The Kitchen Diaries. Nigel Slater

      Right food, right place, right time. It is my belief – and the point of this book – that this is the best recipe of all. A crab sandwich by the sea on a June afternoon; a slice of roast goose with apple sauce and roast potatoes on Christmas Day; hot sausages and a chunk of roast pumpkin on a frost-sparkling night in November. These are meals whose success relies not on the expertise of the cook but on the more basic premise that this is the food of the moment – something eaten at a time when it is most appropriate, when the ingredients are at their peak of perfection, when the food, the cook and the time of year are at one with each other.

      There is something deeply, unshakeably right about eating food in season: fresh runner beans in July, grilled sardines on a blisteringly hot August evening, a bowl of gently aromatic stew on a rainy day in February. Yes, it is about the quality of the ingredients too, their provenance and the way they are cooked, but the very best eating is also about the feeling that the time is right.

      I do believe, for instance, that a cold Saturday in January is a good time to make gingerbread. It is when I made it and we had a good time with it. It felt right. So I offer it to you as a suggestion, just as I offer a cheesecake at Easter, a curry for a cold night in April and a pale gooseberry fool for a June afternoon. It is about seasonality, certainly, but also about going with the flow, cooking with the natural rhythm of the earth.

      Learning to eat with the ebb and flow of the seasons is the single thing that has made my eating more enjoyable. Our culinary seasons have been blurred by commerce, and in particular by the supermarkets’ much vaunted idea that consumers want all things to be available all year round. I don’t believe this is true. I have honestly never met anyone who wants to eat a slice of watermelon on a cold March evening, or a plate of asparagus in January. It is a myth put about by the giant supermarkets. I worry that today it is all too easy to lose sight of food’s natural timing and, worse, to miss it when it is at its sublime best. Hence my attempt at writing a book about rebuilding a cook’s relationship with nature.

      The diary

      I wanted to know exactly when I might find something at its glorious, juicy, sweetly flavoured peak. If something is to be truly, remarkably good to eat, then isn’t it worth knowing precisely when that moment might be? ‘Spring’ or ‘autumn’ has always been too vague for me. There is a vast difference between winter-spring and summer-spring. Even labelling raw ingredients by the month in which they are due to ripen is a bit hit and miss (I missed the damsons and the greengages one year relying on that premise). Anyone who has gone to a farmers’ market in the first week of May and again in the last week will know where I am coming from. It is like two completely different months.

      That said, this is not a book whose dates are to be followed like a mantra. It is simply a book of suggestions for when you might, should you care to look, find gooseberries, sprouts, damsons etc. at their best. It is a guide to what is and isn’t worth eating and when. And I like to think that there are few things more worth knowing than that. It is not some tyrannical culinary calendar but a book to dip in and out of throughout the year and the years to come, a reminder to keep an eye out for something, a gentle – and, I hope, delicious – aide-mémoire.

      The

      photographs

      The photography has been done in ‘real time’. So when it says October 2nd or April 9th, then that is when the picture was shot. After I have cooked each meal and it has been photographed, we sit down and eat it while it is still hot. Then I wash up. The pictures are taken at home, so if you recognise plates and pans from my books Real Food or Appetite, then that is because they are things that I have come to love and cherish. Whether it’s a vegetable peeler or a palette knife, it works for me and has become part of my life.

      The food

      For the most part I shop at small local shops, farmers’ markets, proper butcher’s, fishmonger’s, delicatessens and cheese shops rather than all at once on a weekly trip to a supermarket. I have honestly never set foot inside a branch of Tesco. This book is very much a gentle plea to buy something, however small, each day, to take time to shop, to treat it as a pleasure rather than a chore. This doesn’t mean I spend my life shopping, far from it. It simply means that I stock up on dry goods, such as rice, pasta and the like, once a week, then manage to find half an hour a day (sometimes less) to buy just one or two fresh things from someone who sells them with