Kale By Any Other Name

About author / Amy Powell

World traveler; gourmet 30 minute meals; lover of exotic ingredients; winner on FoodTV's Chefs vs City; graduate French Culinary Institute. Her recipes will tantalize your taste buds.

There exists a real and logical reason why, at a recent dinner party, I out-ed myself as something of an expert on black kale. After all, I can’t remember the last time someone found such information to be cool party banter. In fact, the woman who brought up the topic had not been talking to me at all (making my butting in all the worse and my credibility on the subject a bit suspect). Feeling a tad embarrassed and not wanting to come off as too much of a know-it-all (even though I clearly already had), I shared my cooking tips and gracefully avoided the question of how it was exactly that I knew so much about this dark, leafy vegetable. This is the story of my love of kale, and how I became acquainted with cavalo nero, aka. lacinata, aka. tuscan kale, aka. black kale.

In the fall of 2001 I was assigned the class I probably learned the most from in all the curriculum of the Hotel School at Cornell University. In this class we students operated a restaurant, rotating management teams nightly so that over the course of the semester each group had the opportunity to run this restaurant and put on an entirely different theme than the groups that had come before.

For my management night, I was in charge of the kitchen. Together with my team we set the menu for our Southwestern themed restaurant and then I went forward with standardizing the recipes, costing out the dishes, and ultimately procuring the ingredients in advance of our management night.

The year before I had become fascinated with black kale after a recipe had showed up in the Thanksgiving issue of Gourmet magazine under a menu for a Southwestern vegetarian Thanksgiving table. Already I was into kale for its substantial, hearty character; black kale offered a less fibrous stem, slightly more delicate leaf and spicy flavor. It was perfect as an addition to a number of dishes or standing alone as a dish unto itself.

My team and I had decided that our standard side to go with every main course ordered would be sautéed black kale with onions and cilantro. One would think ordering such a thing at the most prestigious restaurant management school in the country would be a simple task. Not so. Even though in November we weren’t quite in peak season for this winter green that truly blossoms after the first frost, the difficulty was more that I had to explain to each purveyor what exactly black kale was, including all known aliases.

No luck. We switched to plan B and decided to order something like 42 bags of baby mixed kale that would be tender like the black kale and would cook with similar speed. I would like to note that the calculations for how many bags to order to feed our 95 forecasted guests was done not by me, but my chef instructor. When enough kale showed up to fill two hotel speed racks floor to ceiling we knew there might be a problem.

The baby kale was a hit, and thank goodness because my unfortunate classmates were forced to serve it as the side in their own menus for a week to come.

Now black kale (or cavalo nero or lacinata) seems to show up with some frequency at local farmer’s markets as well as the occasional specialty market. It was at a farmers market that the dinner party guest had discovered black kale. Her fascination, like mine many years ago, was such that she thought it made for inviting dinner conversation. Who knows, at this rate? You could give black kale a few more years and it might end up being cool party conversation after all!

Serves/Makes: 4

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
• 1/2 white onion, finely chopped
• 1 clove garlic, crushed
• 2 bunches black kale
• OR
• 1 bunch regular kale, stems removed
• 1 cup dry white wine (or vegetable or chicken stock)
• 1/2 bunch cilantro, chopped (stems and leaves)
• 1 pinch red pepper flakes
• salt and pepper