Boiling

Boiling is the most commonly used and abused method of cooking vegetables. How can we forget the limp, colourless, flavourless cabbage that we were served for school dinners (although at my school they favoured butter beans and lentils and my school dinners were by and large good), or the still-common practice of cooking sprouts until they fall apart? If you boil vegetables correctly, they can still retain their colour and nutritive value. There are two schools – or should I say universities? – of thought. Some people add the prepared vegetables to a large pan full of rapidly boiling water; others to just a little boiling water. Certainly the more water used, the faster the vegetables are heated and cooked, and the faster a vegetable is cooked, the more the colour and texture are preserved. This is especially true of the more delicate varieties. The home economist/health argument is that the smaller the amount of liquid used, the greater the retention of the nutritive value. My argument is that I will nearly always use my precious vegetable water to make a stock or gravy, so it is not lost after all. Green vegetables should be boiled uncovered so that they don’t go grey and mushy but stay fresh and green.