may 07 newsletter

good cateress, newsletter, May ‘07


May. The beginning of the New season of fruits and vegetables, something truly worth celebrating! Although this year for us in the North East it will be a little later than usual, due to our very sad April. In England they spent Easter sunbathing in their gardens, while we in New York were inside with rain and cold, feeling quite miserable. I have ventured to the Green Market two or three times in recent weeks, full of expectation, there are a few ramps; last week a few asparagus.

In previous years we have been eating the new seasons greens; Turnips, mustards, collards, chard even these hardy growers are still to be seen. For some reason I dont regard these as Spring vegetables, although clearly they are

When I think of ’new’ vegetables, the one’s we wished on the first time we ate them that year, I am talking of shelling peas, fava beans, new potatoes, carrots and asparagus followed by soft fruits, strawberries, raspberries and then my personal favourites currants and gooseberries, rarely found here, although Chip in the Green Market usually has a few.

As a toddler, I am told, I would stand in among the rows of peas, you could quickly tell how tall I was or how far I could reach by the height of the remaining peas. One of my earliest memories is of sitting on the kitchen table with the large yellow colander next to me, shucking peas, my mother was guiding me in this enterprise, helping me to put some peas in the colander not just my mouth. My mother always cooked the new peas with a couple of good pods and a sprig of mint in the water. Divine!

My other favourite shucker that appears now are Broad Beans known here
as Fava beans. In England we plant them in the Fall and they grow
through the winter ready for an early spring harvest. We grew them ourselves and occasionally would cut the top leaves off the plant , depending on the black fly that seemed to find these plants particularly tasty, and sauté them with garlic. They were always sweeter and younger than the store bought beans, as the farmer wanted a fuller pod for the weight. In England we eat these beans in their pale grey/green outer skins, which gives them a distinctive slightly bitter taste. I enjoy them out of those skins as they serve them here, but I tend to think of them as an entirely different vegetable.

Baby new carrots! I can eat 3 or 4 while driving back uptown from Union Square. Crunchy, earthy, sweet. The perfect snack and nothing like the hideous little carrots in bags at the supermarket, again not even the same vegetable. As I crunch away on the carrots, I am reminded of Peter Rabbit stealing the farmers carrots in the Beatrix Potter book.

When I had my appendix removed at the age of 16, in the midst of moving from the Folly to the Clarendon in Chale on the south side of the Isle of Wight. The Clarendon an old coaching Inn that had stood there for 400 or so years, with long views of the west Wight coastline. A couple of days after the operation, these were in the days when you kept you in hospital for a week, Mum and Janette appeared in the ward with a trug filled with Mrs. Kings new carrots and peas to cheer me up. It was heaven after the truly inedible hospital food, I happily sat up in bed shucking the peas, chomping the carrots and quickly thereafter recovered. The hospital staff and other people in the ward just thought it was all too peculiar!

Asparagus too. My mother always had asparagus for her birthday in May, in honour of her on her birthday I always eat them and toast her, fortunately on saturday at Union Square there were a few local asparagus. My first asparagus, having grown up in Germany were the large white European variety. We did love those large white asparagus, we were allowed four stalks of mums birthday treat. For those that don't know, the Peruvian white asparagus available here while they might look like European white asparagus, actually bear no resemblance to them at all; although the distinctive flavor is mildly sensed.

Our first year back on the Isle of wight, we had been living there about a month, it was May mums birthday I thought I would buy her Isle of Wight asparagus for her present, the shopkeeper showed me green asparagus. I was horrified I had never seen them that colour and declined them! I quickly grew to love and appreciate them.

But my favourite of all new Spring produce is buttery new potatoes, boiled with a mint sprig, giving them a slight minty flavour. Why is it so hard to find good new potatoes that you scrape rather than peel here? It has always bewildered me the lack of seasonal and variety of potatoes here in America. Every where we lived in Europe we had them, so why is America so happy to put up with an Idaho baker year round, so boring. In his book Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan talks about potatoes and how the Peruvian Inca’s grew 100’s of different varieties of potatoes for many different things, perhaps they should go back to that and stop growing white asparagus.

A new potato has skin that you can literally remove by running your thumbnail across it, hence scraping them. At the end of May beginning of June in England, the Jersey Royals arrive from the Channel islands. Perhaps the king of new potatoes, as a child I could eat 15 or so potatoes in one sitting.

Is there a meal more redolent of Spring than Roast leg or shoulder of local new lamb served with fresh garden picked mint sauce; new potatoes, carrots and peas, followed by local strawberries and cream. I can smell and taste it all.

Finally, in May the woods and copses are full of bluebells, you look at a carpet of blue, with a light fragrance and the buzzing of insects sucking the nectar of pollen.


Here we go into summer....