Not Rocket science

Tim and I rely on salad in the summer months to supply us with a good proportion of our five a day. So to add a bit of variety last year I planted a couple of mixed cut-and-come-again salad blends.(mesclun): Thompson and Morgan's Oriental Mixed salad leaves and Crispy Salad Mix from Wallis Seeds. Oh, and a row of Rocket. Eruca sativa (syn. Eruca vesicaria subsp. sativa) is commonly called salad rocket, garden rocket, roquette, eruca, rucola, rugula, colewort, and, in the United States, arugula. We like rocket.

Just as well really. The salad mixes both contained rocket. While other things - Mustard Greens, Spinach, Tatsoi, mizuna - showed themselves at first, the Rocket rapidly took over. We ended with a bed full of rocket.

In desperation Tim made Rocket Pesto, using large quantities of rocket. The other ingredients were walnut oil, Dijon mustard and cashew nuts, throw them in the food processor using a basic Pesto recipe as a guideline for quantities, blast to a paste, taste and adjust seasoning, bottle...

This year, no rocket. It's seeded itself, so it can do what it likes. I've gone for lettuce - Gourmet Mixture from Nicky's Nursery - and Marshall's Bright and Spicy Salad Mix. Yes folks, it's fluorescent salad for us.

The Gourmet Lettuce mix is a mixture of seven varieties. Out of ten seeds that germinated (more than enough lettuce for two) I think I have six of the seven, which is pretty good going. My only slight gripe is that the two big red ones (variety Firecracker, I think) germinated about a week before the others, and so got big enough to transplant when everything else was too small. Now they are growing away nicely. Oh, and that's a rocket seedling in the foreground.

Gourmet Lettuce - will they taste as good as they look?

Close up, the shapes and colours are stunning.

Firecracker - now that's what I call a red lettuce!

The Bright and Spicy Mix does not include Rocket in its list of varieties. The big frilly-edged things are Serrated Leaf Mizuna. Probably. The other components are Golden Pak Choi, Pak Choi Canton White, Tatsoi (spoon shaped glossy green leaf), Greek Cress, Mustard Red Zest and Mustard Red Frill.

All the different shapes are fascinating

All but the Greek Cress (bottom right) are members of the Brassica family, which makes it hard to pick out a good range of the varieties in the blend, but if I space out the plugs well and remove the extra Mizuna we should have a good mixture. We'll report later on what they taste like.

Salades

Inspired today by an entry on Days on the Claise to look a little further into the various species of salad green that most English-speaking people refer to as "lettuce" - a leafy, sometimes slightly bitter green vegetable used mainly raw in green salads, but sometimes cooked. I used to wonder at school what happened to the hearts as I chomped my way through lunchtime sheets of clammy green raincoat - that was before the days of supermarkets and their pristine displays of hearts. It's no consolation to find out that the outer leaves are even richer in beta-carotene than the heart.

Pandero

Westerners waste up to 50% of the food they buy and a lot of that is lettuce, with good intentions turning rapidly into brown sludge. Every year, according to Green Oak Buzz, 860,000 tonnes of fresh fruit and vegetables, £1.4 million worth, goes to waste in the UK... By contrast, French salades from the market keep nearly as well as home-grown, and the coarsest outer leaves are snapped up by the chickens, or vanish into the compost heap.

There are three members of the aster family widely eaten as salade.  All three have been part of the human diet since at least the times of the Pharaohs and probably much longer.

Lettuce (lactuca sativa), or laitue, is a quick-growing annual with yellowish green flowers. It comes as roundhead or cabbage lettuce, crisphead or Batavia (iceberg), cos (aka romaine) and loose-leaf (cut-and-come-again) types and many old French varieties are available mail-order e.g. from Simpsons Seeds in the UK or Baumaux in France. We grow a red-leafed mini-cos variety called Pandero, a Gardening Which 'best buy' for flavour and all-round quality. We are just about to sow some more while the maximum daytime temperature is below 25C, because high temperatures deter germination in lettuces.

In ancient Egypt, lettuce was sacred to the fertility god Min and considered to be a powerful aphrodisiac. A nice row of cos-type lettuces features on an Egyptian wall relief dating back to about 4500 BCE. Min has obviously sampled his own produce!

The Romans, by contrast, believed that lettuce promoted morality, temperance and chastity!

Endive (Cichorium endivia) is an annual or biennial with deeply cut leaves. It is sometimes called curly endive and frisée in the UK and is known in the USA as Chicory and in France as chicorée frisée. Beware - there are also frizzy lettuce varieties such as Salad Bowl. On the market stall it is difficult to distinguish curly endive from lettuce just by looking at it. I find endive rather tough going, personally, and I'll stick with Salad Bowl.

The flowers of a chicory that was part of a salad mix.
Knowing what to expect when it bolted, we left it to flower.
It was a good three weeks ahead of the wild chicory that is now in flower all over the place.

Then there's chicory, cichorium intybus, a blue-flowered European native perennial known in France as endive and often sold as blanched buds called chicons or witloof. Easy to remember, yes? Radicchio is an Italian chicory with many colourful varieties. Radicchio and frisée frequently turn up in supermarket mixed salads, probably because they do not crush as easily as the more tender lettuces. Chicory is one of the "bitter herbs" that form part of the Passover meal.