SEASON’S EATINGS
Oranges in winter, garlic in July... my guide to buying food at its peak
We all like the idea of eating things when they are ‘in season’, but in a world when you can have strawberries at Christmas and tuck into parsnips in July, it can be quite confusing. The trouble about having pretty well everything available all the year round is that we lose the excitement and the anticipation and – oh yes – a lot of the flavour that you get if you wait for the season to come around. So here are ten of my favourite foods with advice as to when they are at the very peak of their perfection.
STRAWBERRIES
A LOT of people eventually come to an age when they decide that things were better when they were young. I remember it happening to my parents and I know it’s creeping up on me, in certain respects anyway. Modern commercial kinds of strawberry are bred for colour, uniformity and shelf-life, with flavour and aroma playing second fiddle. But even commercial varieties like Elsanta smell and taste so much better when they are right in season – around now, for a few weeks – and when picked yesterday in Wexford, that is, not a week ago in Egypt. Of course, if you grow your own, you can have stunning flavours because the berries only have to make it from the garden to the kitchen. BEST TIME: June to August
ASPARAGUS
AH yes, the curse of the all-yearround asparagus. The US encouraged Peru to grow asparagus in preference to cocaine and threw money at the project. Peru is the biggest producer of asparagus in the world, and because it and coca thrive in different soils and climates, it’s still a serious producer of cocaine.
This has ruined asparagus, frankly. Real asparagus, grown in Ireland (which is rare) or parts of England is in season just now and tastes a thousand times better. I refuse to eat Peruvian asparagus for several reasons, not least because the wait for that native asparagus window makes it taste even better. BEST TIME: April to June
CITRUS FRUITS
NOT many people realise that citrus fruits are in season in winter, nature’s way of delivering large quantities of vitamin C during the darkest days of the year. Just think of clementines at Christmas and the arrival of the bitter Seville oranges in January, when our kitchen (when I was young) would reek of boiling marmalade for weeks. Or the really exotic blood oranges which, when I was a child, was quite a thing in March.
Then they vanished but blood oranges are back these days, not just in cool restaurants but in Aldi and Lidl too. All-year-round citrus fruit is great, but the seasonal specialities remind us that everything has a season. BEST TIME: December to March
LAMB
THERE are people who like lamb when it’s past the first flush of youth and turning rather adolescent. The taste gets stronger and the cuts become bigger and if that floats your boat, fine.
For me there’s something wonderful about the first of the new season lamb: first the anticipation, the weekly inquiries at the butcher’s, the arrival, the subtlety of the flavour, the smell of a butterflied leg cooking slowly over charcoal on our ancient barbecue that is falling apart.
In Christianity, too, of course, lamb has a symbolic significance. I like to gather people together to feast on the first of the
new season lamb. BEST TIME: April to August (May and June at its very best)
BROCCOLI
I DON’T mean those big, thick heads of green stuff that children and adults like me seek to avoid where
possible. I’m talking about sprouting broccoli, much more elegant and, frankly, so delicious that I think the very first of it which comes in around late November is a rival to asparagus. This is the greatest vegetable delicacy of the coldest months and all you have to do is steam it and then toss it with butter. There are now varieties that crop through the summer but it just seems so wrong and out of place. It’s the narrow window of opportunity that adds to the appeal of the real thing. BEST TIME: November to March
SQUASH
THE world has so fallen in love with butternut squash (something that I sometimes struggle to understand) that it’s on menus, especially in the form of soup, during the entire calendar. Eating squash perennially strikes me as a very dull thing to do, especially when there are other lovely things being harvested. Squashes and pumpkins ripen in late autumn and the best of them keep until spring. By March our homegrown ones have collapsed into mush in our barn but we’ve enjoyed them during the cold dark months. BEST TIME: October to January
ROOT VEGETABLES
SINCE chefs discovered celeriac and beetroot, these two excellent and previously unsung roots have been on menus throughout the year and it’s understandable. They store very well but the fact is that they are naturally designed, if you like, to be part of the winter larder or for using during the Hungry Gap that kicks in during April if you grow your own. Root vegetables are really at their best and most useful in winter and bear in mind that parsnips turn sweet after the first frosts. Before that they taste very starchy. BEST TIME: November to March
NEW POTATOES
IT seems that you can buy ‘new potatoes’ at very odd times of the year. The fact that they come from Cyprus and other hot spots explains all. Our own new potato season is right now (the very first Ballycotton and Carne ones I spotted a month ago, but they are an exception). There’s something magical about lifting the first of the new spuds, parting the dark earth and finding those firm, plump tubers underneath. In time they will become more floury, but when they are very new they have a waxy texture and delicious flavour after all the stored spuds that have seen us through the rest of the year. BEST TIME: May to July
PEAS
GOD bless Clarence Birdseye, certainly as far as peas are concerned. We can enjoy excellent peas right through the year because of the world’s oldest and most natural form of food preservation: freezing. But fresh peas are wonderful and a seasonal joy of the summer. However, in Ireland you need to grow your own, which is not very hard. In London last week a dish of peas in their pods were served as nibbles at a restaurant where I was eating. They were glorious, because they had been picked, in Kent just a few hours before. Fresh peas turn to starch in about 24 hours. BEST TIME: June to September
GARLIC
GARLIC stores fairly well, although a lot of the stuff coming from China these days has a horrible, musty smell and taste. I try to get hold of European garlic wherever possible and I grow a few hundred heads of the stuff myself. The best way to enjoy garlic, though, is when it has just been dug up in July here, when it’s still ‘wet’ as the greengrocers would say. The skin is thick and fleshy at this stage and the cloves are as sweet as a nut and quite gentle in flavour. Baked with olive oil and sea salt and squeezed on to good, crusty bread, new garlic is fabulous.