Maybe it’s because spring is here and these little ruby globes are coming into their peak season. Perhaps my new fixation is the result of my being recently bowled over by a canapé which involved a radish, one which had been thinly sliced and artfully arranged on a good baguette spread with glorious French butter and sprinkled with flaky sea salt. I’m not really certain what happened. All I know is that I find myself looking for any and every excuse to eat radishes right now.
Until recently, I never gave radishes a lot of thought. Honestly, I could take them or leave them. I remember reading a hilarious Tom Robbins novel in which he described the beet as the most passionate of vegetables, but he thought that the radish possessed the cold feverish fire of discontent and inquietude. That always struck me as apropos, for beneath their vivid pinkish-reddish exterior, I found radishes to be cool and pale as moonlight. Moonlight with a bite, that is.
But then one recent fine day, a radish snuck up on me and won me over. In some ways this new appreciation feels similar to developing a massive crush quite unexpectedly on someone you’ve known for years but never paid any serious attention to in the past, yet now you find yourself constantly thinking about this person and looking for any reason to throw yourself in his or her path. I never paid much heed to radishes whenever they appeared in a salad, and until this March, I don’t think I’d ever bought a single radish in my life. But in the past few weeks I have experienced them on a new level, and there has been a bundle of them in my shopping basket each time I’ve been to the store this month.