Puntarelle is a variety of chicory that is much loved in Rome, and pretty hard to come by everywhere else. I’ve only ever seen it on one menu in this country – you used sometimes to be able to order it at Orso in Covent Garden – and I’ve never spotted it piled beside the purslane and peppergrass at a farmers’ market. But I’m lucky. From November until February, which is as long as the season lasts, it’s often to be found at my local greengrocer – a shop so crazily modish in the matter of vegetables, it once appeared in the pages of Vogue.
As salad goes, puntarelle is a bit of a faff. You buy what looks like a huge head in the full knowledge that the majority of it will end up in the bin. The outer stems, which resemble dandelion leaves, must all be discarded: you’re after the shoots inside, palest green and shaped like tufty, elongated acorns. Each one of these buds has then to be thinly sliced from base to tip, and soaked for an hour in a basin of icy water – at which point, the magic happens. The shoots, previously straight, now begin to curl prettily.
Nor is the end result for the faint-hearted. Not only is puntarelle bitter; it should rightly be served with a fiery dressing of anchovies, chilli, garlic, vinegar and olive oil – though this (other people’s faint-heartedness, I mean) is something I’ve come to worry about only recently. In the past, I’d always assumed that because I can’t get enough of its particular bite – and because I’ll eat anchovies at any opportunity, including on toast for breakfast – I was giving other people the greatest treat when I served it to them. But then, two things happened. First, I heard a programme on Radio 4 about bitterness, and the way it tends to alarm people these days, having all but disappeared from our increasingly bland diets. Second, I read Bee Wilson’s new book, First Bite, in which she examines the early development of our palates, and thus of the means by which we come to like, or dislike, certain foods.
First Bite is a brilliant read; a month after finishing it, I still think of it every time I set the table. But it also made me feel distinctly weird. I suppose I already knew that people are, for whatever reason, growing ever more timorous about food; you only need have eyes in your head and friends around your table to know this is so. All the same, I stubbornly continued to view the world, taste-wise, through the prism of my own palate, which might politely be called robust (this, by the way, is a simple statement of fact, not some tiresome foodie boast). If something made me salivate, I assumed the same would mostly be true of other people. I believed that the picky eaters out there remained in the minority. I convinced myself that most sane human beings simply long, as I do, to eat anchovies. Also, to scoff liver, stinky cheese, cardamom, grapefruit etc.
Wilson’s book, however, suggests that this is very far from the case; indeed, its very raison d’être is to inspire change, to encourage us to believe that tastes can, in the future, become less rather than more limited. Lost in its pages, it occurred to me for the first time that there are not only people out there who fear and loathe anchovies, liver, stinky cheese, cardamom, beetroot, sprouts, cabbage, grapefruit etc, but that they may now be in the majority; that they are, in other words, the new normal. Which makes people like me … what? Freakish, that’s what.
After I put down the book, I sat around worrying. I kept thinking of all the foods I’d pressed on people down the years. That oozing cheese I presented to S. No wonder she looked so pale. And what about that plate of prawns I served to A? Was that why he left so early? My attitude to those who quail at the sight of bloody meat, who timidly cry “just breast, please!” when you offer them roast chicken, has always been a bit impatient. Weirdo! I would think, as my sister blanched at the sight of me chewing the parson’s nose. Now, though, I’m wobbling. I don’t want to be the stoker of dread in the kitchen, the proud bearer of a platter of disgust with a side serving of nausea. On New Year’s Eve, I duly served a bowl of puntarelle – and with it, the culinary equivalent of a trigger warning. “There are roasted peppers for those who don’t like this,” I said. And then, just to be sure they’d got the message: “Honestly, this is strong stuff.” Lifting a hearty forkful to my mouth, I was almost surprised to find that it tasted completely delicious.
