One man’s weed is another man’s salad
This is particularly true of a man such as Dr. Stefano Padulosi, a generic resource expert, who in 1980 could remember eating a peppery wild herb near Pompeii as a child. He discovered that this had once been a valuable crop in Italy so he found the seed and began to develop it commercially. The result is that rocket is once more available across Europe. It manages to appear “Italian” and even faintly exotic but it first appeared in England as early as 1530 – several hundred years before the marrow or the Brussels sprout. There are plenty of wild herbs here which could be grown commercially. Young dandelion leaves are often used in salads on the continent. Anthony Worrall Thompson was asked to cook the lunch to celebrate the opening of the Channel Tunnel. Among the 1,500 guests dining in part of the Tunnel off Dover were the Queen and President Mitterrand. Wozza (aka AWT) planned to use dandelion leaves in his salad mix. But there was a hitch. His supplier, a farmer from Kent, simply picked the bright yellow heads off 7,500 plants so sadly, dandelion leaves weren’t on the menu that day.
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