No beets in beatnik town

These are the first paragraphs of Tom Robbins’ excellent Jitterbug Perfume, a book to whose convoluted plot beetroot makes a significant contribution.

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.

Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.

The beet is a melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…

The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.

The beet was Rasputin’s favourite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

And so it goes on. The beet is definitely one of my favourite vegetables and reading this book has incited a desperate craving for beetroot. Not just any old beetroot, mind you, but beetroot prepared by mine own hands: grated raw in a salad; roasted with horseradish or aioli or tabouleh or goat’s cheese; as the mystery ingredient in the magical magenta hummus...staining my hands and everything else, resisting peeling and generally causing trouble. Curse you, Tom Robbins, for inducing a serious pang of culinary homesickness and producing a fixation that will be difficult to immediately dislodge as I can’t recollect having seen a beetroot since I left Sydney, either unadulterated at the markets or on a menu.