Samphire, that spiky green stuff that used to be strewn all over the marble slabs at the fishmonger’s and be given away with your nice bit of haddock, was apparently the it vegetable of summer 2008. No longer “the poor man’s asparagus”, it sells in New York for around $9 per pound. You can still pick it for free along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in the US; as with all potentially dangerous coastal exploration (fast tides, rocks, quicksand, and all that), I don’t recommend it unless you know what you’re doing. If you do, then of course you will make sure to leave the plant’s woody stems in place so it can regrow, won’t you? And avoid sewage outflows.

samphire: plate and bowl

After seeing it in the upper west side Fairway labeled “sea beans”, I experimented with samphire a couple of times in May and June before I left for France, but I never felt that I had really gotten to grips with it. So when I saw it for sale in the St Tropez fish market, I jumped at the chance for another tête-à-tête.

Rifling through cookbooks and Google had left me feeling better acquainted with this plant, which has a long and colorful place in culinary history. I will happily admit, however, that parts of the following are extrapolated rather than proven – so if any of you know better, please clue me in.

In common culinary terms, “samphire” applies primarily to two species of suffrutescent* coastal plant: rock samphire (crithmum maritimum) and marsh samphire (salicornia herbacea). The rock-bound variety is watered by the spray from waves hitting the shore, has traditionally been pickled when gathered, and is woodier in texture, stronger in flavor and harder to come by than its Magnoliopsida class-mate. The marsh type grows in tidal estuaries, mud flats and salt marshes, and draws its hydration from the tides that wash over it: this is almost certainly the variety I found both here and in France.

Samphire is naturally salty and spoils quickly once picked. It can be eaten raw, so when buying it, always try a bit and check it for texture and saltiness. It’s easy enough to tell if the shoots are on their last legs – if they’re limp and spottily waterlogged, don’t fork over your cash. The best marsh samphire (more crisp and succulent, and less salty) is picked from the flats at the lowest point of the tide rather than gathered along the high tide line. How you can tell that, exactly, when standing in Fairway, or in front of a St Tropez fishmonger whose hustle would make P.T. Barnum blush, I don’t know, but if you can taste the green vegetable flavor as well as the salt and it has a nice firm texture, then bag-and-buy. The first time I bought samphire I didn’t think to try it until after I’d paid for it. What I’d brought home was salty enough to make me cough, and no amount of soaking and blanching in sweet water could make it really palatable.

By contrast to my Manhattan find, the salicorne I bought in France was still salty, but distinctly flavorful. I soaked it in two changes of ice water for about twenty minutes each time, to leach some of the salt, and then blanched it for only a matter of seconds in plenty of hard-boiling unsalted water before shocking it in more ice water to keep it bright green and crisp. One late nineteenth century recipe prescribed that it be eaten like an artichoke leaf – dipped in melted butter and the tender flesh stripped off the woody part with the teeth – but as I wanted to serve it in a salad, I discarded the really coarse stems. I mixed it with barely-cooked broccoli florets, and dressed the lot with a mix of chili oil, avocado oil, a splash of lemon juice and a generous quantity of toasted sesame seeds. My inspiration was a broccoli dish served by one of my all-time culinary heroes, Yotam Ottolenghi. The combination was fabulous: the samphire was green, crisp and salty, the broccoli green, crisp and sweet, the avocado oil nutty, the sesame seeds toasty, the lemon juice zingy, and the chili oil just the right amount of heat to bring out the best in everyone. And as far as a recipe goes, that’s it. Taste it, experiment, extrapolate for yourself and have fun.

* absolutely my new favorite word