Cooking vegetables whole makes the best of their natural flavour. Annie Bell calls for the right to a peel. Photographs by David Loftus.
We tend to be a bit squeamish about skins in this country. We carefully peel back the slippery skin of a fish to get at the flesh; leave the ruched, leathery film on the rice pudding at the side of the plate; and rid nearly all our vegetables of their skins, apart from potatoes. This is unless you happen to belong to the hearty group who believe that even if you don't enjoy eating them, the amount of vitamins the skins contain makes them a worthy spoonful of medicine.
For me, though, it is an astute chef who removes the fish's silvery skin, dips it into batter and crisps it in the deep-fryer, before sending it out to the table as a prize morsel on top of the fish. And the skin on the rice pudding is one of the best bits, eaten either on its own or daubed with sticky jam. As for vegetables, I have never eaten anything solely on the basis of it being good for me. I happen to like vegetable skins.
Whether or not the skins are edible at the end of cooking, the surest way of capturing the full flavour of a vegetable is to cook it with the protective, papery tissue or shell that nature provides. Cooking vegetables in their skins has its equivalent in meat or fish cooked on the bone, keeping the flesh moist and retaining the fullness of its natural flavour. The ultimate illustration of this kind was a millefeuille of cardoons I recently ate as an accompaniment to guinea fowl, which had been speared through with splinters of bone marrow that melted into the bird's flesh as it cooked.
Just think how good potatoes taste when they are cooked in their skins: sweet, new potatoes the size of a plum or, for that matter, larger, 'old' potatoes baked or boiled before mashing. Lightly oiled and with a sprinkling of sea salt, the skin becomes the best bit. Less obvious are roasted carrots, but their sweet intensity is unsurpassed. The skin melts in the mouth, as though, having sealed in the moisture and flavour, it can discreetly disappear.
The Spanish are fond of roasting ceballots or tender, young onions, over a wood fire fuelled with vine prunings. There is a pre-spring festival in celebration of these onions, the calcotada, that takes place in Valls, in Catalonia. After being divested of their flags and roots, the onions are roasted to a charry gold, the outside layer is peeled off and the soft inside doused with a spicy salvitxada, made by pounding almonds and garlic with mint, tomato and olive oil. And even though there is no equivalent of these small, tender onions in the uk, you can just as easily grill some leeks or fat spring onions on the barbecue or on a griddle, or simply roast them in the oven.
In Honey from a Weed, Patience Gray describes how cipolle arrostite, roasted onions, are made in Mantua and Verona during the winter. "The market people keep themselves alive with charcoal braziers, and at the same time they are roasting on them large purple winter onions, complete with their skins, in a big perforated tin. You take them home, peel and eat them with salt and olive oil. They are often sold in vegetable shops, having been roasted in a nearby bread oven, after the bread has been baked."
In much the same way as Mediterraneans like to roast onions, Americans grill corn cobs on a barbecue. Use cobs with the sheathes and silk intact. Carefully peel back the sheath and pull out the silk, replace the husk and tie it all in place, then soak the cobs in water for 30 minutes before grilling. The kernels steam as they cook, and take on the grassiness of the sheath in much the same way as a fish becomes scented if you barbecue it whole in a bed of wild grasses. I cook aubergines on an open fire and, discarding the skin, blend the smoky flesh with garlic, lemon juice and olive oil. There are few things more delicious than braised aubergine, as anyone familiar with imam bayildi will agree - the real reason for the Imam's swoon.