Ratatouille from Provence, savour the taste of harmony
Editor's note:
A while back there was a news report saying that onion production in the Pingtung area was down this year, yet prices had not risen. The onion farmers said, "If we can just avoid a loss this year, we'll thank our lucky stars!" Whenever the falling wind blows across the Hengchun Peninsula, it is also the onion harvest season. Onions are still available right through July and August. The season is just right and the onions are at their sweetest, so let's all eat onions together.
Onions are rich in vitamin B and C, as well as calcium and phosphorus, and also contain sulfur compounds and flavonoids and other antioxidants, which help boost immunity and prevent bone loss and arteriosclerosis. Domestic onions are less pungent than imported ones, with a finer texture, better mouthfeel and higher sweetness, making them suitable for cold dishes, soups and stir-fries alike.
In addition, onions store well and can be cooked at any time, making them the best choice for busy office workers. Just check that the onion looks intact, with smooth skin and no cracks or rot; after buying, keep it in a cool, ventilated place and keep it dry to maintain freshness.
If you want to buy organic onions, you can ask at these two places:
Pingtung Environmental Protection Union: Phone 08-7370922. On the market next week, order at http://www.greenff.com.tw/
Xuri Organic Farm: Phone (08) 889-1383. 35 yuan per jin, available in 15-jin and 33-jin packs
The onion season has already begun. NewsMarket invites everyone to come eat onions and write about onions, and share your "onion story" with us. It could be a dish, a vendor at the market, a childhood memory... If you are not yet used to how the new platform works, here we tell you how to upload your article in the simplest way.
For the first post in our onion series, we have invited Miru to make us a delicious onion and vegetable dish - Provence stew, Ratatouille
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As early summer approaches, the market grows more and more colorful, and the appetite cheers up along with it.
When you see plump purple eggplants, green zucchini, red tomatoes and yellow bell peppers arranged together at a stall, you feel you should buy them and make this dish - Provence stew, Ratatouille. Actually, this is the mother's dish in the movie "Ratatouille" that moved the picky food critic to tears.
Ratatouille is a country dish, the kind of mixed stew made when vegetables are in abundance, gathering the sweetness of all kinds of vegetables and fruit and reducing it through slow stewing. To make this vegetable-based dish, the basic ingredients are zucchini, tomato, bell pepper, eggplant and onion, and these vegetables and fruits all come into season at roughly the same time in early summer, so you could say the whole garden turns out for it. Farmers who grow vegetables and fruit day in and day out look forward most to the harvest, but they also worry that they cannot use up the yield all at once. Throw all the ingredients into the pot in generous, unmeasured amounts and stew them, and you get this kind of richly flavored country dish.
Sometimes a dish is invented this way because of the time and place, and sometimes a dish's history is created by the migration or invasion of cultures; the history of food is in fact also a history of the rise and fall of cultures. Just like this stew: the distinctly flavored tomato, the mild eggplant, and the rather characterless zucchini stewed together for a long time blend into a mellow flavor, and it is hard to say which vegetable deserves the credit, yet each ingredient contributes its own content and flavor, and the heat extracts the sweetness.
In Ratatouille we also see the flavor of another kind of cultural fusion.
Zucchini, also called summer squash, comes from the Americas. It looks like an overgrown pumpkin, but inside it is full of moisture. Of course it is still a kind of pumpkin, just with a different texture. Bell peppers first came from tropical America or the West Indies.
The tomato, common in Europe, first came from South America, and at first everyone thought it was a poisonous fruit and did not dare eat it.
The onion, utterly indispensable to European cooking, comes from Central Asia, and nearby India is the original home of the eggplant.
None of these ingredients originated in Europe, yet Europe produced a Ratatouille, and today Ratatouille is a dish that represents the French countryside. Without zucchini, without tomato, without onion, the European table as it is now could probably never have come to be. Without the introduction of these ingredients, European cooking would be so much dimmer. The discovery of the Americas brought tomato, zucchini and bell pepper to Europe; European culture powerfully dissolved Native American cultures, but the vegetables and fruits of the Americas powerfully conquered European stomachs, and imperceptibly Europeans lost most of the foundation of their traditional foods.
When Ratatouille came to Taiwan, eggplant, tomato and onion were all common vegetables and fruits in the early days, and now zucchini and bell pepper are grown here too, so when you make this dish at the table, all the ingredients can be produced in Taiwan. Yet what comes out is a French country dish. So where exactly does this dish belong?
Recently, we have also begun to notice signs of Eastern culture gradually entering the West. Although Eastern culture is no longer unfamiliar to the West, it has always been at the level of appearances. Western culture has been in a dominant position for too long, so it has not let the East understand it deeply enough; and only when something is understood deeply enough can one grasp it better. But is dominance a good thing? Dominance also means not seeing weaker cultures, and therefore having no chance to understand them well. Once a weaker culture has absorbed enough, it can grow strong enough to become dominant, just like the rise of the East today.
Food is history, and culture is the trace of life. Eating it and filling your belly may seem plain and certain, but you are also eating culture, chewing it and dissolving it into your days. The days pass one by one, and change goes on meal by meal. This is like the character of stew: a gentle flame and a slow simmer reach the inner texture and deepen the flavor.
