The goal with the best kind of vegetable cooking is to manipulate the produce so it tastes all the better while also tasting entirely of itself. This kind of cooking is akin to donning clothes that accentuate your finest attributes. You had no idea that person’s torso was that voluptuous; you had no sense a zucchini could be so green, so soothing.
In her 2015 book, “A Girl and Her Greens: Hearty Meals from the Garden,” April Bloomfield, currently the chef of Sailor in Brooklyn, builds a wardrobe the produce aisle always coveted but never knew how to assemble. The book is a collection of recipes and thinkings that begins with spring dishes and leaps through the year’s seasons, leaving behind a trail of vegetable savvy.
A prime produce example
Near the halfway point of “A Girl and Her Greens,” in the chapter dubbed “Summer, Lovely Summer,” is a recipe for Stewed Zucchini with Basil. Sounds dull, no? Wrong.
Bloomfield models the dish after a plate she had in Rome. “It was the simplest thing, this zucchini,” she writes. Zucchini cut into chunks and cooked until some of the pieces collapse into a lush sauce. Her version replicates that textural contrast, and as she walks the reader through the recipe, you receive a priceless lesson in attentive cooking.
You learn to watch how the garlic browns in the ample olive oil and to remove it if it sneaks past golden. You learn to add salt during multiple stages of the cooking. You learn when to waft in the basil leaves and at which stage to wallop the zucchini with a spoon until it acquiesces, the pointed edges tumbling into a summer-squash emulsion. You learn to complete the zucchini with lemon zest and juice, dried chile and more salt, as needed. Take a bite and your jaw drops. Simple, comforting, inviting: Everything you want from your vegetables.
Lasting kitchen influence
The same coaxing elements present in those giving zucchini appear in different manners across “A Girl and Her Greens.” A warranted onslaught of heavy cream in Bloomfield’s creamed spinach is counterpoised by shallot rings and a load of white wine. Roasted young onions — the kind that are the size of a tennis ball and come with their flowing tops — are dribbled with a sharp, rich pesto made with sage rather than basil. Swiss chard is boiled, stems and all, then sautéed with a finely chopped mixture of garlic, red onion and marjoram. Eat as is, or tangled on toast or, as Bloomfield suggests in an accompanying recipe, as a filling for ricotta cannelloni.
It bears mentioning that Bloomfield fell away from the center of New York’s restaurant scene a few years ago, courtesy of sexual harassment and assault revelations at restaurants where she once cheffed. The accused men moved away and on; Bloomfield had no such luxury. As Helen Rosner said in The New Yorker, Bloomfield is a “chef who, by many accounts, turned her eye away from the monstrous misdeeds of the men who employed her and a person who, after those men slunk away out of the public eye, retreating to the comfort of their money and their summer homes, had to keep working.”
Bloomfield has always been a sublime, underrated chef. It is good to have her back in the spotlight, preparing her staggering plates for lucky diners at Sailor; it is good to still have “A Girl and Her Greens” in home kitchens, evidencing on a grander scale how instructive and transformative her singular cooking is.