THE TWO FACES OF FENNEL

ennel, I think, is really two separate vegetables: the raw and the cooked. Its character completely changes with the application of heat. Yet both forms are equally delicious, particularly when olive oil enters the picture. Raw fennel — white, crisp and clean — has an anise-like quality that is more tactful than insistent. It is like celery’s gentler cousin: just as crisp but not as stringy or salty. In Italy, where they appreciate fennel more than we do, it is eaten in wedges, dipped in olive oil.

Raw fennel makes a reviving salad, especially if you strew some of the dill-like green fronds in among the white slices, the thinner, the better.

A fennel salad should never be cut too far ahead, as the charm is the crunch (prepped slices will hold in a bowl of ice water for an hour). The simplest way to dress it is à la Elizabeth David, with nothing but salt, lemon juice and olive oil. I love this as an accompaniment to grilled fish, or with balls of buffalo mozzarella.

But raw fennel is also a graceful element in more complex salads. In My Paris Kitchen, US cook David Lebovitz has a great recipe for fennel, radish, orange and crab salad, in which the fennel’s crunch is a subtle foil for the juicy citrus and rich crabmeat.

Cooked fennel has none of the crunch but a far more attention-grabbing flavour. Braised or baked long and slow, it takes on a depth that the raw article scarcely hints at. When you cook celery, unless you are careful, it turns to water. When you cook fennel, it becomes liquorice-scented toffee, almost preternaturally sweet. You start to see why, in Renaissance Italy, sweet fennel was eaten as a dessert.

How to achieve the slow-cooking? The classic Italian way is to par-cook it in salted water, then bake it with parmesan until golden and bubbling, with or without cream (I say without). Jane Grigson calls this the best fennel dish “of all by far”, and who am I to disagree? But I’m not so crazy about switching on the oven just for a few bulbs of fennel.

So I was delighted to discover Anna Jones’s “super-sweet slow-cooked fennel” in A Modern Way To Eat. Fry thick slices in batches in generous amounts of olive oil in a pan, turning with tongs, before returning to the pan with sugar and fennel seeds and cooking until soft and deeply caramelised. Jones says this is delicious “stirred through pasta”. She is right. I would add the tiniest glug of Pernod to amplify the aniseed effect.

Another technique that was new to me was the stewed fennel in The Essential New York Times Cookbook, by Amanda Hesser. In Hesser’s “hyperbraised” technique, the bulb is cut into eighths and put in a pan with half a cup of oil and 1.5 cups water, fennel seeds and fennel fronds. You “blast it with heat”, lid on, until the liquid has evaporated. The texture, Hesser notes, comes out “miraculously, like confit”. It is soft and dense and very concentrated.

The only hint that it is the same vegetable as the raw bulbs is that whiff of liquorice. — © The Daily Telegraph, London