The other day, we walked past a field of cauliflower in the green belt of Rome called Casaletto. Not that it was clear they were cauliflowers to begin with, so tight were the pale green leaves protecting most of the heads, although a few were visible, staring out like ghostly white faces. In her Vegetable Book, Jane Grigson describes seeing a man near the city of Nicosia in Cyprus carrying a cauliflower so big that he couldn’t get his arm around it. It’s a shame she never met Peter Glazebrook of Halam in Nottinghamshire, who in 2014 entered the Guinness World Records with his 27.48kg cauliflower.
The cauliflower is a variety of the common cabbage with arrested inflorescence. That is to say, a cabbage whose flowers were starting to form, but got interrupted at the bud stage, resulting in dense “curds”, which are most commonly white, but can also be luminous green, purple, orange, yellow and brown. Broccoli is arrested in much the same way, and I can’t help but feel a little sorry for both inhibited vegetables.
