Fennel

Describing the uses of fennel is, for me, like explaining what to do with a tomato. It is a food that I have always loved and do not question. Perhaps it is because I was raised near Little Italy in Greenwich Village that I have always taken for granted this crisp, fragrant vegetable/herb, which I have just recently come to realize is relatively hard to find in much of the country.

In culinary terms, fennel means Italy, where it is served in dishes from hors d’oeuvres through dessert. The pale-green, feathery-topped vegetable, with its celery-like stems and swollen bulb-like base of overlapping broad layers, has been cultivated there forever. Ancient Romans used a number of fennel varieties to generously season pork, lamb, seafood, and beans. So do modern Italians, who still make a fennel-pork sausage as they did in the time of Apicius, and consume large quantities of both seeds and vegetable. The seeds, by the way, come from a nonbulbing variety of fennel currently grown and used throughout the temperate world, while the fleshy sweet vegetable is cultivated primarily in Italy, France, Greece, and the United States.