Vegetables and Salads

Appears in

Published 1999

About

One of the pleasures of cooking fresh vegetables is having so much natural flavour just waiting to be enjoyed. However, one of the most criticized aspects of British food is our general treatment of vegetables – it’s said that we undervalue and over-cook them. This may have been the norm in the past but it’s certainly not so now, nor was it so, perhaps surprisingly, in the more distant past, with vegetables receiving the respect they deserved.

Wild vegetables, herbs, seeds and leaves would probably have been the most important element, apart from the occasional meat kill, of prehistoric man’s diet. Once cooking vessels were introduced, and after the Romans had brought in several new vegetable varieties, both wild and cultivated vegetables would have been used in the vegetable soup-pottages which were so important in the diet of poor and rich alike from very early times right up to the eighteenth century. Some favourites used were early types of onions, leeks, turnips, carrots, peas, broad beans and cabbage. Possibly this close relationship between the vegetables and an over-cooked soupy consistency contributes to our bad reputation. For many centuries, vegetables were not seen as something to eat fresh, but as inevitable additions to dishes such as stews which were always cooked lengthily in plenty of water.