With apologies to Peter Mayle, whose lovely book, A Year in Provence, starts with the simple line, "The year began with lunch" -- as I say, apologies -- my blog will begin with a prolix sentence that attempts to explain, however inadequately, that this year in provenance -- I am trying not to call too much attention to the pun -- started not with lunch, but with a walk. A walk up Broadway -- the Chicago street, not the Manhattan one -- for 42 blocks on a cold January 30th, past the Jewel grocery, Dominick's market, and Aldi Foods, to a small market called True Nature. An intimate space, the little store laid out an array of winter vegetables, each with its provenance: Paw Paw, Michigan; Algonquin, Illinois; Fond du Lac, Wisconsin. Each place name sounded its deep history: Paw Paw, an ancient Pottawatomi cultivation; Algonquin, a western outpost of a New York people; Fond du Lac, a northern habitation of the Menominee. I hurriedly gathered up New World roots: Jerusalem artichokes, which an early French governor of Canada, Samuel de Champlain, called the topinabour or artichaut du Canada, because it reminded him of the taste of artichoke; the tuber became Jerusalem artichokes in English because a 17th-century Italian naturalist discovered that the plant was a member of the sunflower family, the girasole family; potatoes, in the Yukon variety, ultimately derived from a variety described in Histoire des Plantes (1601), written by a French naturalist who had travelled in Peru; rutabagas, a giant Russian and Swedish turnip that is actually a cross between turnips and cabbages, already found wild in western Russia in the 17th century and introduced into Illinois in 1817 and proud winner of the Gold Medal in Root Crops at the Mid-West Horticultural Exposition in 1919; and, of course, sweet potatoes, a root first domesticated in the Yucatan Peninsula about 5000 years ago and now grown as far north as southern Ontario.

But no celery root. So I walked north again, to Loyola Ave, where I discovered a lovely market called New Leaf. There, displayed in a simple refrigerator case, lay a true store of root crops, including celery root. a so-called legume gourmand in French cooking, but now appearing in American markets from Great Barrington to Chicago to Missoula. Carefully turning it over, I discovered a small tag on the bag: "Grown in Paw Paw, MI."

Provenance. That's the theme of this blog, places of origin both near and far -- proximate in time and place, distant in origins.