Living: Succulent New Vegetables

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The standout this year: a pea with an edible pod

A classic New Yorker cartoon pictured Moppet staring mutinously at Mom over a plate of murky compost. "It's broccoli, dear," says Mom. Says Moppet: ''I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it." There is good news for M. & M. The 1979 garden catalogues piling into mailboxes this spring offer a number of vegetables that look like spinach, taste better than spinach, but are not Spinacia oleracea. Some of them have been imported from the Orient, notably shungiku (Chrysanthemum coronarium) and tampala hinn choy (Amaranthus tricolor).

But the hell with spinach. For the venturesome home gardener, there is a new sweet pepper, Dutch Treat, whose pungent fruits progress from yellow to orange to red and are edible at all stages; it comes, naturally, from Holland. There is also an improved version of the so-called yard-long bean, a.k.a. Orient Express or asparagus bean because of its asparaginous flavor. From China come bitter melon, gow choy, a garlicky chive, bok choy cabbage, and an aromatic celery, heung kuhn -all valuable for good wokmanship. A Japanese melon called Honey Drip is described by its originators as "intolerably delicious." Vegetable growers, generally a conservative lot, have been slow to pick up on an unusual variety called vegetable spaghetti: it is a member of the squash family that, when opened up, yields oodles of non-noodles that can be prepared exactly like pasta.

There are several novelty strains of sweet corn, notably "candy stick," which is only one inch thick but a foot long and is ideal for freezing; other innovations include the first bush-type butternut squash and a tomato, Long-Keeper, that stays fresh up to four months after picking. The redoubtable Burpee catalogue alone offers such enticements as the spacemaster cucumber, a pumpkin whose seeds can be eaten raw, and Sugar Bush watermelon, which represent years of genetic selection not only for flavor but -more important to the home gardener -for compact growth in a limited space.

Not in decades, however, has a single new vegetable stirred such horti-culinary hyperbole as a rogue one-chance-in-a-million mutant developed over years by the Gallatin Valley Seed Co. of Twin Falls, Idaho. It is called the Sugar Snap pea. Somewhat like a snow pea, but with plump, juicy kernels and melt-in-the-mouth pods, it also has some of the characteristics of a snap green bean and should be eaten pod and all. The Burpee catalogue, which gives it cover-sweetie treatment, calls it "truly fantastic." The authoritative magazine of the venerable Massachusetts Horticultural Society joins the seed industry in hailing it as "the best new vegetable in over 100 years of plant breeding."