IT MAY challenge the spirit to think of cauliflower as anything but an overrated, ungainly plant. But in the craggy land between Ramallah and Jerusalem, there is one variety of that plain vegetable that invariably attracts a crazed following at this time of year.

Every winter stands manned by farmers pop up along most of the West Bank’s winding roads, with proud growers displaying vivid yellow bouquets wreathed in green roughage. Forget the white vegetable that, when boiled, resembles a brain and releases a gassy aroma redolent of cheap cafeterias. This is zahara baladi, an ancient local cultivar that takes a full year to grow and is in season for just a few weeks. The plant has a nice, mustardy hue; the flavour is well-rounded, sweet and earthy and the texture irresistibly creamy.

All this is enough to entice Palestinian Jerusalemites to leave their homes in blustery weather. “It’s cauliflower madness,” one customer agreed cheerfully as he battled a vicious wind to get to a stall.

Their craze reflects not just the brief flowering of a delicacy, but also a gastronomic renaissance brought about by successful Ramallah chefs, many of them trained abroad, and a bumper crop of recent books highlighting local cooking.

Cauliflower has been mentioned by Arab botanists for more than a millennium. It is the crucial ingredient in maqluba, a gem of Palestinian cuisine in which fried florets are cooked with chicken or lamb (and sometimes eggplant) in a huge pot of spiced rice that is triumphantly turned upside down before serving.

Translated literally, zahara baladi means wild flower, and it usually makes its appearance some time in February, just as the terraced hills erupt in a riot of colourful blooms. “This is the golden time of flowering plants,” exults Munir Nasser, a professor of biochemistry at Birzeit University with a passion for local flora.

Commercial vegetable growers sometimes try to engineer their plants so as to produce saleable crops twice a year. But purists will always insist on the existing variety of zahara baladi.

Local lore ascribes amazing properties to the plant. It is said to cure everything from respiratory ailments to postnatal pain. In villages, chunks of the stuff are artfully combined with onion and spices and blended into a light dough that is fried, producing an appetising fritter. In Jerusalem, families wait eagerly till winter to make mtafayeh—a one-pot wonder consisting of lamb and zahara baladi cooked with goat yogurt, tahini, lemon and fresh minced garlic.

“The taste is just different, so good, so soft,” sighs a Jerusalem lawyer and new mother who has just dispatched her husband on a mission to the cauliflower kiosks. Her name, appropriately, is Zahara.