Romanesco

…This bit of cutting-edge gastronomy is eye-catching and mouthwatering, a vegetable as old as the Roman hills. It’s bosky. It tastes subtle, velvety, green, and vegetal, with an elusive savor, vaporous, the way avocado vanishes into thin air with its smoothness. It looks seductive too, glowing with an unearthly, phosphorescent beauty. Vegetable pulchritude.

Romanesco, named for its place of origin in ancient times where it was grown exclusively, is cropping up on menus, the newest new thing and one of the oldest. It is sneaking up out of the Lazio hills of the Roman countryside, out of the mists of Italian history. Some say it harks back to the times of Julius Caesar. Something old, something new.

Sometimes called Romanesco cauliflower or broccoflower (it is technically an edible flower) or cabbage or even asparagus (an early mistaken identification based on not knowing what to make of this vegetable mystery), it is close to all these, a clone of none, hard to classify accurately. Cauliflower or broccoli, mathematical formula or vegetable?

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And the color—an impossible color between green and yellow, with white highlights—beams out. Saturated color, brighter than bright, like Caribbean birds or carnival costumes. Someone called it “fluorescent broccoli.” It’s a glowing yellow-green, chartreuse, otherworldly, neon, as if lit from within. A special effect vegetable created by nature.

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There’s the math and science aspect. Romanesco is fractal, symmetrical, formulaic, pyramidal or conical, harmonious, spiraling, rhythmic, and logarithmic.

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In fact, Romanesco is “self-similar,” or “fractal,” which is a mathematical principle described by Leibniz in the 17th century in which each small part, although different in size, is identical to the others and also an exact replica of the larger whole. This pattern appears all over the natural world, in clouds and snowflakes, for example.

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As if that were not enough, there’s more math. All the florets are arranged in a spiral, called a logarithmic spiral, in a rhythm called the Fibonacci series, which is said to be based on “the famous golden number, origin of all aesthetic harmony according to the Renaissance artists.” Romanesco, a vegetable with an equation. The logarithmic spiral was identified by Descartes, and it also appears frequently in nature. Does Romanesco remind you of a mollusk? The shell of the cephalopod Nautilus is another example of a logarithmic spiral. So is a cyclone….

text source: http://artsfuse.org/5365/food-muse-resplendent-romanesco-rhapsody/

photo taken by a friend