Trendy Veggie Turns Out to Be Humble Broccoli

Picture the ultimate cocktail party after a guest announces he’s started seedlings for half a dozen varieties of the year’s hottest vegetable. Then stand back as he names it: the humble brassica.

Otherwise known as broccoli, that lowly vegetable that has withstood even a presidential smear, brassica leads this year’s insider list of Trendy Veggies.

It would hardly be out of fashion this season to grow a single broccoli variety--even the common Green Comet, for example--but to be truly trendy, look for the latest in colors and shapes. For broccoli need not be just an ordinary vegetable. Thompson & Morgan seed catalogue (P.O. Box 1308, Jackson, N.J. 08527) offers no fewer than a dozen choices, with a range of colors that include burgundy, violet, cream and lime as well as the familiar deep blue-green hue of supermarket broccoli.

Heads no longer are just the round, flat kind. Now some varieties are made up of dozens of separate, conical florets; others have sprouting habits that produce many sweet, edible shoots all over the plant.

So fashionable are brassicas today that a whole new member has been bred--broccoflower, now frequently seen in supermarkets. Dubbed “green cauliflower” in mail-order catalogues, this melding of broccoli and cauliflower adds to the cauliflower color range one more hue, following white, cream and violet.

Broccoflower has the color of sprouting grass and combines the mild buttery flavor of cauliflower with the sweet crunch of broccoli. Johnny’s Selected Seeds (Foss Hill Road, Albion, Me. 04910) carries seeds of green cauliflower Alverda, the most widely planted variety of broccoflower.