Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

"Old age is not for sissies," said Bette Davis. It certainly isn't. The knees fail, the memory fails. We're not what we used to be. But what was that, exactly? What were we, in the first place, that we've changed from--grown out of or into? It's an endless quest, this trying to find the essence of ourselves. Or of anything, really.

In high school, I liked a band called the Cowboy Junkies. I especially liked a song they sang called Sweet Jane. I didn't know theirs was a cover until years later, when I heard the original Sweet Jane, by Lou Reed. I can't say I liked the original. If we think of covers as the expression of what each artist sees in a song, well, I liked what the Cowboy Junkies saw. I liked the essence they chose to draw out of Lou Reed's piece.

 

I no longer have strong opinions about this particular song and its covers, but covers, generally, fascinate me. They say so much about what we think it's okay to emphasize, to keep or to change. They tell all kinds of stories about what we think is good, what we think is real or authentic.

 

Maybe covers fascinate me because I don't tend to follow recipes too closely. I like to get ideas from other people's cooking, but I modify their recipes based on what I think is the "essence" I'd like to draw out of the recipe or its ingredients. 

 

And so, when I saw Maangchi's recipe for cold salad with spicy mustard sauce, I liked her idea of using Asian pear but decided I had something else that would do the trick: kohlrabi. The flying-saucer look-alike of the cruciferous vegetable family, kohlrabi tastes like a cross between a granny smith apple and a salad turnip. All set, I thought, I've got this recipe covered. (I should have known one cannot make bad puns like that with impunity.)

 

I'm used to buying small kohlrabi--an inch or two in diameter--at the farmers' market. Probably, this salad would work well with such very small, very fresh young things. I had something else at hand this time. Boston Organics brought a behemoth: a bigger-than-a-big-grapefruit-sized kohlrabi that had clearly been grown for winter storage, not fresh eating. This behemoth is not for sissies. Not for salads, either. At older stages in its life, I discovered, the vegetable develops an over-cooked cabbage flavor and a slightly spongy texture. 

 

At first I was disappointed. I fixated on how to bring the behemoth back to some semblance of its youth. (What could I possibly add to the salad to get that thing crispier?) Then I realized I was doing it an injustice. I have little patience with people who can't accept their own aging; why should I inflict that worldview on a kohlrabi? 

 

Here is the other way that old age is not for sissies: aging challenges us not only to accept and make the best of what we have at any given time, but also to accept that what we have--our essence, if you like--at any given time differs from what we may have had at another time. What we did to bring out our best at one point in life may not work at another, because we have a different best. Sounds so obvious, but it isn't that easy to do.

 

Musicians, especially vocalists, meet these challenges with varying degrees of grace. Here are the Cowboy Junkies performing Sweet Jane in 2011. I'd say they're not dealing well with their own aging. The arrangement of this version makes me feel the band's trying to be more like a young Lou Reed, here, than they did when they had the oomph and the edge to pull that off. *

 

Here is a no-longer-young Lou Reed performing Sweet Jane.  This has to be the most un-Lou-Reed-like performance I've ever seen from Lou Reed, possibly because he seems so true to himself. 

 

No-longer-young kohlrabi, I discovered, works well cooked lightly with fresh lotus root and a little sesame oil. Something about that combination brings out the best in each of the vegetables, just as they are.

*not to imply that aging entails loss of oomph and edge, every time