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Choux Marin au Parmesan
Ingredients.
One basket of Seakale.
Three ounces of Parmesan.
Two ounces of Butter.
Seasoning. Wash the kale, cut it across and boil in salted water until tender. Then drain and place it on a greased dish in layers with grated cheese and seasoning between each. Sprinkle cheese over the top, pour some butter melted over all, and bake for about ten minutes or until slightly browned.
A gratin of seakale under Parmesan, served in the savoury course at the end of dinner. The whole dish hangs on not overcooking the kale, which turns to string and water if left in the pan.
- What seakale isChoux marin is seakale, Crambe maritima, a shore plant grown for its blanched ivory stalks. It is still sold by a few specialist growers in late winter. Blanched chicory or the pale ribs of Swiss chard behave similarly in this dish, though neither has the same faint hazelnut flavour.
- "One basket"Seakale was sold in punnets or small chip baskets, conventionally taken to be about a pound. Something on the order of a pound of trimmed stalks will serve four as a savoury.
- Boiling timeTender means roughly 8 to 12 minutes for stalks cut into short lengths, tested with the point of a knife. Longer boiling, which older instructions often call for, collapses the stalks and sheds water into the gratin.
- Keeping it paleSeakale discolours quickly. A squeeze of lemon in the cooking water keeps the stalks white, and they should be drained thoroughly and blotted before layering or the butter and cheese will not brown.
- Oven heatBrowning in ten minutes implies a hot oven, somewhere around 425F / 220C, or a moment under the grill at the end. The recipe itself specifies no oven heat.
- The cheese and butterThree ounces is about 85 g of Parmesan, finely grated; two ounces is 55 g of butter, melted and poured over rather than dotted. Use real Parmigiano Reggiano or a good grana, since there is nothing else in the dish to carry it.
- SeasoningWhite pepper and a little salt, applied sparingly. The Parmesan and the salted cooking water bring most of the salt already.
- ServingBake and serve in the same shallow dish, very hot, as a savoury after the sweet course or as a first course. It does not reheat: the stalks go slack.
Seakale grows wild on the shingle beaches of Britain and northern Europe, where it was gathered long before it was gardened; its cultivation as a forced winter vegetable is generally traced to English kitchen gardens of the later eighteenth century, where crowns were covered with pots or sand to blanch the shoots. By the Victorian period it was a fashionable early-spring luxury, sold in small baskets and usually served plainly boiled with melted butter, in the manner of asparagus. Dressing it with Parmesan and browning it puts it in the savoury course, the short, salty dish that closed a formal English dinner and was one of the few strictly British features of an otherwise French-titled menu. The French name here is typical of the professional cookery of the period, when even a beach cabbage was given a French label on the day's bill of fare.