Italian veg - grow borlotti beans and artichokes
by Sarah Raven
Artichoke 'Gros Vert de Laon'
When I was a girl we often spent the Easter holidays in a large, creaky old house just inside the walls of Asolo, the hill town in the Veneto, looking out across the wide plains of the Po fifty miles west of Venice. The smoky, wooden atmosphere of the house, ‘La Mura’, its rickety balcony covered in dripping, mauve, fragrant wistaria and its entrance row of teraccota pots filled with fruit-laden lemon trees are still a touchstone for me of what a marvellous place can feel like.
Just down the road in Castelfranco or Montebelluno, the twice weekly markets were a cornucopia of strange and exotic delights for an English child – big, cylindrical olive oil drums, cut in half and filled with dandelion, rocket - which no one in England had heard of at the time – fennel and cress, all collected wild; globe artichokes, plump with leaves or stripped bare, right down to the heart, floating in bowls of water with quartered lemons to prevent the flesh turning brown; strange spotty beans, with pods of cream and crimson; and bomb-shaped chicories in pure white, tipped acid-green and beetroot-red. The market at home in Cambridge just wasn’t like this.
Until recently, I’d thought that those sparky, exciting kinds of vegetables belonged where I’d first seen them. You could either go to Italy and enjoy them there or rather exepensively buy them imported into classy London shops. But as I now realise, that just isn’t true. It’s perfectly possible to grow in England the whole suite of Italian vegetables, herbs and salads without major effort, expensive greenhousing, or to be honest enormous skill. All you need is a few good seeds that will take you out of the narrow, repetitive trench of Northern leeks, brassicas and carrots. I love these too, but you can buy them anywhere, so if you’ve only got a small space to grow your veg, why not fill it with these rarer delights?
Globe artichokes are incredibly easy to grow and all the varieties I’ve tried are reliably hardy with a duvet of straw or mushroom compost over the crown in the winter. The best way to introduce them to your garden is to ask for a few offsets from a friend with a good, heavy-fruiting, plump form in their vegetable garden, but we don’t all have one of those. I’ve grown mine from seed – three varieties, which fruit at slightly different times to extend my harvesting season. The first to produce is the well-known ‘Green Globe’ which I start to pick in May. Then comes ‘Gros vert de Laon’ an old French form which is my favourite. It has an odd, flat, inelegant shape, with a wide base and a shorter curve of the outer leaves than others. It reminds me of a lotus flower in Oriental paintings in green, not pink. The reason it has such an odd shape is because of the huge flat disced heart in the middle of the flower. The last one is ‘Romanesco’, (also called ‘Purple Globe’) a purple-washed Italian form, invaluable if you’re addicted to artichokes because it fruits very late and is pickable in England into October. Choose this over the other purple - ‘Violetta’ which has dryer, spikier flowers, more for ornament than eating.
We always bought artichokes on every visit to the market and ate them with so called ‘Angelica Sauce’, a roughly chopped mixture of two hard-boiled eggs, a handful of flat-leaved parsley, a slurp of anchovy paste, red wine vinegar and lots of olive oil. You boil the artichoke whole and then strip the leaves ones by one, dipping the leaf bases and heart into a dollop of the sauce. This remains one of my favourite summer things.
What I don’t remember eating are the borlotti and cannellini beans [sic] which must have been dried not fresh in the spring, but I grow Borlotto ‘Lingua di Fuoco’ and they are a big excitement in August and September. Even better apparantly and the one well-known as the king of botlottis in Italy is ‘Lamon’. A bowl of the stippled pods and some shelled beans mixed in is so beautiful, I picked them and had them in a shallow bowl on the kitchen table for much of the summer. The small, shelled beans are a wonderul, pale eau-de-nil which develop crimson splotches as they enlarge and age. I cooked them often too, with some melted red onion and skinned fresh tomatoes, stewing them slowly for about three-quarters of an hour. Once they’d cooled off the heat for ten minutes, I stirred in a good handful of chopped coriander and scattered some Parmesan slithers over the top.
If you have a greenhouse, there’s another unusual crop to add which I also first discovered in Italy, the South-African plant - Cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana). These have taken over from raspberries as my favourite home-grown fruit. They are golden-yellow balls, the size of a large gob-stopper, with a crisp, beige Chinese lantern case hanging around the ball. They have a sharp, unique flavour – pineapple mixed with passion fruit. Grow them inside, like tomatoes, supporting the six or seven foot plants on stout bamboo canes. They won’t ripen until early autumn, but eaten as they are, or even better, one half of the inner ball dipped in chocolate, you’ll want more and more of them. Grow three or four plants this year and next year you may well end up filling a good part of your greenhouse with this wonderfully tasty fruit.
Just down the road in Castelfranco or Montebelluno, the twice weekly markets were a cornucopia of strange and exotic delights for an English child – big, cylindrical olive oil drums, cut in half and filled with dandelion, rocket - which no one in England had heard of at the time – fennel and cress, all collected wild; globe artichokes, plump with leaves or stripped bare, right down to the heart, floating in bowls of water with quartered lemons to prevent the flesh turning brown; strange spotty beans, with pods of cream and crimson; and bomb-shaped chicories in pure white, tipped acid-green and beetroot-red. The market at home in Cambridge just wasn’t like this.
Until recently, I’d thought that those sparky, exciting kinds of vegetables belonged where I’d first seen them. You could either go to Italy and enjoy them there or rather exepensively buy them imported into classy London shops. But as I now realise, that just isn’t true. It’s perfectly possible to grow in England the whole suite of Italian vegetables, herbs and salads without major effort, expensive greenhousing, or to be honest enormous skill. All you need is a few good seeds that will take you out of the narrow, repetitive trench of Northern leeks, brassicas and carrots. I love these too, but you can buy them anywhere, so if you’ve only got a small space to grow your veg, why not fill it with these rarer delights?
Globe artichokes are incredibly easy to grow and all the varieties I’ve tried are reliably hardy with a duvet of straw or mushroom compost over the crown in the winter. The best way to introduce them to your garden is to ask for a few offsets from a friend with a good, heavy-fruiting, plump form in their vegetable garden, but we don’t all have one of those. I’ve grown mine from seed – three varieties, which fruit at slightly different times to extend my harvesting season. The first to produce is the well-known ‘Green Globe’ which I start to pick in May. Then comes ‘Gros vert de Laon’ an old French form which is my favourite. It has an odd, flat, inelegant shape, with a wide base and a shorter curve of the outer leaves than others. It reminds me of a lotus flower in Oriental paintings in green, not pink. The reason it has such an odd shape is because of the huge flat disced heart in the middle of the flower. The last one is ‘Romanesco’, (also called ‘Purple Globe’) a purple-washed Italian form, invaluable if you’re addicted to artichokes because it fruits very late and is pickable in England into October. Choose this over the other purple - ‘Violetta’ which has dryer, spikier flowers, more for ornament than eating.
We always bought artichokes on every visit to the market and ate them with so called ‘Angelica Sauce’, a roughly chopped mixture of two hard-boiled eggs, a handful of flat-leaved parsley, a slurp of anchovy paste, red wine vinegar and lots of olive oil. You boil the artichoke whole and then strip the leaves ones by one, dipping the leaf bases and heart into a dollop of the sauce. This remains one of my favourite summer things.
What I don’t remember eating are the borlotti and cannellini beans [sic] which must have been dried not fresh in the spring, but I grow Borlotto ‘Lingua di Fuoco’ and they are a big excitement in August and September. Even better apparantly and the one well-known as the king of botlottis in Italy is ‘Lamon’. A bowl of the stippled pods and some shelled beans mixed in is so beautiful, I picked them and had them in a shallow bowl on the kitchen table for much of the summer. The small, shelled beans are a wonderul, pale eau-de-nil which develop crimson splotches as they enlarge and age. I cooked them often too, with some melted red onion and skinned fresh tomatoes, stewing them slowly for about three-quarters of an hour. Once they’d cooled off the heat for ten minutes, I stirred in a good handful of chopped coriander and scattered some Parmesan slithers over the top.
If you have a greenhouse, there’s another unusual crop to add which I also first discovered in Italy, the South-African plant - Cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana). These have taken over from raspberries as my favourite home-grown fruit. They are golden-yellow balls, the size of a large gob-stopper, with a crisp, beige Chinese lantern case hanging around the ball. They have a sharp, unique flavour – pineapple mixed with passion fruit. Grow them inside, like tomatoes, supporting the six or seven foot plants on stout bamboo canes. They won’t ripen until early autumn, but eaten as they are, or even better, one half of the inner ball dipped in chocolate, you’ll want more and more of them. Grow three or four plants this year and next year you may well end up filling a good part of your greenhouse with this wonderfully tasty fruit.
