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If I know you the way I think I know you, dear friends, and of course I know you the way I think I know you, you have read the title of the post and two thoughts have sprung to mine. Permit me to set your minds at ease -- or permit me to serve you a heaping plate of crushing disappointment. If you're wondering if I have turned my back on the Way of the Oven and embraced raw foodism, I have not. Call me reactionary -- go ahead, do it -- but when I want raw food, I'll eat salad, or fruit, or fruit salad. I really don't want to eat faux lasagne made out of thinly-sliced daikon. Yes, yes, yes, I know that even Charlie Trotter has paid homage to raw, and if he offered me a multicourse raw meal from his kitchen, I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm still a bit wary of much of the verbiage coming from the raw food movement. When someone refers to a perfect braise of beef and carrots, or a creamy souffle, or a snapping-fresh bunch of asparagus, rolled in olive oil and salt and roasted in a 500-degree oven, as "angry food," my back goes up. In short, I'm not a good candidate for a raw regime.

If you're thinking the other thought that would spring to mind when you read the title, well, I'm sorry, but it's not about that, either. Mom, it's safe to uncover your eyes. Um...Mom?...Mom?

Having rabbitted on about what it's not, let's proceed directly to what it is. What it is is a sort of culinary brainteaser, a question posed to me by a Particular Dear Friend of mine last week: Are there any foods that can be eaten both raw and cooked, that are most commonly eaten cooked, but are as good, if not better, if eaten raw? I am only a bit sheepish to admit that all of my time not spent slinging hash at the box factory, having occasional conversations with my pals and my family and my Lloyd, or pursuing frivolous pursuits like sleep, has been spent contemplating this question. At first, it seems tricky to come up with a list. There are plenty of foods that can be eaten both raw and cooked, but our associations and preferences tend to remain firmly in a single camp. I think of dark leafy greens like kale and chard, which can be eaten raw if they are chopped or sliced finely, but which acquire whole new levels of textural beauty when they are cooked. Conversely, strawberries can be cooked, boiled with sugar for jam and compote, or baked into a pie, but in general strawberries show off their best side, their bright sweetness, when they are eaten raw, either by themselves or macerated with a little sugar. Particular Dear Friend suggested that broccoli was a good example, that he preferred broccoli raw to cooked. There are plenty of people who share his point of view -- witness the ubiquity of raw broccoli on crudite trays -- but of course I have to be a contrarian here. Actually, it's not even that I'm a contrarian; rather, I am a bug for broccoli cooked just the way I like it. The way I like it is more tender than tender-crisp, but less tender than overdone. When I bite into a broccoli floret, I want that floret to give under my teeth; I don't want it to spring back. But until my teeth cut through it, I want it to maintain its structural integrity. If it falls apart on the fork, we're in trouble here. If it has been cooked more than seven minutes, I don't want to play. But raw? I'll leave those to hardier people than myself.

Asparagus, on the other hand, I have eaten raw. I've only eaten the slender ones, the ones about half the size of a #2 pencil, with tips the size of a fingernail. They are wonderful, grassy and sweet and a pure hit of chlorophyll. I have also eaten sugar snap peas, height-of-summer peas, pod and all. They are terrific sauteed and dressed in a little orange-flavored butter, but at the height of summer, when you get the peas that have been out of the ground for mere hours, there is no pleasure quite like topping and tailing a raw pod and then biting into it, the whole thing, pod and all, drawing the water out of the pod with your teeth, snapping down on the peas suddenly set free in your mouth. I have sat in front of the tv, watching some blood-running-down-the-sides-of-the-bucket movie with Lloyd, munching my way through a bag of sugar snaps during the scary parts. I have also performed the Mindless Movie-Snacking Automaton routine with sorrel, which is a fixture in soups and sauces in British cookery, but which I have always loved raw. Sorrel is a tart green, so tart that it makes your mouth pucker at first bite. Several years ago, the New York Times food section ran an article (I think by Amanda Hesser) called "Gooseberries and Sorrel," all about the tartness and succor of these two plants, and even now, my mouth begins to water. (I have since read, though, that sorrel is high in oxalic acid, which can be toxic if consumed in large quantities; please, dear friends, do not follow my sorry and possibly dangerous example. Do not eat sorrel as if it were a bottomless bag of Route 10 Dill Pickle-Flavored Potato Chips.)

You could always try spinach, which is a cousin of sorrel, and which also contains oxalic acid, but not in the same quantity as sorrel. Spinach is one of those rare beauties that can be really wonderful either raw or cooked. In an otherwise useless diet book I owned as a teenager, I read some pretty good advice on how to learn to love spinach: start by eating it raw, in salads; then graduate to gently-wilted salads, cold salads dressed with hot cooked dressing; then, finally, try it braised, or sauteed, or stir-fried with a little garlic and oyster sauce, or sauteed and dressed with a rice vinegar dressing and sesame seeds. Once you get used to the shock of seeing your big bag of greens cook down into a cluster the size of a digestive biscuit, you will find a dozen different ways to love your spinach -- or you can just wash it to remove the sand, spin it dry, and make yourself a big crunchy salad out of it. This same silly diet book also gave the same sensible advice about mushrooms, only in reverse: start with cooked mushrooms, then work backward to raw.

Even as I know that I love all of these foods, the asparagus and the spinach and the peas and the strawberries, I still wondered if there were other answers out there, something that really stood up as well raw as it did cooked, and vice versa. It should not have been a surprise that I found it in one of my favorite sources of food writing, the journal Petits Propos Culinaires (a/k/a PPC), or rather, the anthology of collected works from PPC, The Wilder Shores of Gastronomy. Included in this delightful book is a reminiscence originally published in 1979 in PPC #2, "Kibbeh Nayyeh" by Suad Aljure:

When I was a little child I knew it was Sunday when my mother took over the kitchen. Sunday was kibbeh day and no hands were allowed to touch the kibbeh except Mama's (which, now that I think about it, must have been rather humiliating for our cook). That was my father's rule; only Mama's touch was right for kneading the kibbeh, and he claimed he could tell when strange hands had prepared the mixture.

Ms. Aljure's essay is a little gem, filled with nostalgia, keen observation (her description of how carefully her mother trimmed all fat and membrane from the lamb should be required reading in culinary schools everywhere), gentle sibling rivalry (as witnessed by her tart observations of her sister's fondness for mint leaves) and tactile sensation (one can almost feel the nubbly texture of soaked burghul against one's palms). I read, enraptured, from the first word to the last, when I realized I hadn't seen any cooking instructions. No, I thought, that couldn't be. I had had kibbeh in restaurants. I had bought take-out kibbeh meatballs from Sahadi in Brooklyn. I know that what I had eaten had definitely been fried, not raw. I read again. Trim the meat, check. Put the meat, onions and mint into the mortar, check. Pound, pound, pound, pound, pound. Add the burghul, squeezed dry, in handfuls. Pound, pound, pound, pound, pound. Repeat for an hour. Taste for seasoning. Pound, pound, pound. Form into mound on platter, flatten it out, smooth it out with palm, mark it with wells for the collection of drizzles of olive oil. Nothing about frying. Nothing about baking.

Of course it was not that my memory was faulty; it was that my horizons were not all that broad. Kibbeh is indeed served raw, or baked, or fried. The scholar of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cookery Paula Wolfert has identified 50 different varieties of kibbeh. My initial shock has turns to curiosity, then to contemplation, then to the engagement of brain and palate. Can I find a restaurant that will make this for me? Possibly, not easily. Can I make this on my own? I'll need to get myself a mortar and pestle. Do I really want to spend an hour pounding lamb and onions and burghul together? I close my eyes and think of Suad Aljure's story of kibbeh nayyeh, kibbeh tartare, meat and vegetables and wheat pounded to utter smoothness, urging me on; wouldn't I like a nice wedge of warm pita, a slick of olive oil, a bit of kibbeh to put between them? Yes, yes I would. I have eaten it fried; I will eat it baked; but I absolutely, positively cannot wait to eat it raw.