Broccoli Rabe
The quick-thinking that led to you even knowing what Broccoli Rabe is
Note: Ok, after some feet-wetting early posts, now we are down to it. This is the kind of thing I really wanted this newsletter to be about. 700-1000ish word stories of little moments of genius. Will try to get in a streak of these over the coming weeks.
The climates of Messina, Sicily and Stockton, California are shockingly similar. Stockton gets a few degrees warmer in the summer and stays a few degrees warmer in the winter, while Messina gets a few more inches of rain a year, but we can forgive Stefano A’rrigo from not really noticing. When he first visited the Central Valley of California soon after World War II, all he could see was just how much it felt like the coastal town that he and his brother emigrated from more than a decade prior.
Warm days, cool nights, dry summers, with wetter winters: this meant that you could grow the stuff you used to grow in Italy year-round (and it has turned out, pretty much anything else). The A’rrigo Brothers’ first thought was grapes: returning soldiers from Europe had developed a taste for wine, and there was not yet much American supply to serve it. So, they made a deal with some of their cousins back east in Boston to supply fresh grapes.
The company they formed would come to be known as Andy Boy, and chances are you have eaten some of their broccoli. More specifically, their fresh broccoli. In 1925, Stefano arranged for a train-load of refrigerated broccoli to be shipped from California to New York, the first such shipment of its kind. To distinguish the higher-quality California broccoli from the lesser locally-grown New England variety, Stefano put a pink label on his broccoli with a cute drawing of his grandson, Andrew. And so Andy Boy was born, marking the first time that fresh produce became a brand.
Over the next four decades, the Andy Boy company branched into a wide variety of vegetables, including a previous wild-grown Italian plant known in English as mustard greens, but also referred to as rapini. You know it as broccoli rabe.
There are two parts of that last sentence to break down. First, the time period. The late 90s and early 2000s ushered in a tremendous change in how Americans thought about food. Food TV, celebrity chefs, the founding of Whole Foods are just a few markers of this transformation (I myself use the publication of Kitchen Confidential in 2000 as a line of demarcation, though the water was warming before it).
New ingredients with a wider flavor and taste profile were in demand. Broccoli rabe was ready and waiting. This bitter, abundant vegetable was a terrific candidate for adoption as it tasted different than broccoli but hey also it was a kind of broccoli right so how weird could it be? (I am guessing many of you probably had a similar experience as I did in 2003 or so, ordering a sausage and pasta dish with this “broccoli rabe” stuff on the side that neither looked very much nor tasted at all like broccoli. Probably also with a brown butter sauce of some kind). Google Trends confirms it: search interest in broccoli rabe roughly quadrupled between 2004 and 2015.
Forty years before, Andy A’rrigo (yes the same one on the label), now in charge of Andy Boy’s west coast operations after his father passed away in 1951, was looking to ship mustard greens from San Jose to the East Coast. At that time, the Interstate Commerce Commission controlled shipping rates for food products and broccoli got a special discounted rate. But when Andy Boy wanted to ship mustard greens the Transcontinental Rate Bureau said that it would be charged regular rates. Since shipping costs for fresh produce can account for up to 15% of costs in a notoriously low-margin industry, this was very bad news indeed.
In a fit of inspired and exasperate pique, Andy told them that the stuff was actually called “broccoli rabe”, and the TRB knowing about as much about broccoli rabe as I did as at 22-years old, said “oh, ok it’s broccoli I guess” and extended the discount rate to “broccoli rabe” and laying the groundwork to confuse all of us for years to come.