Fennel is fresh and tasty

What’s not to love about fennel?

Waddya gunna do with those?” says the lady behind me with a sour look on her face. She doesn’t sound particularly friendly. We’re standing at the checkout, disdain hovering between us as I innocently clutch two modestly sized white vegetables with green stems and feathery fronds.

“Well,” I chirp awkwardly, “I was thinking a little salad, you know olive oil, salt and pepper, maybe a squeeze of lemon. A side dish with pasta.”

The look on her face makes it clear she is never going to be convinced and hasn’t the faintest interest in my dinner plans, anyway. “Can’t stand the stuff,” she says, redundantly. “Son made it for me once … Never again. Hated it.” I pay and go home to make my wanky salad.

It’s quite a shock to discover that anyone could feel so strongly about my favourite vegetable — the Italian name for which is also that nation’s primo pejorative for a man of alternative sexuality. What’s not to love about fennel? Or finocchio, as the charming thieves call that variety usually consumed in Australia, Florence fennel. It’s crisp, crunchy, refreshing, subtly anise in flavour, makes a lovely salad and is equally good roasted, crumbed or fried; good pickled, too. The seeds of the sweet fennel (a different species) are an essential spice for all sorts of cooking, from Italian salsicce to the best Indian curries. Not to mention the making of absinthe.

In the Anglo-Australia world in which I grew up, fennel fell into a large food group we’ll call Adult Stuff. Ingredients discovered and embraced on life’s journey beyond the cocoon, making up for the blandness of the typical Aussie table in the ’60s and ’70s. Which may go some way to explaining an enthusiasm for anything edible that, judging by my sibling, can’t be explained by genetics.

To this vast list we could add anchovies; chilli in its magnificent, myriad forms; real cheese; coffee. It goes on. We were children of The Graduate generation and if it came from a supermarket, it had to be good. “Sanitised” was seen as a compliment.

Those stories about the Italian kid and the Anglo Aussie in the playground, one with salami, olives and cheese, the other with Vegemite on Tip Top, longingly looking at each other’s lunch boxes … didn’t happen to me. A friend, the daughter of a Polish immigrant, tells the story of how her father discovered fennel growing wild in the vacant block near their home in suburban Adelaide in the ’70s. Of her mortification when he would conduct daylight raids, proudly bearing aloft great bunches of koper włoski through their conservative suburb. Harvesting and carefully drying the seeds, and cooking it as his mother had in the old country, mocking the neighbours who would pass up such a delicacy.

A typical migrant story repeated all over Australia in Greek, Italian, Balkan households. Foraging was a way of life, a natural response to hardship and deprivation of the war years and the austerity that followed. Not a pastime for chefs.

Now I buy my fennel from the children of those migrants. If I can, at the local greengrocer, or maybe the occasional farmers’ market. But sometimes I find myself in a queue in a brightly lit emporium. If nothing else, the supermarket experience is a reminder that for some, the ’70s never died.

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