NONFICTION

The Erotics of Escarole

By Jesse Curran     VOLUME 59 No. 3

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All spring I’ve been wanting to write an ode to escarole. To write a poem of praise expressing my passion for escarole and my deep satisfaction with escarole. And, since I’m without a stove while the kitchen gets renovated, my longing for escarole. It’s not that escarole, broadleaf and rough and standard garden green, is as beautiful as the swirling violet cabbage. It’s that when I met my husband, who was at first my lover (and oh what a good lover), he planted a garden bed of escarole for me to harvest in the spring and in the summer and in the fall. And every time I made beans and greens with the escarole, he happily ate it, enjoying it as much as I. And for fifteen years, he has planted those beds of escarole, and when I’m feeling down and out, I know it’s time to slice off a bunch, submerge it in a sink of water, then sauté the leaves with garlic and oil and chili pepper and a sharp grated cheese. Escarole has been at the center of who we are as a “we”—and perhaps, who we might be once more.



Escarole is a member of the Asteraceae plant family. So are over twenty-four thousand other species, including the aesthetic gems of sunflower, daisy, and aster. Traveling onward through the Linnaean classification, one arrives at Cichorium endivia. And within the same genus, there are varieties—including different types of radicchio, frisée, endive—and of course, my beloved broadleaf escarole. In Italian, it’s scarola. The word itself can be traced to Medieval Latin, escariola, which translates as “something edible,” and roots further back to the Latin verb “to eat”--edere. Chicory, on the other hand, has roots in the Latin word cichoreum. In my handy Oxford Companion to Italian Food, there’s no entry for chicory or escarole. Endive is there and serves as a catch-all for the whole lot of varieties. And radicchio, Cichorium intybus (var. foliosum), gets a few sentences. It’s also noted in the Oxford book that though there’s much confusion over the names, it matters not—one should just enjoy the different kinds.



My marriage is in a rut. It just is. We’re tired. We’re absorbed with work, trying to make ends meet. We’re tired. We have a kid who is wired to resist. We’re tired. We’re in the throes of a long-needed house renovation that is pushing the limits of our communication and finances. We’re tired. One of us has chronic pain due to nerve damage. We’re tired. The other one has nerves that run through the walls of the house (which is now having those walls ripped out), firing with each tantrum and power struggle. We’re tired. Each day, the news is more cataclysmic and the algorithms more predatory. We’re tired. I feel guilty that my marriage is in a rut. Because of the renovation, we no longer have a kitchen, which means it’s harder to cook. We’re tired. We’re not making love. We’re in a rut. I feel ashamed of where we are, though I hear of similar ruts among my peers. My marriage is in a rut. It sucks. It’s where we are. We’re tired.



Most of the Italian joints around here have escarole and beans as a side dish. Hands down, I think this is my favorite take-out item, even as it’s something I routinely cook at home. I could eat it every day—for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. The earthy and somewhat nutty flavor of cannellini beans complements the more bitter greens. A good olive oil flavored with garlic and simmered in a bit of chicken stock coats both green and bean. I prefer escarole, but a number of leafy greens will yield a similar pleasure. Beans and greens (kale), beans and greens (spinach), beans and greens (chard), beans and greens (broccoli rabe). And though I released the tight hold on my vegetarianism when I was nursing my first child (and suddenly wanted chicken and no longer felt so attached to the idea of being a vegetarian), I still prefer beans to meat any day. I’m no nutritionist, but beans and greens feel to me like an ideal veggie “meat.” Protein and iron and all that other good stuff. I can feel my energy replenish; I can feel my heart nourished. I can feel my body being both filled and fulfilled.



In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the story “Baucis and Philemon” offers a reference to endive and cabbage. In the tale, Jove and Mercury are in disguise as mortals, going door to door in Phrygia. As Ovid writes, “they asked for welcome at a thousand doors” and at a thousand doors they were denied.1 Save for one, the humble home of Baucis and Philemon, long-wed and consummate hosts. Ovid offers many lines describing their food preparation and the care and attention the couple dedicates to cooking up what they have on hand, ancient foodies with garden-fresh ingredients and a passion for the process. Philemon “then strips leaves / off of a cabbage that her husband picked / in their well-watered garden,” while he simmers some bacon to offer the brassica a hearty foundation.2 Philemon continues to prepare a platter of offerings. As Ovid writes:

On top she places chaste Minerva’s olives,
still half unripe, and autumn cornel cherries
preserved in wine lees, endive, radishes,
a block of cheese, and eggs she’d gently roasted
above warm coals, all served on earthenware.3

Olives and endive, a block of what I imagine to be a fine Italian sheep’s milk cheese, served on earthenware. Jove and Mercury, royalty in disguise, are given the royal treatment. After the repass, the mighty Jove goes on to punish the people who slammed the thousand doors with a flood. But Baucis and Philemon are saved, and their cottage becomes a temple. They ask only to die together when their time comes, a wish that is granted. And even better, when they die, they become “a linden and an oak.” Two trees, forever standing side by side.

Among other themes, this story, like so many other classical tales, rewards hospitality. It also takes pleasure in the pleasures of hospitality—and the relationship between garden and kitchen, the relationship between husband and wife. One harvests the cabbage and then simmers the bacon while the other strips the leaves to add to the broth. Their extended longevity takes root from the care they extend as gardeners, as cooks, as collaborators, as hosts.

And let’s not forget, there is endive.



It took me longer to find my way to romantic relationships. But not to the erotic, not to the reaching. The Rilkean immensity always loomed large in my heart. I knew longing like a baby knows mother’s milk. For years, I longed for lovers quite out of reach. Then I found a few within reach, and my body knew the pleasure for which it had long longed. And then: two kids, a pandemic, parenting woes, rising climates, rising prices, rising fascism. An affluent suburb with wheels that fly on deeply internalized capitalistic and neoliberal values; moral center lost in doing what’s “easy” because everything else is damned hard. Not to mention the judgement and shame and fear—always popping up like Whack-A-Moles at the arcade. And then—and so—the rut, which sends the Rilkean immensity for a loop. Yet still, the body, with all its feeling, breathes. The imagination reaches. The bower beckons. The possibilities hover. The escarole glistens, simmering in golden-green oil.



Is there anything sexy about leafy greens? They are a far cry from champagne and strawberries. Not a common aphrodisiac like chili pepper and chocolate. Plain old leafy greens don’t always strike one as sultry. Sometimes bitter. Sometimes tough. Sometimes in need of a hard blanch or a little seasoning to coax out their possibility. In those early days, there was something so satisfying about my man out there in the community garden, clad in denim cutoffs and a straw hat, planting me rows of greens. Bringing them home in bunches so I could submerge them in the sink and then sauté them up with cannellini and chili and god knows way too much garlic. And then, sitting there at our little table on our rickety wooden deck, looking out over the harbor, eating beans and greens with fresh shaved Parmesan and a humble Tuscan red. It wasn’t the escarole so much as the way it brought us together. Escarole was one of the ways we forged our separate beings. Escarole in between, escarole as the means.



For about two decades, I’ve been contemplating the erotic with the help of insights by a series of lyric theorists. The erotic has also been the state of being at the center of my interest in ecopoetics, a field of literary studies that explores the lyric connection between the self and the natural world. It has always seemed to me that people dwell both in the logos and in the oikos. Both in our physical dwellings and in our language—both in our abode and in the story we tell about our abode.4 I’m fascinated by the paradoxes of connection and separation that ecological thinking surfaces. Consider A.R. Ammons’s brilliant opening poem to his book Sphere ; it suggests we can’t find a direct correspondence in nature to match our word longing, as one might find a rock for a rock, and so we return from nature back to our homes and above our mantle, we place an image of longing instead. We dwell in our separation from nature; we long for a lost connection; we desire a possible union. We seek it in sex. We seek it in art, in poetry, in religion. It’s like the rut is our condition, though we have some ancient memory of a state beyond the rut. We don’t want to be in the rut. On top of this, we also seem to have forgotten that the word rut has two divergent etymologies. One suggests it is a doublet for the Middle English word route (a track, a road, etc.). The other history traces to the Latin work rugitum, “a roaring”—or the verb rugire, “to bellow,” often associated with the bellowing cry of sexual excitement by a male deer. This has me thinking that perhaps the rut I find myself in has, somewhere within it, a roaring capable of transcending the rut.



1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Stephanie McCarter (Penguin Classics, 2023), 235.

2 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 236.

3 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 236.

4 I’m forever indebted to Robert Pogue Harrison for his erudite reflection on the etymological resonance of the word ecology and its connection to a larger ecological ontology in his book Forests. In particular, in the chapter “Dwellings,” Harrison brought my attention to the Ammons’s poem to express the idea of human dwelling in logos. As he writes, “without logos there is no place, only habitat; no domus, only niche; no finitude, only the endless reproductive cycle of species-being; no dwelling, only subsisting.” Said directly: “we dwell not in nature but in relation to nature” (Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests [University of Chicago Press, 1992], 200–201).



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JESSE CURRAN is a poet, essayist, scholar, and teacher who lives in Northport, NY. Her essays and poems have appeared in dozens of literary journals, including Tar River Poetry, Literary Mama, About Place Journal, and Denver Quarterly. She is the 2025 Long Island Poet of the Year and an assistant professor in the Department of English at SUNY Old Westbury. Learn more at jesseleecurran.com.


VOLUME 59 No. 3