There are two ways the universe—and edible plants, in particular—might turn out to be, supposing you didn’t have much experience with it, or them, and were reasoning from first principles. The first way is the one conjured up by recipes that call for “three cloves of garlic.” Have you seen garlic? Its cloves come in radically different sizes. Garlic, as everyone knows, is added to recipes for flavor. If “three cloves of garlic” is a consistent unit of measure, it must therefore be the case (or so reasoned a younger me) that a clove of garlic comes into the world instinct with as much flavor as it will ever have, and as it grows, dilutes. Only under these conditions would it not matter whether you took a large or a small clove: only if the sum of flavor in each clove was constant.
A similar reasoning follows from recipes that call for “six to eight leaves of basil.” For such an instruction to make any sense, the tiniest bud of a leaf must have all the flavor of an unfurled one. In the moment of plucking a leaf from one’s basil plant, one feels the cosmic justice of this understanding. In detaching the leaf from its stem, after all, it is irremediably, phenomenologically true that one is harvesting not just the leaf but all its potential.
Alas, it seems that most edible plants aren’t like that, actually. The other case about the universe seems to be the one that holds: a bite from a large honeycrisp tastes pretty much the same as a bite from a small one. An exception is blueberries, significant enough that it kept me unsure about the nature of the world for years. Small blueberries, those tart little slate grains, have a much more intense flavor than the big round hothouse ones you mostly find at the grocery store, which look like dog ticks that have fed. I’m pretty sure the one is not a bigger and more fully grown version of the other, that to compare them is to compare apples and oranges, as it were, but it sort of looks like one is an enlargement of the other, and they’re certainly sold to us with that implication, and one quickly learns, the hard way, that it does seem to be a higher law of biology that if you breed blueberries to be larger, you can’t help but also make them more insipid—as if the sum of flavor in nature’s idea of blueberry is a unit that cannot be shrunk or swollen, no matter how you distend the fruit. If botanists were able to crispr up giant blueberries with all the smack of tiny ones, surely they would have by now.
Now that I think more about it, other counterexamples come to mind, if we’re allowing for comparison between varietals. A honeynut squash is both smaller and sweeter than the butternut it looks like it was engineered out of, and cherry tomatoes are denser with gusto than beefsteaks. So which is the truth about flavor, uniformity or entelechy, maybe depends on whether the index is the individual or the type. In the meantime, I just chop wantonly and eyeball what looks like the equivalent of three average-size cloves.