No need to take the bitter with the sweet

To be honest, no one seems to know if Belgian endive (the cigar-shaped white lettuce with the green tips) is good for you or not. Some online nutrition sites claim it’s a good source of beta carotene (the vegetable form of vitamin A; true or “preformedâ€� vitamin A mainly comes from animals and their byproducts); others say it has only traces of beta carotene but  it’s abundant in folate.

This, of course, is one of the reasons why people give up on trying to figure out which foods are good for them, and just go to McDonald’s instead. At least there the nutrition information is clearly printed on your placemat.

As a general rule, endive, like other lettuces, is high in fiber and low in calories. As a rule, it’s usually the darker lettuces that provide the most beta carotene, which strengthens your night vision and also helps fight cancer.

Belgian endive (not to be confused with its darker, curlier, more bitter cousin, which is also known as chicory and frisée in addition to being called just plain old endive) might not be the most super-nutritious vegetable in the produce section. But it is good for you — and is certainly more nutritious than, say, fried pork rinds.

And it performs an important and sometimes overlooked task: It makes salad more interesting. If you are trying to increase your intake of salad and greens (an excellent goal), you have to find a way to minimize the tedium, without resorting to the use of exotic and usually sneakily fat-filled dressings.

Endive can be eaten several ways. If you’re just adding it to a salad, you can gently pry the leaves apart and serve them as spears in a salad (they also make an excellent scoop for healthy dips such as hummus). Or  you can peel away any brownish outer leaves and then chop the “cigarâ€� lengthwise into 1- or 2-inch pieces and add to your lettuce. Endive is also excellent on its own; try serving it as an appetizer salad dressed with a little olive oil and lemon juice, toasted walnuts and either fresh ricotta or a pungent blue cheese.

It can be roasted, intact as a “cigar� or sliced. And it can be served with scallops, as it is in Thomas Keller’s latest cookbook, “Bouchon.� p

Now, the thing about endive is, it’s bitter. And the thing about Thomas Keller is that he works out lengthy and interesting ways of dealing with such culinary shortcomings. Like a long soak in salt. Not salt water. But salt. He directs earnest cooks like me to trim the bottom of the endive core and then, with a small knife, cut as much of that core out as possible, making a cone-shaped hole in the bottom. Then set the endives upright like little missiles in a salt silo, cover with a damp towel and refrigerate for 12 to 24 hours.

When that’s done, rinse the endives and proceed with any recipe. Keller’s scallops and endive, employing thyme, lavender, fish fumet, tarragon, honey, orange juice and a few other items is fine. Or you could pare the whole thing down to sautéeing the treated endive in olive oil with a little garlic, a pinch of sugar and a teaspoon of chopped tarragon and topping it with a couple of sweet, pan-fried scallops, which is what I will do next time, after treating the endive first, of course.

                                                                                                                            — Marsden Epworth