The land of overcooked green things

The other day in class Patricia was cooking green beans for a dish. She brought one over to me. "Is this done?" I tasted it, and it was just at that spot I love: a little crunchy, but no more raw taste to it. Bright green, it tasted like summer and I helped her pull them out and shock them in an ice bath.

About five minutes later Chef started asking who had done the green beans. I presumed he wanted to praise that person for her excellent timing in making sure that they were cooked to perfection. Apparently not.

"These are still raw! Where's the cooking water so we can put them back in?" Patricia defended our decision by explaining that the green beans were going to get re-heated and thus cooked more when we added them in to the next step. Chef looked at her strangely and told her to cook them for at least another four or five minutes. She smiled, "better undercooked than overcooked, right?"

Well I have come to the realization that in Italy that isn't true, because I have seen so many green things be abused and overcooked until all nutrition, flavor, and color has been leeched out of them. I have admired the Italians' respect for products in every department except the one of things which are green.

I've seen the chefs at school do it over and over, and my host mom does it every time she cooks anything leafy. Now, there is a Tuscan dish called "rebollita", which means "re-boiled", where you take a soup of spinach, kale, chard, celery and some other flavors, eat the soup with bread, soak the bread in the soup overnight as a thickener, and re-heat it the next day as a kind of stew you eat with a fork. I understand that when you reheat those things they will get overcooked, but that's the point in this case. However I don't understand the point of overcooking them on round 1 as well! I've started to term it an official philosophy of Italian cooking. Whenever I see something overcooked (for example we overcooked otoro tuna the other day--so painful to watch!!) I just remind myself of the Green things philosophy. Which doesn't make the slaughter any less painful, but at least lets me categorize it as a cultural difference.

I guess the main point of this post is that cultural relativism is not always a good thing--sometimes they're just wrong!!

In other news, now that I've now learned how to embed videos, I'm going to have fun with its awesomeness for a bit. Check out my sister and her show!