A story appeared in the newspapers recently courtesy of the Marks & Spencer archive. It was about the way customers had reacted to "new" foods down the years. For instance: avocados. "A lady came back one day to our Manchester store and complained about the poor quality," said Nathan Goldenberg, M&S's first head of food technology. "Because they were called 'avocado pears', she had peeled them, removed the stone, stewed them and served them as dessert with custard. No wonder she complained."
What amazed me about this wasn't so much the cooking method, batty though it sounded, but the fact that avocados were first imported by M&S from Israel as long ago as 1959. Wow. I didn't have my first avocado until 1979 (I was 10) – and it was considered so special a treat that once it was gone, my stepmother stuck cocktail sticks in its sides, the better that she might suspend it over a glass of water until it began to sprout. Once it did, we planted it in a pot. The tree survived for years, though it never produced any fruit. It was about 1985 before we were sufficiently relaxed about avocados to give up this ritual.
Unlike my little brother, who used to store his peas in his cheeks like a hamster – he would then ask to be allowed to go to the loo where he would spit and flush – I always liked vegetables as a child (and yes, I know that, technically, avocado is a fruit; but its savoury qualities are such that I am going to count it, in this instance, as a vegetable). The plain truth is that there weren't that many about: frozen peas, carrots, parsnips in season, and potatoes, that was about the limit of it. At Christmas, there were sprouts. At my granny's, there were spring greens, soft and peppery. Occasionally, there were broad beans and courgettes. In the summer, butter lettuce, cucumber and tomatoes (one size only). It was only when my father got an allotment that I tried curly kale (so hip now, but then so unfashionable it was eaten only by those who wore socks with their Dr Scholl sandals), fresh beetroot, and a potato that was neither Maris Piper nor King Edward (the knobbly pink fir apple). I was at university when I first ate asparagus (I suspect it was tinned). I didn't try butternut squash until I was in my 30s, and I was close to 40 before I tasted salsify (a disappointment).
Over the years, a few hippies, many new immigrants and the influence of a handful of fashionable chefs in tandem with the muscle of the supermarkets, which regard choice as a crucial marketing tool, have brought us a vegetable revolution, of sorts. Where once there was only butter lettuce, now there is cos, radicchio, lollo rosso, oak leaf, rocket, tatsoi. Where once we made do with cabbage and spinach, now most metropolitan supermarkets stock chard, chicory, fennel, samphire, purple sprouting broccoli, even cavolo nero. As for potatoes, we're supposed to treat them with a reverence previously reserved for fine wine and caviar. Close to where I live, a new restaurant has opened: Potato Merchant. Its menu celebrates the potato in all its guises – there is tartiflette, pommes Anna and a posh version of bubble and squeak – and on your way out, you can buy varieties "sourced" from Carroll's in Northumberland and Morghew's in Kent. It's a far cry from Spud-u-Like, I can tell you.
When I was a child, you couldn't give allotments away. In Sheffield, dozens of them stood empty, their greenhouses smashed, their potting sheds inhabited only by mice. They were for the old: men in flat caps, who grew dahlias and runner beans and not a lot else. But now the waiting lists are so long, those holders who find themselves too busy to dig sometimes illegally sublet rather than let go of their plot altogether – the vegetable equivalent, I suppose, of the dodgy things people get up to when it comes to school catchment areas. Meanwhile, those of us with another eight years (or more) to go, turn the smooth pages of Jojo Tulloh's Freshly Picked and Lia Leendertz's My Cool Allotment (no socks and sandals in those potting sheds) and dream of green tomatoes.
In the US, the situation is more extreme. Some years ago, I had dinner at Blue Hill in New York, where the chef is Dan Barber, "high priest of locavorism" and pioneer of the farm-to-table movement (Barber was on Time magazine's list of the most influential people in 2009 and has written editorials for the New York Times). At Blue Hill, vegetables are treated like an expensive cut of meat or a fresh fish, by which I mean that they are sometimes offered to you for inspection before they're cooked; and once on the table, they are the main event, not a side dish (though the restaurant is not vegetarian). I remember the start of the meal – we had a tasting menu – like it was yesterday. A waiter solemnly appeared with a large block of wood. Along the top of it were half a dozen metal spikes and stuck on these, in the manner of martyrs' heads outside a city gate, were a series of impossibly slender, raw baby vegetables: a carrot, a parsnip, a beetroot. They were shining slightly because, as I later found out, they had been spritzed with a salt solution. These fellows were what passed for canapes that night at Blue Hill.
And yet most of us still don't eat as much veg as we should. Our platonic ideal, when it comes to supper, consists of a piece of meat or fish, with vegetables on the side. The idea persists that there is something impoverished about a diet lower in meat – and given its cost, this is true in a financial sense if not a nutritional one. You have only to visit those swank steak houses in the smartest parts of London to see how meat has become a status symbol, just as it was when my grandparents were young. The customers – loud, red-faced and mostly male – are almost as off-putting as the bill. This is food for the big of salary and if salad or other greens are ordered at all, it is, one senses, thanks to a momentary prick of conscience rather than true desire. It's a bit like watching someone leave Hermès with a new handbag, and handing a quid or two to the man selling the Big Issue outside.
Will this ever change? I hope so – and perhaps this recession will help to do the job. Beans are a great thing when you're broke. The queues at my local Turkish greengrocer are much longer just lately, and people's baskets piled much higher. City boys aside, it would be a good thing all round if meat was considered a treat, rather than a staple. But the taste makers – by which I mean the cookery writers and the chefs – are going to have to play a part, too. As Jeffrey Steingarten, the food writer of American Vogue, put it at the height of the BSE crisis: "Steamed broccoli is the root of all evil. I am pretty sure of this." Steingarten's point was that we would all be glad to eat more vegetables if only vegetarian meals were more "sumptuous, seductive, artful, delicious, et cetera". And then there would be no need for the worst excesses of agribusiness (which caused the BSE crisis in the first place).
In search of this sumptuousness, Steingarten went to L'Arpège, a Paris restaurant with three Michelin stars whose chef, Alain Passard, had recently introduced a vegetarian menu. There, he ate a "wide, tender" circle of celeriac paved with chestnut slices, crisply gratinéed, set in a puddle of truffle sauce – delicious, but simple. Passard told Steingarten that steaming is "too violent" a cooking method for broccoli and many other vegetables – a phrase I have never been able to put out of my head since I first read it. It's easy to laugh at the reverence accorded to veg by the likes of Dan Barber, but I do think that if we learned a certain gentleness in cooking them, it would go a long way to changing our feelings about them.
Of course, there are times when vegetables require barely any attention at all, gentle or fierce: a plate of cucumbers, peeled and dressed on a summer's day; a bowl of fresh peas, kissed with butter; a bunch of radishes, mayonnaise on the side. I think back to that first avocado, still unsurpassed in my memory for its nuttiness, its creaminess, its perfect state of green-yellow ripeness. We filled the well left by the stone with oil, vinegar and a little pepper, and then we scooped out the flesh with a teaspoon, straight into our mouths. It seems a shame that avocado vinaigrette is no longer deemed worthy of a restaurant menu, or even a dinner party. Because as with so many basic vegetable dishes – pommes purée, celeriac remoulade, tomato pilaff – when it's done right, it's about as good as food gets.
