Rules and Radishes, Rules and Radishes

 According to my high school Russian history teacher, movie extras in crowd scenes are instructed to mutter "rhubarbs and radishes, rhubarbs and radishes" as they move about,  to simulate crowd noise. I've retained this tidbit through all the years since high school, yet remember nothing of the actual subject of the class. It's not that Russian history is unimportant--it's very important--but, with apologies to William Carlos Williams, so much depends on a red radish. Or a green radish. Or a white or a pink or  a black radish. Radishes matter. So do ideas about how or what to simulate, and what rules to follow to either stand out in a crowd, or blend into one. 

Radishes matter if you follow rules. I am not particularly governed by rules, myself. I follow them when I understand their importance, and have less patience for them, otherwise. For this reason, I'm not usually inclined to follow recipes exactly. Instead, I take great pleasure in going to the farmers' market, buying the best-looking produce, and then figuring out how to adapt whatever recipe I feel like cooking to whatever foods I felt like buying. Except with radishes.

part of the radish selection at Reliable Market in Somerville, MA

Radishes drove me to sign up for deliveries from  Boston Organics last fall.  I wanted a particular type, the watermelon radish. Watermelon radishes are unlike any other radish in my experience. Besides an inimitable hot-pink interior, they have a unique flavor. There's just no substituting for them. They happen to be nearly impossible to find around here after the farmers' markets close in the fall. When I saw that Boston Organics had them in weekly deliveries, post-farmers'-market-season, I signed up immediately.

I stopped the deliveries last week, despite excellent experiences as a customer. I believe it all stopped, just as it started, with radishes.  Boston Organics works a little like a CSA; they deliver their choice of fruits and vegetables each week (although customers do have some choice in what they receive). I was happy to adapt recipes to use whatever vegetables came to me, except for (you guessed it) radish recipes. Even though each week's delivery provided more than a week's worth of produce, I kept buying additional radishes. This time, I wanted Korean radishes--as inimitable, in their own way, as watermelon radishes. I cook a lot of Korean food; I need the right kind of radish. I'm now free to buy them without creating even more of an excess of vegetables here.

Why radishes stand out in a crowd of adaptable, simulate-able vegetables, I don't know, but I realized that they do because of yet another of them. I don't think this one has a specific name in English. It's the 'mooli' in the mooli paratha I hope to learn how to make. I've been making parathe for a while, but, due to my non-rule-governed nature and my habits of adapting recipes, I think it's fair to say that the ones I make are simulations. Now I'm going to learn to make the "real" ones, provided I can find the right kind of radish.

parathe I made with turnip for filling instead of radish

We'll see what happens with "real" mooli paratha. I hope mine will eventually stand out by not standing out--that is, they'll be the way this food is supposed to be.

On standing out in a crowd, and also, not, there's Fritz Kreisler, the outstanding violinist so adept at simulation that his Violin Concerto in C Major (in the Style of Vivaldi) was taken for a "real" piece composed by Vivaldi, as I understand, in part because Kreisler knew which rules of Baroque-era composition to follow.

On being rule-governed,  there's something a friend said, after having spent time on the dance floor at a wedding we attended recently: "Dancing with [another wedding guest] was fun, but I can't really lead or follow. It's the kind of person I am." I could say only, "Yes"; that's the story of my life in dancing, too. But then, not being rule-governed is, itself, a rule to live by--and anyway, as radishes are my witness, we are all governed by some rule or another. That universality, plus the individual rules we follow, make us both stand out and blend in.

more radishes at Reliable Market