People who worry about their food—which means just about everyone nowadays—deplore the loss of the seasons. Not just because the production and transport of raspberries in December and asparagus in January are a carbon-pumping sin, but also because we're upsetting the clock of our own palates, the pleasure of the stately march of the fruits of summer—rhubarb, raspberries, strawberries, figs, blackberries, apples—arriving in their right order.
But this is useless nostalgia. We should cheer the year-long abundance of fruits and vegetables, because it is pushing our cooks to have more ideas. Just as countries with a lot of oranges or mangoes expand their cuisine to deal with the bounty, so having too many strawberries has led our cooks to realise there is more to do with them than make summer pudding.
Thus, all summer I've been asking friends for new things to do with fruit. The best tip I got was from Francis Bickmore. He's just been to El Bulli, the Catalan kitchen-laboratory of the inventor of "molecular gastronomy," Ferran Adrià. Francis sent me a photo of Adrià's fondant de frambuesas con wasabi y vinagre de frambuesa, which he'd eaten. It shows a single raspberry-shaped object topped with a bright-green speck of green Japanese horseradish, next to a teaspoon of brown-pink liquid, all posed on a sheet of silver foil. It looks like pudding in a smack den. You eat the raspberry fondant in two bites, glugging the spoon of vinegar between them—"an uplifting mainline rush of flavour," says Francis.
I got a clutch of tales of Heston Blumenthal and others of the "Boo! Got you there!" school of cooking trying weird things with berries and acid. But that is not so very new. Auguste Escoffier marinated strawberries in orange juice and Curaçao, calling them "fraises romanoff"; Jane Grigson wrote in Good Things (1971) of Venice restaurants serving strawberries with lemon juice, while in the Vendôme she found them sprinkled with red wine vinegar. She goes on: "In England, we've eaten strawberries in claret for centuries." On those lines, the chef Simon Hopkinson suggests marinating chopped strawberries in beaujolais and a little triple sec: I have done and it's good. In Bristol, I found a little café in Clifton, the Rainbow, which mixed strawberries with pimento-stuffed olives, capers and brined peppers. It worked. But there's not much I found that beats strawberries with a little lemon, chopped mint and black pepper.
While I was polishing my "season erosion ain't so bad" thesis, I talked to a Norfolk farmer for whom the absence of summer so far this year in England is a disaster. He was in mourning for his speciality tomatoes. It was early July, and he'd just learnt that his main supermarket buyer had chucked most of them out, unsold. People simply hadn't wanted salad vegetables in the rains and cold of this year's early summer. He was miserable, not least because supermarkets pass most of the cost of unsold produce back to the farmers: "Either we're not getting summer any more or people don't appreciate summer produce any more. Doesn't matter which—we'll still go out of business." If the seasons are gone, it's time the English started sun-drying.
A new way with oranges
A friend arrived from Majorca with blood oranges, a bottle of the season's olive oil, cloudy and green like a witch's potion, and the promise of a revelation. She peeled and pithed the oranges and chopped them into small chunks, then mixed them up with a generous amount of the oil, salt and black pepper. Then she let them sit for an hour in the fridge.
There's something very exciting, the alchemist's thrill, about putting two familiar ingredients together and producing something quite different. And so it was: the oranges, tart by themselves, became honeyed and satiny; the oil had emulsified, and if you had eaten with your eyes closed, you'd swear cream had been stirred in. I haven't found this idea in any cookbook. The closest thing to Kim's oiled oranges is the fairly common notion of putting them in a dressed salad—bitter leaves like chicory or rocket work well. But this was something else, something new; and a good way of making useful those posh extra virgin olive oils that accumulate in the cupboard, too muscular to cook with.
A culinary adventuress
I've just found a copy of Countess Morphy's 800-page Recipes of all Nations, and I'm entranced by it. Countess Morphy was the pseudonym of Marcelle Azra Forbes, a forgotten heroine of the battle to get this country to eat more adventurously. Published in 1935, Recipes was the first popular cookbook to raise British eyes beyond the culinary bounds of western Europe or the sanitised curries of the Raj. Morphy is mocked nowadays for her colonial tone and her mistakes (under "sushi," she declares that the Japanese like to eat rice with fish steamed, grilled or fried). But among those she inspired was Elizabeth David, who as a teenager attended her cookery classes at Selfridge's. Morphy was no countess—she was an adventuress born in New Orleans who married an English wine writer. But she's a winning enthusiast, and perhaps the first westerner to recommend recipes from sub-Saharan Africa, including a "delicious" fricassée of iguana from Guinea.
