Connections: Flavor of the Month
Even though I don’t consider myself particularly susceptible to trends in the kitchen — I never did get into sriracha, for example — I am, like all of us, susceptible to flavor fads. I’ve cooked my way through the great goat cheese glut of the 1980s, and the mania for sun-dried tomatoes. I can remember the days before balsamic vinegar, and the decades when we all called it just plain old coriander instead of cilantro.
Lately, what we’ve been cooking with a lot is fennel. Like anise, fennel has a licorice tang, which suits me just fine. I love real licorice, enjoy licorice tea, and have been known to buy licorice candy at the movies, just because the package says “licorice,” even though I know full well that that stuff isn’t actually licorice but is sweet junk and mainly corn syrup.
The other day, when nothing had been planned for dinner, I devised a dish of chicken sausage from Iacono Farm with onions and fennel, and it came out with high marks. I started by sautéing chopped onion in a little olive oil, which 9 out of 10 recipes seem to start with, then added the sausage. After it had been broken up and thoroughly heated, I added quite a lot of fennel, which had been cut into long slices. It was a swell meal, and there was hardly any effort involved. To gild the lily, we sprinkled some fennel seeds on it, which made ultimate sense since a jar of fennel seed has been sitting in the pantry for so long that I don’t recall why it was there.
I’m not sure why I haven’t used fennel much until recently. Culture, I guess. Fennel was not familiar to my grandparents, its having been a perennial in the Mediterranean region of southern Europe rather than the countries from which they emigrated. I vividly remember my grandfather complaining about his wife’s cooking, however, which he would say amounted to “zip.” She could have used some fennel!
In the words of the Indian writer Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, fennel “is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people . . . smelling of changes to come.”
That’s very poetic, and if I use my imagination I do think I know what she means, but I prefer this explanation of its appeal from East Hampton’s own food guru, Ina Garten: “In the summer you want fresh, light, and sort of quick things; in winter you want things that are comforting, so your body really tells you you want to go towards potatoes, apples, fennel, things that are warm and comforting. And loin of pork.”
The internet says that in medieval times fennel was employed, together with St. John’s wort and other herbs, to ward off witchcraft and other dark influences. It was supposedly hung over doors on Midsummer’s Eve to keep away evil spirits.
I’m not sure that source is particularly reliable (isn’t that what they said about garlic?), but I do know that fennel is good for what ails us. Have you tried it with pork chops?