Barbabietola

I think I resisted beets as a child because they reminded me of some inner organ, like the liver, a little calcified, at least hardened by maybe cancer, as it sat there, cross-sectioned, bleeding on my plate…bleeding all over my plate, staining the respectable broccoli and even the mashed potatoes, its presence far too vivid and insistent. The taste was too strong as well. I think the beets my mother pushed on me were pickled and too vinegary, the beet’s inherent sweetness also strangely per-fumey, the fumes doing something to the inside of my sinuses and the back of my throat. It seemed utterly duplicitous the way my mother would carve off a little piece of beet-flesh, caught almost squirming on her fork prongs, and bring it so reverently toward her mouth, saying it’s fine, fine if you don’t like them because that merely means more for me.

I think I recall even Beet Gerber baby food, poised on the shelves looking like jars of coagulating blood. I think I recall her dipping the baby spoon in the jar to feed the clots to my little sister. There are very few foods I resist on principle, very few foods I frankly do not like. “I will eat anything that does not eat me first,” I used to joke with friends, because truly my tastes are encompassing and eclectic. “Except beets,” I would qualify. Beets, I surmised, may indeed have the capacity to “eat me first”—or perhaps suggest something that has already been eaten, digested, and converted into something else I didn't want to know.

Then arrived this past summer and the month of July when I was visiting my friend Anny, helping her, when the weather would permit, in her lush garden in Lisores, France. “We’ve got to do something with all these beets,” she proclaimed early in the adventure, yanking them up in great clumps of dirt by the purple stained greens that grew so innocuously from the muddy earth. She’d already initiated me by cooking the purplish Swiss Chard in Crème Fraiche du Normandie—there was a slightly beety tang to the chard, and a diluted bloodishness to the purple that puddled my plate. I did not want to offend or seem too childish in my disdain; I confessed that in truth I did not like beets, but insisted that I would face one, come to terms with one, if she insisted.

How generous she was the night she made red flannel hash to offer to leave the beets out of my portion, cook simply the corned beef and potatoes in a cream sauce for me. I was tempted to allow her to do this for me though it seemed like cowardice on my part and also seemed incomplete somehow, a recipe stripped of its essential ingredient so off-balance as to be genetically defective in a certain sense and liable to do the body harm. No, no, no, I insisted, I would go the distance.

Everyone remembers the Dr. Seuss book, Green Eggs and Ham, and remembers the wordless two pages on which Sam-I-Am pauses before the fork offering his mouth the green eggs and ham. The silence is iconic, the certain adjustments taking place in the psyche of the one who is going to ingest what once disgusted him. I faced a Sam-I-Am moment before Anny’s red flannel hash, but then found as did in fact Sam-I-Am himself—I do, I do, I do like Anny’s red flannel hash; the French mustard and salty corned beef somehow cut the beet-sweetness in a way that made it palatable, more than palatable, even good, even wondrous, even delicious enough that I think I ate the leftovers three meals running, long after others at the table had moved on to duck and certain pates.

I still would not have considered myself a convert to beets. Even having enjoyed Anny’s red flannel hash, I was not convinced that it was the beets that had made the dish for me or that I would ever want to replicate the dish and certainly I did not imagine that I would buy beets on my own and figure out a way to deal with them. This moment of truth arose just the other night as I was following my resolution to eat only locally what I can buy at Antonio’s alimentaria up the street. Antonio is a co-conspirator in my diet and effort to live the politics expressed in so many of the books I’ve recently been reading. Desiree and I drop into Antonio’s daily after giri and he will announce what new variety of epicurean delight he has to offer my day--watermelon, zucchini flowers, a certain golden apple. And then Tuesday, he announced he had fresh barbabietole. I did not even know the word, did not know what barbabietola was, but it sounded promising. In the spirit of my newfound lust for the unusual, for getting past certain cravings and learning to want only what IS…I agreed to a cena of barbabietole and Antonio reached his hirsute hand into one of the crates gaping open near the cash register and did a little Ta-Da as he pulled out the globulous bunch of beets.

Oh, beets, I thought. Barbabietola means beet.

Two beets last forever if you are a single woman. These two were bigger than my fist, the waxy uncooked purple hardly indicative of the bleeding beasts themselves. I spent half a morning on the internet seeking out beet recipes. Borscht and pickled beets seemed most prevalent and I knew I needed mustard on mine, even if the corned beef was impossible given my resolutions and uncertainty that corned beef exists in Italy. It took all day for me to learn how to roast them and make a creamy mustard sauce, but I did, and perhaps they were as delectable as they were less for their intrinsic value as unique food as for what they represented in my quest to live in deeper more open and adventurous ways. I had mastered the beet and rendered the disgusting delectable. Now I could practice with the Buddhist meditation Tonglen—breathing in all that is bad in the world to breathe out only goodness, peace and joy--and somehow mean it in a more convincing way.

How delighted I was to find an email from Anny that night after gorging on the very meal she had somehow made possible for me. It was communion, I told her, a kind of pagan eucharist—how our souls had found each other this day of days that I had chosen to conquer my resistance to the Is-ness of Beet-ness. She’d been trying to call the entire time I’d been seeking out recipes. How wondrous is this? I wrote back. I thought perhaps she believed I was making too much of too small a thing, as usual. But she gets it.