the full roster

Every vegetable

All 52 of them, sorted into the eight categories behind your taste profile. The 28 marked make up the quick common round.

Leafy greens

Grown for their leaves. Some form a dense head you cut into, like cabbage; others are picked as loose leaves, like spinach and rocket. They cook down to almost nothing, which is why a bag of spinach always feels like a lie.

Roots

The plant's own food store, grown fat underground and topped with leaves you can usually eat too. Long and tapering like a carrot or parsnip, or round with a leafy crown like a beetroot or turnip.

Tubers

Technically swollen underground stems rather than roots, which is the distinction nobody makes at the dinner table. Dense and starchy, they store for months and do the heavy lifting in most meals built around them.

Bulbs & alliums

Bulbs are packed layers of leaf bases wrapped around a stem. The alliums here — onion, garlic, shallot — carry the sulphur compounds that make them sharp raw, sweet when cooked, and responsible for chopping-board tears.

Stems

Here the stalk itself is the vegetable rather than a handle for something else. Expect fibre and crunch, and a structure that runs lengthways — which is why celery strings and why you slice a leek across rather than along.

Flowers & buds

Immature flower heads, harvested while the buds are still tightly packed. Leave broccoli in the ground long enough and it opens into yellow flowers — edible, but well past the point anyone wants to eat it.

Seeds & legumes

Seeds, and the pods some of them arrive in. Eaten fresh and green like peas and beans, or dried and stored like chickpeas and lentils. Legumes also fix nitrogen back into the soil, so they earn their place in the ground twice over.

Fruit-vegetables

They grow from a flower and carry seeds, which makes them fruit to a botanist. Everyone else treats them as vegetables because they're savoury and turn up in dinner rather than pudding — the tomato argument, extended to peppers, cucumbers and every squash.

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