila! Massaged kale salad

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Weblinks:
Cavolo nero is not just kale
Bringing Italy Home by Ursula Ferrigno
Tender vol I A cook and his vegetable patch by Nigel Slater
Nigel Slater autumn recipes
How to massage kale 
Kale are a people
Food thoughts from a family blog 
The CSA Farm we use 

Thank you to all those who sent me stories, photos and recipes - sorry I could not post all your thoughts in my limited space.