All about kale: the evolution of this popular green
As a child, I remember the collective belief that kale was only good for cattle and that if anyone were idiot enough to want to eat it, it would be a miserable experience. Difficult, bitter, unpalatable and does not improve with habitual cooking.
Before I could afford to pay for my own dinner, Italian chefs began testing the conservative British palate with something called cavolo nero – literally translated as “black cabbage” – a type of kale.
Kale around the world: different varieties
I was curious about this elegant Italian variety with slender, striped, obscure leaves. In the 1980s, cavolo nero was a garden rarity. It was really tasty, straightforward to grow and survived the worst that a British winter could throw at it. But was this the only kale worth eating?
Italians will undoubtedly hate me for saying this, but of all the wonderful vegetable varieties native to this country, cavolo nero is by far the least compelling.
I don’t give him a place in my garden, preferring the many other delightful and tastier varieties I have discovered over the years.
Americans bred their own delicious types, which they called collards, from the English word colewort meaning “cabbage”. A staple of Southern U.S. cuisine, savoy cabbage sprinkled with vinegar is my kind of food. One that I grow regularly is wonderfully called Georgia Southern Collard.
Asparagus kale: a great brassica
While traveling in the former Soviet Union, I quickly became familiar with many different Russian varieties. Unlike the narrow-leafed and almost cylindrical cavolo nero, Russian kale came in red and green, with gigantic, serrated and pleated leaves. Canadians also had their own variations. Then, in the mid-1980s, I discovered collard greens.
This wonderful brassica, bred in Scotland in the tardy 19th century, was so named because the flowering shoots that appear in spring can be eaten blanched, like asparagus. Delicious. But for me the real joy of this variety is its abundance of tender, pale green leaves, which are best picked in tardy winter and sautéed with garlic.
Other types of British kale
Since then, I have been a fan of asparagus kale. This isn’t the only brilliant British kale. Another variety is Ragged Jack, so named because of its deeply serrated, obscure green leaves. Not cultivated commercially for over a hundred years, it survives at Tunley in Somerset, where it was known as Tunley Greens.
Another local variety is Black Jack from Tiverton in Devon, although in the 1970s the breeder apparently kept this crop to himself as I never came across it when I lived in the area.
Off One’s Kale: The Kale Revolution
Maybe because of the cultural aversion to kale in the UK, in the Scottish vernacular “don’t eat kale” means not to eat it. However, kale’s mixed public image has not stopped it from becoming a staple of Scottish cuisine. Curly varieties of kale are also known as ‘Scotch kale’ and for centuries there was almost no meal in Scotland that did not include kale soup.
The American botanist Edward Lewis Sturtevant (1842–1898), in his seminal work Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, completed in 1887, describes a traveler in Scotland named Ray who wrote in 1661 that “people used much icing made from wort coal, who call him keal.6
Kale was so ubiquitous that it became not only the generic name for kail soup, but also the pot in which it was cooked. Even the greatest Scottish poet, Robert Burns (1759–1796), wrote about it. the importance of this vegetable in helping the love intentions of teenage lovers in his poem Halloween.
Contemporary kale: a foodie favorite
Nowadays, more and more gourmets love kale, some even see it as a “superfood” and eat the sprouted seeds or make dazzling green smoothies from the leaves, which are apparently intended to provide them with endless benefits.
For some, the obsession with this once-despised vegetable includes eating kale chips with lots of salt. I can’t think of any other vegetable whose image has changed so much recently.
Notes
6. Edward Lewis Sturtevant, Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, ed. UP Hedrick (Geneva, NY: Recent York Agricultural Research Station, 1919), https://www.swsbm.com/Ephemera/Sturtevants_Edible_Plants.pdf.