Run Them Through Butter Add A Little Salt

Notes on bitterness

It’s radish season.

Until very recently this meant less than nothing to me. This was a vegetable that I simply had no interest in or experience with. But we have a miniature community garden going here in Detroit, a microcosm of the larger community project we hope to get going soon. In the backyard of a house owned by one of my friends and rented by two others, a handful of us pitch in with the planting, weeding, and harvesting, and we all get to reap some really tasty stuff—stuff that often gets put into meals we share.

Community Note

And last summer, out of that garden, my friend Gina put us all on to something that has forever changed my appreciation of this nameless middle period between spring and true summer: a sandwich of buttered bread, thin slices of radish, and a little salt. I like to throw some arugula on mine, too, but even without it the taste is unbelievable.

Yesterday, in advance of a bike ride to the Belle Isle beach on Detroit’s newly connected Greenway, I threw together a few of these sandwiches at my wife’s request. We had pulled a bunch of radishes from the garden on Friday night (including some of the “Easter Egg” variety, which are bright purple jewels) for this express purpose. And then, serendipitously, I opened my email to find a newsletter from the always-brilliant Devin Kelly, in which he discusses a Jim Harrison poem that consists of the following lines:

My work piles up,
I falter with disease.
Time rushes toward me—
it has no brakes. Still,
the radishes are good this year.
Run them through butter,
add a little salt.

Well, there are things we can’t control: time rushing toward us with no brakes. And there are things we can: those moments where we pause to savor something good here on earth. Harrison clearly knew the secret that I have just been made privy to, that a good radish with a little butter and salt can stop time for a moment while we enjoy it. (I’m very nearly a Harrison completist when it comes to his novels but he’s written so many poems that I will likely never get to the end of them, and I’m grateful to Devin for bringing this one to my attention, one I’ve never seen before although it appears in two different collections that I own. Always, always more to read, always more secrets to be unearthed at the moments when we need them.)

What strikes me about the radish thing is that it wouldn’t have always been this way for me. Radishes, for all their merits, have a bitterness to them that I think I would have found appalling even a few years ago. It’s like coffee in that way. I didn’t start drinking coffee until my mid-twenties, and went heavy on the cream and sugar for a while. After I ditched the sugar it still took me years to cut out the cream, and even then only because I was militant about not going to the store too often during the early months of COVID and ended up having to go two weeks without it by accident. By the end of that period I went from barely tolerating it black to liking it best that way.

This is one of the perks of adulthood: that we lose the extreme taste sensitivities possessed by children. Whatever we lose in discernment as a result I think is more than made up for by the tolerance we gain. So many things that genuinely nauseated me as a kid—the smell of bacon frying, the taste of garlic, the very idea of eating a mushroom—have become culinary cornerstones of my life.

Another adult lesson: you can grow all sorts of stuff in your old dresser drawers, in a pinch.

There are probably some grander conclusions to draw from the fact that the ability to tolerate bitterness has enriched my adult life immeasurably. I think about what Van Helsing says to Arthur in Dracula:¹

We and you too, you most of all, dear boy, will have to pass through the bitter water before we reach the sweet.

There is so much sweetness to be found out there, the kind of sweetness that can stop time for a while—even if it can’t throw on the brakes, it can make you feel like you’ve stepped off the track. I’m so glad to know now that some of that sweetness can be found in the bitterest, unlikeliest places.

Thanks, as always, for reading. I’ll talk to you next time.

-Chuck

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1. Granted, this was about cutting off the head of his fiancee and driving a stake through her heart to prevent her from becoming undead, but still.

Author with radish sandwich.