Newswise — William Woys Weaver, food historian, author and gardener, who has devoted more than 30 years of research into the origins of American cookery and the traditional kitchen garden, has joined Drexel University and is currently teaching culinary arts students how to plant a traditional heirloom garden in a very nontraditional setting—on campus just blocks from center city. The heirloom garden supplies the students with ingredients for the foods they prepare.
Weaver is widely known for planting seeds of heirloom vegetables that have been passed down from generation to generation. His grandfather had jars of seeds stowed away in baby jars at the bottom of his freezer, from where Weaver inherited many of the seeds to plant his garden. Such seeds are being planted at the corner of 33rd and Race streets during his class at Drexel offered throughout the spring term.
The ground work for the culinary arts department's kitchen garden began three years ago. Now up and running, the garden usually has several rows of rare French shallots, including sweet besançon, prince de Bretagne, French gray, and an Asian version called Vietnam Yellow. The garden also features a variety of herbs and can provide the kitchen with heirloom varieties including French thyme, tarragon, sage, oregano, lemon thyme, spring onions, chives, Italian field rocket, chervil and during cool weather Mache. Bronze fennel, white French strawberries, peppers and tomatoes can also be picked in the garden.
According to Weaver—who maintains the Roughwood Seed Collection in Devon, Pa., growing more than 3,000 varieties of vegetables, herbs and flowers—there is no doubt that locally grown food tastes better than shipped produce, but Drexel's garden has some added features.
"Our garden is organic, so we have the benefit of knowing that the food we are growing is not coated with sprays and pesticides," said Weaver. "We also aren't limited to using the choices of herbs offered by supermarkets. By growing the food the students understand the meaning of freshness and learn about new tastes and flavor combinations."
There is no doubt that home-grown vegetables are healthier, but for students trying to learn the eatery business, Weaver says there is no better teacher than nature itself. "The basis of good cooking is the kitchen garden, for without it a chef is nothing," Weaver writes in the introduction of his book on heirloom vegetables (Henry Holt press, 1997). "Yet how many cooks are trained to know the moment the ice bean has reached perfection or when the Musselburgh leek is most succulent? These are not plastic-wrapped vegetables of the supermarket, long ago suffocated in the stale air of trucks."
Instead of cooking with onions, culinary students can experiment with shallots whose seeds date back to at least the 18th century. Rather than using store-bought lettuce they can use the delicate variety of European lettuce known as Mache that is 150 years-old.
According to Weaver, about 45 vegetables are available today under the same varietal names as decades ago, such as the Jersey shallot and the early rose potato. Others haven't undergone extensive commercial breeding and lack varietal names. These are mostly native American vegetables that include Malabar spinach.
Author of 12 books including A Quaker Women's Cookbook and The Christmas Cook, a 300-year history of American Christmas, Weaver won an Emmy in 1993 for his food documentary "Terrapin." He served as a consultant for a variety of culinary projects and is the founding president of the Historic Foodways Society of the Delaware Valley. His book Heirloom Vegetable Gardening was chosen as a main selection for the Rodale/Organic Gardening book club as well as the Garden Book Club. It received the Julia Child Cookbook Award and the Jane Grigson Award for scholarly excellence. He is a member of numerous organizations including the Seed Savers Exchange and Arche Noah, an organization in Austria devoted to preserving threatened agricultural plants in Central Europe.
Drexel's culinary arts program prepares students for leadership positions in the fine-foods segment of the hospitality industry. The baccalaureate degree program is one of the leading technology-oriented programs in the country, offering students exposure to cutting-edge problem-solving techniques and ideas. Students have the opportunity to explore their culinary talent in a 14,000 square-foot state-of-the-art commercial kitchen and operate the Academic Bistro, an on-campus restaurant and lounge.
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