Christopher Kimball: This is Milk Street Radio from PRX. I'm your host, Christopher Kimball. Today it's all about plants, and it turns out they're a lot smarter than we give them credit for. So, if you've ever wondered how your fruit trees know when to bloom in the spring, some scientists believe it's because they remember winter's past

Joe Yonan: The plant is counting the elapsed time of cold to have this sufficient chill factor. And scientists and farmers call this the memory of winter.

CK: Does having a memory mean plants are intelligent. We'll find out later in the show. But first, it's time to talk vegetables. Joe Yonan joins me now. He's the author of Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking. Joe, welcome back to Milk Street.

JY: Thank you, Chris. Really excited to be here.

CK: Last time we were talking about Cool Beans, The Ultimate Guide. And I'll just say it again, everyone should go out and buy that book. (Oh, thanks) fabulous book. So, I love your new book about, thank you Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking. And we're going to get into a bunch of recipes and stuff. But I do have a obviously going to start with a weird question, which, okay, the food world, as you well know, is really into authenticity, right? Everything has to be authentic, although I don't buy that at all, because recipes change daily. But when it comes to vegan or vegetarian, there's no problem like taking, you know, a Brazilian beef stew and replacing the beef with, you know, seitan or tofu or eggplant or whatever. So, when it comes to that kind of cooking, authenticity goes out the window, which is fine with me. I have no problem with that. But how do other people in the food world square that with this rigid approach to, oh, we can't mess with recipes because then they're not authentic? How do those two things live next to each other in the food world?

JY: It's such an interesting question, Chris. I'm actually really glad that you opened with it, because, you know, I write a vegetarian cooking column for The Washington Post, and have for years, and you'd be surprised at the number of people who object on the grounds of lack of authenticity or lack of traditionality when I veganize a recipe. I of course, am with you that recipes change all the time, and that often I feel like the objector is it's almost like people who move to a new neighborhood and they know going in that it's, you know, noisy, or there's lots of traffic, or that there's ambulances at night, but once they move in, they want to change all the zoning in order to, you know, protect what they want. And sometimes I feel like that with recipes, like everybody decides on a certain iteration of a recipe as being the one that is granted this imprimatur of authenticity when, as you know, even those recipes, even the recipes people get so worked up about, you know, the cacio e pepe or the Carbonaro’s, you know, those weren't always the way that they are now, you know. So where I end up coming down is, you know, is the dish respectful, you know, and when I'm doing it, when I'm, you know, quote, unquote, veganizing something like, do I understand the dish that I'm referring to enough to be able to veganize it in a way that pays some respect to the original recipe and, of course, does it taste good?

CK: So, let's talk about the fun stuff. Now we've gotten through the philosophical harass of the food world. Toum, I had this in Beirut a few years ago. I had no idea what it was, but it was high on my list of really interesting ideas. You want to explain what it is.

JY: Oh, it's just the best. So, toum is an emulsion that's made from just garlic and olive oil and maybe a little bit of lemon and salt. So, it comes across a little bit like the way you make mayonnaise, but you don't need egg, obviously, and and you use a lot of garlic, and it whips up into this cloud. This possibly the most powerfully flavored cloud you will ever taste. And for garlic lovers out there, like me, it's, it's just, it's a dream, and I've used it for many years as an alternative to mayonnaise anyway, just because I, I love that punch, you know, like, I've made potato salads where I use a little bit of toum instead of mayo, and it's phenomenal, and you kind of can't believe that it's going to come together, and then it, it just kind of does this magical thing and comes together.

CK: So, I see recipes like this in different categories. One of the categories I really like is sort of, you know, themes, classic recipes like apple pie for example or oatmeal that are variations on something people really know. Well, one of them that caught my eye, because I'm an apple pie freak, was apple pie with salted vanilla sugar. (Oh, yeah) do you want to talk about that because that, yeah, that really, really stuck out to me.

JY: Yeah. So, this was one from my long-time recipe tester Kristen Hartke that includes this gorgeous, salty sugar on the crust, and it just takes the pie to another level. I mean, it's pretty classic otherwise, but she also uses a good amount of apple cider, which I really like, and vanilla. So, it gives it this, yeah, it's just this apple on apple kind of tartness deepened with these spices, and then this just crowning touch of the salted crust. I love it

CK: And by the way, since I am religious about my apple pie, if this is as good as it sounds. I'm going to have to do some Mia culpa on Instagram about this recipe.

JY: Oh, man, Chris, I don't, yeah now that makes me nervous. Your apple pie standards are very, very high.

CK: It's apple, it's just like, it's all so you write about in the mid 20th century, vegan was born the Vegan Society. Where do we stand today? Do vegetarians talk to vegans? Do vegans vegetarians are? Is this Democrats or Republicans? Or do they have an annual together? Or is everybody invited to an annual conference?

JY: Oh, you know, I wish I could say that everybody were invited to an annual conference, but things can still be a little bit divided. You know, I have people when I write about vegetarian cooking, of course, I certainly have some people who say, in a very condescending way, oh, well, you know, you just haven't, you just haven't gotten there yet. You just haven't made your full transition to veganism, like you'll get there like young person, because my diet now is probably about 80 90% vegan. So yeah, I think you're seeing now the biggest growth is of people who don't want to label themselves, but they just want to eat more plant-based meals.

CK: Yeah, I think that's true. So, are there a handful of tips or tricks or quick recipes or things that you could do at home at 5:30 in the evening that would be sort of the top of your list of vegan recipes you like, or vegan approaches?

JY: Sure, so I would say, get some smoked paprika, that's probably my favorite all time spice, and start using that a little bit. And you'll get the idea of what it can mean and bring to your cooking to add these smoky flavors to vegetables. And you can do it with just, I mean, the classic would just be roasted potatoes or, you know, beautiful fried or roasted chickpeas or pumpkin seeds. So that's one. Another one, I would say, is playing around with silken tofu as a as a thickener, and particularly, I'm thinking about the most accessible way is to turn it into a salad dressing. There's a dressing that I've been making for decades that uses one of those shelf stable blocks of silken tofu, really a cup of leafy herbs. You know, the first time i i saw it, and got the recipe for it from this restaurant in New Hampshire. It was parsley, and then, you know, a couple cloves of garlic, a little vinegar, little olive oil, and it blends up into just this incredibly vibrant, minty green colored, almost green goddessy dressing. And it's just delicious. And then you can use it with crudité, or you can, of course, put it on greens.

CK: So, I don't think I've ever asked you, why are you vegan?

JY: Oh, well, you know, it happened fairly gradually, and I was motivated out of a sense of health, I think, at first. So basically, what happened is I, I was having people over for a dinner party, and I was trying to figure out what to make, and I opened my freezer, and I noticed that there was all this beautiful, humanely raised meat that I had been buying from farmers markets for years and never cooking at home.

CK: Great. There goes 1000 bucks, right?

JY: And it sort of it just really struck me. And I was like, what's going on? Wow, I don't really cook meat at home hardly anymore. And I think part of it was also a reaction to all of the rich, you know, eating that I was doing as part of my job. I'm not a critic, but, you know, there's just a lot of rich eating that happens. And I think I was like eating lean and clean at home, so I could eat down and dirty when I'm at restaurants. So, it sort of started there, and then I realized that I felt better.

CK: Did you find your health, your cholesterol, your energy level? Did you find long term health benefits?

JY: Yes, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. The energy just went through the roof. I was amazed. And yeah, I mean, I don't I don't like to spend too much time talking about that, because I don't want people to think that I'm prescribing anything for them, but for me, it's been great.

CK: Oh, I think Joe tomorrow, you should go on Instagram or Twitter and just, you know, evangelize about how everyone should immediately become vegan and see what happens.

JY: Yeah, could I attribute that to you, Chris?

CK: Sure, I get lots of hate mail. Go right ahead, Joe, another great book, Mastering the Art of Plant- Based Cooking. I love it, and congratulations.

JY: Thank you, Chris. I really appreciate your having me on.

CK: That was Joe Yonan. He's the food and dining editor at the Washington Post, also author of Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking. You can find his recipe for toum at Milkstreet Radio.com now it's time to take your calls with my co-host, Sara Moulton. Sara is, of course, the star of Sara's Weeknight Meals on public television, also author of Home Cooking 101.

Sara Moulton: So, Chris is there one thing you wish that they would grow in the United States, that they don't grow, that you just would love to find?

CK: Yeah, yeah, a tomato that actually tastes like a tomato, or broccoli, it tastes like broccoli. I go into the produce sections now and and almost nothing has any flavor. You know, arugula that's spicy. It's grown for the eye, it's not grown for the palette. And so, some of the other stuff from the store is very good. You know, modern supermarket's an amazing place, 30, 40,000 different items, but the produce is, you know, pretty awful.

SM: I agree with you, actually, I really do. But you know what I really would wish somebody would grow and I don't know why they don't. Maybe you do is fraise du bois. For people who don't know what that is, those are wild strawberries. They grow them in France.

CK: They probably charge $100 a pint

SM: Probably, but I'm they're hard to grow, I guess. But they are so you know, they're not, they're dense and such essence of strawberry, they're so good.

CK: How about heavy cream that tastes like something? Yeah, that'd be good.

SM: Yeah. That would.

CK: Well, that was very depressing. Thank you for asking me that question.

SM: No, I want, I'm hoping maybe I'll inspire somebody to grow fraise du bois, and if you do, let me know.

CK: All right, time take call.

SM: Welcome to Milk Street. Who's calling?

Caller: This is Janet Alba,

SM: Hello. Where are you calling from?

Caller: I'm calling from Beverly Hills.

SM: How can we help you today?

Caller: My favorite place to eat is Spain, and whenever I go there, I fall in love again with the tortilla Espanol, and I've tried many recipes to duplicate it. It's always so disappointing. It's not anything like theirs, and I would like to know how to make that at home.

SM: So, let's just tell people what this is.

Caller: It's nothing like the name sounds, (right) It's usually served at tapas, but I think it's such a beloved food into the mainstream, and it is layered egg and potato, (right) Like slices of potato and beaten egg, seems like it would be baked

SM: Right. What do you remember about it that you like so much in Spain?

Caller: It's the flavor and the texture. (Okay) it's delicious and comforting. There's no crispiness. It's just one of those simple things that's so fabulous.

SM: It is. It would be a great weeknight meal here. There was debate about how to make it. Should there be onions? Shouldn't there be onions? Do you boil the potatoes first? Do you fry the potatoes in oil? And my main experience is I was also in Spain in a place called Madrimagno. We were working with a hotel chef, and he made this dish, the tortilla Espanola. What he did is he cubed his potatoes, and he blanched them first till they were slightly tender. So, he used onions, which are controversial, but can be added, and he caramelized and cooked them low and slow. And he did something else which is unusual. He deglazed the pan with wine, and then he combined the potatoes the onions with the eggs and put the whole thing back into the skillet with olive oil and cooked it till it got a crust on the bottom, then flipped it over and cooked it on the other side, then flipped it over three or four more times. So, he got quite a crust. Let me see, are you fan also of the pan con tomate the bread with the tomato rubbed on it.

Caller: Oh yes

SM: I had a revelation, because he also made that. I realized that it wasn't just that the bread was delicious, or the tomato was delicious. What was really, really important was the olive oil. So, in the recipe I just gave you, you could have sauteed the potatoes too, and that would have given you more flavor if you cooked them in the olive oil. But at the very least, use a really, really good olive oil. But let's see what Chris has to say.

CK: Yeah, I got a lesson in this years ago atop his place in Boston. El Toro, so then the chef's a good guy, and the way he did it was, there was nothing crispy, it was very soft, as Janet, I think said, and it had cubed potatoes, but they were obviously precooked, and so there wasn't a lot of browning. There was nothing crispy. But the secret was a lot of olive oil. There was like a cup of olive oil, and he used a carbon steel pan. It was just a massive amount of olive oil. And when he cooked the eggs with the potatoes, he got it going in a circle, so it kept sort of spinning in the pan to cook. But the secret, it seems to me, was the olive oil the potato and the egg. Nothing was crispy, nothing was too brown. It had that very soft, comforting texture. And I think he did flip it in the pan, but you could have put it under boiler, but the whole thing was soft and velvety and rich, and the olive oil just added. The olive oil is really well. It's like, olive oil, like in a tomato sauce. I mean, it just adds that silkiness, you know, I think it's an American cook, you have to get over your fear of oil, yeah, because this dish does not work with three tablespoons of olive oil. It's a cup or two. I mean, it's a massive amount of olive oil

Caller: Oh, my goodness.

CK: But it's, you know, olive oil is healthy. I don't know if that's what you had, but it sounds like I was

SM: I’ve a feeling that's what's missing, is the really good olive oil, and lots of it

CK: and lots of it. And you could do it on top of the stove. He did it in four minutes, five minutes. Yes, very quick. It's a great dish.

SM: You know, fat is a conductor of flavor, so anytime you add fat to a recipe, a recipe is just going to taste better anyway. But if you add a really flavorful fat, like a good quality olive oil, then it's all better.

CK: But in this dish, it's also about the texture the olive oil makes the eggs, instead of being dry or whatever, they're really creamy and unctuous because of the olive oil. So, it's texture here too. So, I'm with you. That's my favorite Spanish dish.

Caller: Now I certainly will try that. I will just hold my breath and pour in the olive oil.

SM: Yes,

CK: Close your eyes and keep pouring Yes.

SM: Okay,

CK: Take care.

Caller: Thank you so much

CK: Our pleasure.

SM: Bye bye,

Caller: Bye bye.

CK: This is Milk Street Radio. If you have a cooking question, give us a call anytime. The number is 855-426-9843, 855-426-9843 one more time, 855-426-9843 or email us at questions at Milk Street Radio.com. Welcome to Milk Street who's calling?

Caller: Hi. This is Roseanne.

CK: How can we help you?

Caller: My question is about green beans. We love to eat fresh green beans, but I have yet to really master that al dente crunch, but without the squeak that I did restaurants. So, I can either get it where they don't squeak and they basically dissolve in your mouth, which are my family doesn't particularly care for, or I get them where they're kind of al dente, but then they're still super crunchy. So, I need some help.

CK: Yeah, we have this trouble, too, and it goes from al dente that is inedible to overcook in about 20 seconds. You're right, and there's that really narrow little window. So, the best way to do it, I do it in a wok, but you could do in a skillet. I would put the beans in, trimmed add some water, not a lot of water, put the top on, steam them for a couple of minutes. Take the top off that water is going to evaporate, and finish cooking them in a sauce, whatever you like, but it's a steam then a sauté.

Caller: Would you add salt to the steaming liquid first?

CK: Sure, you could do that. I mean, yeah, that's fine. I'd add a little bit of salt, or we could just add it to the sauce. I mean, usually when I'm doing it, I'm using toasted sesame oil, soy sauce, mirin, a little oyster sauce, maybe. Or you could keep it drier. It doesn't have to be just a tiny bit of sauce, but with chilies, you know, spices, et cetera,

SM: Or a little bit of butter, or a little bit of really good olive oil at the end

CK: Or those things. Yes, you could do that too. The steaming just gets them pretty much half cooked. Two thirds cooked. And then when you finish it off with a sauté, you have a bigger window when they're done. And also, you can add a lot of flavor that way too.

SM: Years ago, when I was a chef at a restaurant here in Boston, what we would do is we would combine the vegetables, whether it was broccoli florets or green beans or carrots, cut a nice way in a large skillet with water and butter, and we put the lid on, bring it up to a boil, and then take the lid off, let the water evaporate, and then eventually the butter would either coat the carrots, or, if you kept it going, would brown the carrots. And that was sort of a good way to do it.

CK: Steam, take the top off. Sauté season.

Caller: All right, okay, we'll give it a try. All right.

SM: All right.

Caller: Thank you.

SM: Bye. Bye. Welcome to Milk Street who's calling?

Caller: Hi, my name is Jen, and I'm calling from Maynard, Massachusetts.

SM: Hi, Jen. How can we help you today?

Caller: I'd really love to pick your brains to find out some of your favorite go to vegetarian meals.

SM: So, you're vegetarian, not vegan, right,

Caller: Correct and we'll even need a little bit of fish. But that's easy enough for me to cook the vegetarian meals I struggle with.

SM: Yeah, I think of vegetables that are meaty, that could be the center of the plate, and then you could treat, decide to do a starch in another vegetable, you know, like you used to do with the meat. Like, I'm thinking about portobello mushrooms, you know, how about a portobello cheesesteak, or a portobello, quote, unquote burger? The thing about mushrooms is they absorb marinades like, you know, like they're really thirsty, so it's sort of fun to throw a flavorful marinade on them and then grill them, or, you know, roast them. And they're just great. Cauliflower steaks, I don't know if you've done that, when you cut the cauliflower thick, and then you could even bread it and sauté it and put some sort of yummy sauce on it. Eggplant stacks are great, you know, slice the eggplant, brush it with vinaigrette or oil, roast it till it's tender, and then layer it with other ingredients. So that's one thought. Is starting with a meaty vegetable. The other one is to take your vegetables around the world. I think we all get into a rut, even us carnivores. But let's see what Chris has to say.

CK: A few things, eggs, of course. And the Spanish tortilla is, you know, essentially, it's a potato omelet, if you want to think of it that way. I do rice balls all the time. I use a medium grain Japanese rice, which has a ton of flavor. It's about one to one water to rice to cook it. So you have leftovers on top. You can steam or boil vegetables and put those on top. You can stir fry vegetables, and put those on top soy sauce, a toasted sesame oil, maybe a little mirin and a little sugar, you know, stir fry your vegetables and put them on top, and then throw that on top of rice. The last thing I would say is, you know, pickling. You can pickle onions and other vegetables in 15 minutes, right? Heat up two parts water, one part vinegar, a few garlic cloves, et cetera. Heat it up and then pour it over the sliced onions, or whatever you have. Just let it sit 15 20 minutes. And those really go well with vegetables. Something a little vinegary and pickled perks up a meal. And you can keep that in the refrigerator, which I do all the time. I always have pickled onions sitting around

SM: And you don't add any sugar to counterbalance the vinegar.

CK: You can add a little sugar to it if you want. Yeah, I mean, you have starch, you have rice, you have the vegetable, and you have the pickle, and then you could also put some chopped nuts on it, like peanuts or whatever. But those are the things that really go well together. If you think like that, you can make 1000 meals quickly.

SM: Just a general statement, breakfast for dinner. And I don't mean waffles. Eggs are so quick to cook, as Chris mentioned, so frittatas, poached eggs. You could even make them ahead of time, park them in the fridge and then reheat them. Omelets, you know, eggs are just the best, and you can just pile vegetables into them, on top of them.

CK: The frittata is great because you start in a skillet, finish it quickly, in a few minutes in the oven.

SM: Yeah, that's a real speedy one

CK: We even have a recipe where you have cooked spaghetti and you put it in (Yeah) Sounds weird,

SM: Pasta frittata.

CK: Pasta frittata, that's excellent.

Caller: These are really good suggestions. I don't think I'm brave enough for a wok.

CK: I'm going to have to say about the wok. Years ago, I didn't use it. It is the best cooking utensil because you can boil in it, you can fry in it. You can steam in it, you can stir fry in it.

Caller: If Chris Kimball is suggesting I get a wok, I am going to get a wok, and I will report back and let you know how that goes.

SM: Please do yes

CK: Anyway, okay, there you go. 50 suggestions.

SM: Thanks Jen

Caller: Excellent. Excellent suggestions. I really appreciate you taking a couple of minutes to help me out, and it was great to talk to you both. Thank you so much.

SM: Thank you, bye bye.

CK: Thanks for calling

Caller: Bye, bye.

CK: You're listening to Milk Street Radio after the break, are the plants in your garden conscious? That's when we continue.

This is Milk Street Radio. I'm your host Christopher Kimball. In the 1970s a group of researchers found that playing classical music helped plants grow. To this day, many still swear by that practice, but it's not true. While plants don't favor certain genres of music, they are capable of hearing. In fact, some scientists believe plants can think, recognize family and even store memories. For more on the emerging science of plant intelligence, I'm joined now by Zoe Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters. Zoe, welcome to Milk Street.

Zoe Schlanger: It's so great to be here. Thanks for having me.

CK: Okay, this is either, this is either a massive change in our understanding of the world, or it's just crazy stuff. And I think it's the first (I hope so) so you're basically saying that, in short, plants have agency, plants have intelligence. Plants can think they can summon predators, for example, to attack what's attacking them. I mean, these are really amazing examples of research that show that we should think about plants totally differently.

ZS: Yeah, absolutely. Plants have agency, whether they have intelligence. Is the red hot center of this pretty intense debate going on in botany right now, and I've been fairly convinced that by a definition I'm willing to use, they do whether they can think that gets into tricky territory, no neurons in a plant, no brain, but they can certainly make decisions which sounds like it's this kind of like semantic fussy distinction, but probably an important one. We're not sure if we need to be able to think to have intelligence. But going back to examples, yeah, I love that you already brought up this example of plants summoning predators to eat the thing eating them. I think a lot of gardeners will have had this experience of seeing tomato hornworm caterpillars show up on their tomatoes for example. Tomatoes, we've known for about 25 years that they can detect the species of caterpillar eating them, and then synthesize a chemical in their bodies, which they exude through their pores that will then float along the air and be picked up by a parasitoid wasp that will come and inject its eggs into that caterpillar, and the eggs will hatch and the larva will eat the caterpillar from the inside out. So, this is a very slow way in which tomato plants are defending themselves.

CK: You wrote about the ancient Greeks believing that plants had souls, and today, I think we pretty much come around to the idea that animals are a lot more intelligent than we ever gave them credit for. But it's really interesting the way we've opened up our minds to the notion that souls exist in a much broader spectrum of existence, right?

ZS: Right, and of course, we're using the term soul very loosely. I mean more like something like agency or consciousness. So we are, we are in this funny business of constantly kind of expanding that circle of our recognition of what has some sort of animacy consciousness, and really, when you think about it, it's more science sort of moving itself here and there. But obviously none of these organisms are changing in any way. It's just sort of where we choose to frame them

CK: Well, it has massive implications for religion and philosophy as well. If you extend being to a much broader group of things on the planet

ZS: Right, it brings ethics into the into the debate.

CK: Yeah, it does. So, you write about plant basics, and it's so interesting. I love this, the dangers of being immobile. So how does immobility factor into how plants are structured and how they grow?

ZS: Yeah, immobility is this primary evolutionary difference with plants, and honestly, it's given them some absolutely remarkable capacities. So, plants, for example, can incredibly finely sense moisture gradients in the soil, as we all know, but they can also sense the sound of running water, meaning the vibrations that are made by the acoustic impact of water running through something and move towards it. They can sense chemicals in the soil that tell them things like who they're planted beside. They can tell if the plant beside them is a foreign species, if they are the same species, and if the same species, whether they are genetically related, whether or not that is a member of their kin group, very literally, like a sibling, and then behave differently towards them. So, these are just a few of the things, but really their rootedness in place has given them through the millions of years that they've been here, these incredibly fine-tuned capacities.

CK: So, give me an example of you know, in science, you know better than I do. You posit a theory, right, based on observation, and then you have to go prove or disprove that theory based upon field data, etc. So, give me like that's a good example, right? If a plant senses their foreign plants, then it might grow faster, shade out the foreign plants and beat them to it, versus being a better neighbor. How would you go about collecting field data to prove or disprove that theory?

ZS: Yeah, one paper I loved is a paper that came out of the China Agricultural University, and it was about rice. And they were looking at how relatedness of rice lines contributed to how they grew. And they found that the plants behaved very differently below ground according to who they were planted beside. So, the rice, when it found itself planted beside its very close sibling, would keep itself from kind of growing these long noodly roots that would normally try and extract as much nutrients from the area and sort of monopolize the soil nearby. And then as the relationships became more distant, that underground root to root competition increased. And so, this found something that we already know in the animal sciences, which is your kind of allegiance to your kin in a biological sense, how much you'd protect your kin is related to how distantly related they are. And then they put rice plants beside completely separate cultivars of rice, like totally different strangers to each other, and those rice plants competed wildly below ground, and this has implications for yields, because a plant that is putting more effort into growing these competitive roots will have less energy to make fruit, so you have rice yields that go down if you're planting rice with very distantly related species

CK: You mentioned in passing the 1973 book, The Secret Life of Plants, and you said that this really set back the field of plant neuroscience. Why was it? It was popular, but it was full of nonsense or (exactly) inaccurate?

ZS: Yeah, yes. I mean, I'm sure a lot of people remember this book. The impacts of it have rippled out through the decades. But this book was published in 1973 and it hit the popular market. People absolutely loved it. There was a feature film that Stevie Wonder wrote the soundtrack for, and it's a great album, I have to say. But unfortunately, about half of the substance in that book and then the film was questionable or just absolutely downright pseudoscientific. For example, the whole idea of plants enjoying classical music more than rock and roll,

CK: Right, well, that, but that's one of those things that everybody thinks is true.

ZS: Exactly. This is the impact of journalism, or false journalism

CK: Well, is it? Let me ask, does music playing different music actually affect plants or plant growth?

ZS: I don't know of any evidence that genres of music make a difference to plants. We do know plants are incredibly sensitive to sound. The world of phyto acoustics is a booming field at the moment, but they're sensitive to sounds that have ecological significance to them. In an experiment with Evening Primrose, showed that it would sweeten its nectar by three times when it was played a recording of a bee buzzing near it. So sound is part of the world of plant sensing,

CK: Memory in plants you say they have been found a form store and excess memories. What kind of memories? And why do they have memories?

ZS: So, we already know that plants store memories about things like temperature and elapsed time. And anyone who's grown a fruit tree or an almond tree or even tulips know that plants like that need an elapsed period of cold in order to bloom in the spring, and that's because the plant is counting the elapsed time of cold to have this sufficient chill factor. And scientists and farmers call this the memory of winter, or also vernalization.

CK: What are some we talked about a couple of these, but there are other conclusions we come to. Obviously, monoculture is all about yield, but in the long run, that might be short sighted. How would a farmer 50 years from now, assuming this field continues to evolve, how might we think about what to plant and how to plant and how to feed the world.

ZS: Well, I mean, there's a few roads to go down here. One is the idea of companion planting, which is not news to any gardener. For example, borage is known to make strawberries sweeter. And this is folk knowledge, sort of, but it's been shown that, you know, strawberries are able to produce fruit asexually, meaning, by pollinating themselves, or they can do it through cross pollination, using the assistance of insects. And when they do it with cross pollination, the strawberries tend to be higher quality. And what borage does is attracts those pollinators for the strawberry. So, there's all these finely tuned into relationships in plant communities, these cross species relationships that we could afford to introduce, more probably, into our cultural practices.

CK: The one thing we didn't talk about though that I found really fascinating was weeds mimicking other plants. You want to talk about that?

ZS: Oh yes, I am so intrigued by this. So, there's this concept called vavilovian mimicry, named after Vavilov, this agronomist in Soviet Russia who discovered this. He basically discovered that rye was actually originally a wheat plant in wheat fields that was totally inedible, but through the process of selection, through the process of farmers weeding by hand, weeding out rye weeds from their wheat fields, the rye began to take on a physiology that was more wheat like, and therefore more edible literally. Grew plumper fruit, started to take on the shape and the color of wheat, and so now you end up with this highly edible rye plant purely through this mimicking process. And there's actually some thought now that there's this one biologist who believes that herbicide resistance in weeds is actually a form of vavilovian mimicry at a biochemical level. In other words, weeds that have grown resistance to the herbicide sprayed are actually mimicking the crop plants that have been engineered to survive the herbicide. So that's that's more of a thought experiment at the moment, but we do know plants are genius mimics.

CK: So, let's summarize where we are. Plants as you write, can make very complicated calculations about the world around them and then take action of some kind. But that's not the same as having a soul, and that's not the same necessarily as having intelligence, however you define intelligence. So in your opinion, are we going from a system of thinking about the world in terms of you have a soul or you don't, or you have intelligence or you don't, to a gradation of all things, including plants having some levels of intelligence and soul, if you like, whatever you want to call it is just different ways of describing it, different levels of different abilities, but we're all part of the same living concept. Is that sort of where we're headed? Or am I totally off base?

ZS: No, I think you're totally on base. I think intelligence, if you start to think about it as a biological phenomenon, that is an emergent property of evolution, because it's advantageous for survival of any living thing to have some form of intelligence, then yes, you start to see intelligence everywhere. So decision making, capacity, the ability to make a wise choice for your future. That I think, is certainly intelligent behavior. Certain people make arguments for intelligence existing even at the level of a cell, because somehow a cell knows what it needs to do, and it knows that by its relationship to the other cells around it and plants well, first of all, I've just been around for millions of years, longer than we have, and it's not this hierarchy of biological creativity. It's actually just every single weird, bizarre, creative niche that could exist, every example of how to live, has been produced, pretty much, by evolution and is being produced, and each plant is a version of that, and so are each of us.

CK: As always, the world is a much more complicated and a much more fascinating place than we think, and it just sounds like we're on the very edge of a massive rethinking of so many things about plants and about animals and about what intelligent it is, et cetera, et cetera, and evolution as well, right?

ZS: Indeed. Isn't it exciting?

CK: I want your job.

ZS: It's a good job, I have to say

CK: Zoe, this has been one of my all-time favorite interviews. This is just fascinating stuff.

ZS: So, I'm so honored.

CK Yeah, thank you.

ZS: Thank you for having me.

CK: That was Zoe Schlanger, author of The Light Eaters. When I was a kid, folks talked a lot about dog intelligence, their noses being 10,000 times more sensitive than ours, and their obvious emotional intelligence. Then it was onto whales, which have a well-developed cerebral cortex, which may mean complex language, then the octopus escaping from tanks like Houdini, solving puzzles and using tools. But today, it's vegetables. They can sense if their neighbors or family are not changing their behavior if they are and throwing shade if they aren't. Does broccoli think? Does it have a soul? Well, maybe not, but vegetarians, beware what you're eating for dinner tonight used to have feelings. You're listening to Milk Street Radio coming up what coconuts, squid and the mafia all have in common. Hi, I'm Christopher Kimball, and this is Milk Street Radio. I'm joined now by JM Hirsch to talk about this week's recipe, Greek white bean soup. JM, how are you?

J M Hirsch: I'm doing great.

CK: You know, I haven't been in Athens since 1967 but the good news, that's the bad news, or maybe the good news for Athens, you've been there much more recently, and you told me that one of the things you really liked is a winter stew, but it's really not wintery. It's good for winter, but it's very different than what I thought of as a winter stew. So, tell me about this recipe.

JMH: Yeah, you know, it was really fascinating to me, because I think, you know, especially as a New Englander, we think of winter stews as hearty, robust, even maybe a little bit heavy. And in Greece, their goal with a winter stew isn't to be heavy and hearty, but it's to somehow capture at least some essence of summer, bring the summer garden into the winter kitchen, is essentially the way it was described to me. I was working with a very famous chef from Greece, Argiro Barbarigou, and she has spent her entire life cooking around Greece and learning recipes, and this Fasolada stew that she taught me. It's considered one of the national dishes of Greece. And of course, as you would expect, in a place like Greece, there are a million ways to make it, but the essence of it is always to try to capture some of that summer flavor from the garden and bring it into your kitchen in winter. And really, she did an excellent job with it. It's a very simple bean-based stew.

CK: So, this is a non-meat stew. It's a bean soup?

JMH: Correct, it's a bean soup. It is cooked with chicken broth, although, again, you know, if you go to the house next door, you're going to have somebody make it with vegetable broth. You know, it's one of those recipes.

CK: So, I make bean soup. This is a white bean soup, and I just throw it together, right? Like most of us would, what was special about this again?

JMH: Well, you know, it's all about how they start and finish, because, as we know at Milk Street, when you add an ingredient, changes how it tastes in the finished dish. And so, the soup starts as you would kind of expect, sauteing onion with olive oil, and then they add tomato paste for richness, which you brown to caramelize the natural sugars so you're getting a real depth of flavor. And then they start adding the other ingredients, including carrots and eventually beans that cook in the broth. But what's important is, as much as what they start with was what they finish with. And they finish the dish with more carrots. So, you're getting two layers of flavor from the same ingredient. You're getting that sweetness, you're getting a richer version and a fresher version. And they finish it with splashes of red wine vinegar to heighten and brighten the flavors, lighten it up. They finish it with parsley only at the very end to make sure you're getting that kind of summery, fresh herb vibe going on. They also finish it with olive oil. Again, you started with olive oil. Now you're going to finish it with olive oil, and that's going to give it a wonderful peppery viscosity when you whisk it right in at the end.

CK: You know, let's stop there for a second. You know, I've noticed in Italy for a pasta sauce, like the tomato sauce, they always finish with fresh, fruity olive oil at the end of cooking. (Yeah) I started doing that now in copious amounts, I'd point out, because when you cook olive oil, that fruitiness disappears, (right) I think that, just as a concept, you know, fruity olive oil added at the very end for lots of dishes it's really great.

JMH: It's fascinating too, because I think in the United States, we tend to have a very narrow vision of olive oil honestly, we tend to think of it as a cooking fat, right, or something you drizzle in a salad. The reality is that olive oil has, can have, should have a lot of really robust, fruity flavor, pepperiness, if it's a fresh, good olive oil. And you're right, you cook it off when you use it as a cooking fat, but do you want that flavor at the end, and by adding it only at the very end, you can appreciate a lot more from that single ingredient.

CK: So, you were in the land of feta. (Yes) I suspect there's a little sprinkle at the end or something.

JMH: Of course, it wouldn't be a delicious Greek stew if you didn't finish it with a little briny, creamy feta cheese, which, again, you know, it doesn't come across as heavy. It brightens, it lightens, it enriches it. It's really delicious.

CK: Well, that's, you know, my kind of recipe. I love bean soups. I love the idea of beginning and the end. I love finishing with some bright vinegar, feta, olive oil, parsley, a little bit of summer in winter, sounds like a good deal. Maybe I should go back to Athens.

JMH: There you go. Now you have an excuse.

CK: JM, thank you. A white bean soup plus a lot of from Athens from Greece, as you said, a summer soup for winter. Thank you.

JMH: Thank you. You can get the recipe for Greek white bean soup at milk Street radio.com,

CK: This is milk Street Radio. Now it's time to hear from our friends, Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette of A Way with Words. Grant and Martha, what's going on?

Martha Barnette: Well, Chris Grant and I have been putting our heads together to get inside some hidden heads in your kitchen and in your pantry. Now, of course, it won't surprise you to hear that the word chef ultimately comes from the Latin word for head caput, and in modern French, a chef isn't just the head of the kitchen. You can have a chef of anything you know. A chef Don tre pues is the head of a business. And we get the word chief, the English word chief, from the same root. So, the chef is the chief of the kitchen. And if you want one more word related to those, mischief means to come to a head badly. So, mischief and Chef chief yes

CK: That's a bit circuitous, but I like that

Grant Barrett: This same family of words that Martha's talking about that relate to the Latin word for head capout also ultimately produced the word cabbage, which comes to English from Old French, a word caboche, C, A, B, O, C, H, E, which which means head. And in French, a caboch has this connotation of an unusually large head, which you can call somebody who's light on intellect a cabbage head as early as the 17th century. Or you could just call them a plain old cabbage

MB: and another head in your kitchen is the coconut. You know, it sort of looks like a little head, and it comes from Portuguese and Spanish Coco, which can mean a grimace or a head or a skull, because it has those three little indentations, you know, that I used to think look like a bowling ball. But apparently the Spanish and Portuguese explorers thought it looked like somebody's head. And what's really interesting too, is that in Nigerian English, if you're talking about somebody and calling them a coconut head, it's the same thing as a cabbage head that we were talking about earlier. It means somebody who has no common sense or no intelligence.

CK: There’re so many ways to insult people now I've added a few to the list thank you

GB: We don’t scare Chris, we provide you with all the material you need, (full service). But let's spin over to some other heads that appear in the kitchen the pantry, and one of these is cheese. There's a salty Greek cheese, very lovely on its salad. Cephalotie, which is typically produced in large, rounded forms resembling a head. Now the cepha part of that word Cephalo theory is some of the Greek word for head cephalos, which also gives us the cephalopod so etymological cephalopods like squid and octopus, which you might eat are basically head footed, which I love that because it's right there in the word cephalopod, head footed and by the weight, there's another word I don't know if you know this, Chris, I was so excited to find this, that moment before you eat, when you're salivating and your stomach is growling in anticipation, is known as the cephalic phase, because your body's premeal activities, all that growling and salivating are caused by what's in your head.

CK: So, so if i i look at someone as we sit down to dinner, and I'm saying you're looking slightly cephalic,

MB: I’d be careful with

CK: That doesn't sound right to me actually,

GB: no, it sounds like SPD put that way.

CK: So, the word capo, then would that be like in the mafia, being a capo is that where that comes from?

GB: means the head, literally, the head of the organization.

CK: So, I wouldn't say to a capo, you look cephalic then I guess that would be, really, that would be a life ending experience

GB: No, you’d be sleeping with the fishes and not eating them,

MB: Sleeping with the cephalopod. And then there's the word carrot that also has a very long Etymology in terms of head, and it goes all the way back to the Latin carata, which is thought to be derived from an ancient root that means horn or head, referring to the carrots horn like shape. (Okay). so Chris, on that note, I think Grant and I are going to head out.

CK: Oh Lord,

GB: So having us on the show again would be a capital idea

CK: A pun my word. Thanks, guys,

GB: Bye Chris,

MB: Yes chef, goodbye.

CK: That was Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette, hosts of A Way with Words, that's it for today. You can find all of our episodes at Milk Street Radio.com or wherever you catch your podcasts. You can learn more about us at 177 Milkstreet.com you can become a member and get all of our recipe’s access to all livestream cooking classes free standard shipping from the Milk Street store and more. You can also find us on Facebook, at Christopher Kimball's Milk Street, Instagram at 177 Milk Street. We'll be back next week with more food stories and kitchen questions and thanks, as always, for listening.

Christopher Kimball's Milk Street Radio is produced by Milk Street in association with GBH co-founder Melissa Baldino, executive producer Annie Sensabaugh, senior editor Melissa Allison, producer Sarah Clapp, Assistant Producer Caroline Davis with production help from Debby Paddock. Additional editing by Sidney Lewis, audio mixing by Jay Allison and Atlantic Public Media in Woods Hole Massachusetts. Theme music by Toubab Krewe, additional music by George Brandl Egloff, Christopher Kimball’s Milk Street Radio is distributed by PRX.