agretti

A delicious, slightly salty vegetable of many names: roscano, erbette negus, liscari, ariscolo, rispoli, riscoli, or rospici, or barbe di frate (friar’s beards) or maybe even the inexplicable senape del monaco (monk’s mustard). It's especially popular in central Italy, where it appears in the markets in spring.

Agretti taste a bit like spinach, only with a consistency like thin noodles—think of it as linear spinach. Besides being delicious, agretti are astoundingly virtuous: low calories, lots of iron, calcium, and other minerals, lots of vitamin B3 and C. It’s mildly diuretic, mopping up those awful triglycerides and cholesterol in your blood. Popeye could have beat the whole Red Army with a can of this.

Very trendy these days, agretti are usually served cold with oil and lemon as a salad, or as an accompaniment to seafood antipasti.

It's sometimes confused with salicornia, or marsh samphire, to which they are closely related.