Let us now praise kohlrabi

Walking the walk is hard. It’s one thing to advocate buying and eating local but its quite another when confronted with purple kohlrabi.

Before going further, the kohlrabi was delicious.

I ate my first kohlrabi this weekend, grown by a couple of young, organic farmers. It arrived in a waxed cardboard box along with a slim selection of lettuce, spinach, potatoes, broccoli and spring onions. We’re splitting a CSA share with two neighbors. Our third yielded a single, generous meal.

Community Supported Agriculture is a small grower risk-mitigation, sustainable agricultural model. It is informed by the cooperative movement, but generally speaking, CSA farms aren’t co-ops. CSAs seek a stronger producer-consumer relationship. The growers build a market while consumers receive a steady supply of high-quality produce.

It’s sort of capitalism, version 2.0. CSAs will never run Cargill out of business but they have their growing niche.

The wet, cool spring has been tough on all farmers, small and large. Southeastern Minnesota has been particularly hard hit. The CSA risk-mitigation model means reduced produce bounty for my neighbors and me.

While I’ve known about CSAs for years, culturally, I come from farming’s big commodity side. My folks grew corn and soybeans not organic row crops. But, as I thought this one through, I realized that I’m only a generation removed from the model that small organic growers embrace. Growing and eating locally is not a new idea. In fact, it’s as old as agriculture.

Sixty years, my grandparents ate kohlrabi and whatever else was in season. What they didn’t consume, they preserved, usually in jars. It sustained them until the following summer.

“Canning,” the colloquial term for preserving food in jars, loses its considerable romance in reality’s sweaty red face. Canning requires boiling water to distill and seal jars, typically during the summer’s hottest months. It’s hot, hard work.

My grandparents didn’t can on a lark or to preserve a food pathways cultural tradition. No, they canned so that they could feed themselves and their families and still make the farm mortgage payment. I can close my eyes and taste my Grandmother Dorothy’s sweet pickles but I’m not falling all over myself to carry on her tradition and put up two hundred jars.

I will however eat fresh kohlrabi.

Kohlrabi is one of those mysterious vegetables. Light green or purple skinned, hiding firm white flesh, is a brassica family member like cabbage and broccoli. Originally from Northern Europe, it’s thought to be a turnip/cabbage cross.

High in Vitamins A and C, both leaves and bulb are edible. It can be steamed, roasted, or shredded and eaten raw. Respected chef and cookbook writer Deborah Madison, in her seminal work, Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, observes that whatever works with turnips will also work with kohlrabi.

The other night, I peeled the bulb, julienned and steamed it for five or six minutes. I tossed the kohlrabi sticks with a generous dollop of sour cream, two or three teaspoons of prepared horseradish and a bit of dill and salt.

Why, I asked my wife between mouthfuls, didn’t we start doing this earlier?