Hi everybody! I am your classmate Stephanie - going by the
initials of -sm and the user name of boxsquat for blog purposes.
For
Observation #1, I chose to do a vegetable that I had never seen or heard of
before. It didn’t come into my life all so naturally though (but how often does
that happen anymore?). I get a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)
box from the Green Grocer every week. Recently, a kohlrabi was featured in my
box. This kohlrabi came from a Nichols Farm in Illinois.
It is about the same size as baseball and its light green, classified as white I
found out by doing research, but I also got one that was dark purple (its now
“deceased” aka I ate it). It is very solid and heavy. The outside is very smooth and waxy,
except for the dried scale parts, that used house little arm looking things
like shown here:
I think kohlrabi looks a lot more like the aliens from Toy Story than it looks like food...
The
word kohlrabi translates from German to ‘”cabbage turnip”. It is easy to grow,
apparently too easy to grow, farmers complain on the internet about having too
much of it. Its flavor is a cross between cabbage and broccoli stem. In addition to eating, some cultures use the kohlrabi bulb with
leaves attached as ornament in their homes.
Kohlrabi comes from Northern
Europe. Kohlrabi didn’t come to the United States until 1806 when it was
brought over by European immigrants. In 1734 the Irish started to grow kohlrabi
in fields – before then you would only find it in small gardens for family and neighborhood use.
I
think the kohlrabi is interesting because we are a country of immigrants and I
like to wonder why our ancestors left some vegetables, took some here, and how
our tastes have shut out certain plants from our dinner tables in the time
in-between. In native cultures cuisine is based around what grows easiest and
heartiest – just like corn, apples and potatoes in the U.S. With kohlrabi we
have something that grows easily and hearty in American soil, yet it is very
rare to find in a grocery store.
-sm
And so how did it taste? How did you cook it?
ReplyDeleteIt is interesting to consider those things we think as "native" being relative to a given history: Corn is native certainly to Central (then North) America, but potatoes (from South America) and apples (from Central Asia) didn't arrive until European colonists came.