The Modern Cook’s Year. Anna Jones

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

       Dedication

      Introduction

      Start of the year

      Herald of spring

      First warm days

       Summer

       Autumn

       Winter

       Basics

       Index

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       About the Publisher

       Introduction

      There is something so joyful about eating food at its very best. Damsons as the nights draw in, apricots when the nights are at their longest, watermelon on a searing hot day, squash at Halloween. It is about an ingredient at its peak, the apex of its flavour, but more than that it’s about a time, a place and the memories of summers, Christmases and days past that are wrapped up in every bite of food we eat.

      In London, where I live, the ebb and flow of the year is so apparent, the seasons come and go with force and how we eat changes dramatically. As a young chef, learning to cook with the seasons was truly the most miraculous discovery. Every Saturday would start with strong coffee alongside almost every London chef at Borough market. Then I’d walk over to Tony Booth’s veg stall, smell peaches, squeeze tomatoes, bite sharp little apples. It reconnected me with nature, with what was growing.

      For me a year divided into four seasons feels too vague. Anyone who has stepped into a greengrocer on the winter side of spring and then again at the summer end will tell you that the two are very different. There are so many more subtleties to what’s growing than spring, summer, autumn and winter. It’s this rhythm, this relationship with nature, which I encourage you to foster. No June is the same, wild garlic will fill the hedgerows up at different times each year, the French apricots will arrive a few weeks later. The seasons are a useful tool but our eyes and taste buds should be our guide. This book is written in six chapters, which roughly knit together two months at a time, but let your senses, and the fruits and vegetables you find at your market, lead you. As each year comes and goes I am led to cook dishes at slightly different times and find the very best day for an ingredient does vary. With this in mind I encourage you not to think too rigidly about the seasons and the chapters of this book, use the produce on your doorstep to make the food that you feel like eating. If that’s macaroni cheese in July, so be it. The pages of this book are intended as a guide; you are the cook and the eater.

      As much as the ripeness and readiness of an ingredient, and how it is cooked are important, the feeling at a certain time of year can inform how I cook too. A cool green salad eaten outside with little fuss suits the hot impatience of summer, a bowl of soup eaten with a spoon from a cushion balanced on a lap is homely, comforting and grounding like autumn. A just warm salad of freshly podded peas, broad beans and the first asparagus, echoes the promise, the smell of new-mown grass, the verdant green of spring. It’s my desire as a cook to feel and allow others to share these emotions, to punctuate the year with the memorable meals I have loved again and again, to nourish those I love with more than the flavour of food.

      With that in mind I have included milestones and things I do at different times of year here too, from antique shopping at Christmas to resetting my culinary clock in spring. I hope they help to weave a picture of the year.

      The techniques I lean on in the kitchen change too as the year unfolds. In winter my heavy cast-iron pots never leave the hob, always full of soup, or a vegetable braise. In spring vegetables which are tender and fresh need only a lick of heat from a hot frying pan. In summer, I use my mandoline most, to finely slice fennel and courgettes, for grilling and for raw salads. The dishes, the way I cook and the time I want to spend doing it change as dramatically as the contents of my fruit bowl and fridge.

      While summer cooking tends to be the quickest I am somewhat of an impatient cook all year round. There are odd days when I linger in the kitchen but most often I cook dinner for the three of us in under an hour and those are the kind of recipes you will find in this book. A few use quite a few ingredients, for layering flavour and texture, which I feel is such an important part of cooking vegetables. I work with a palette of ingredients throughout the recipes in this book, so I hope that if you do invest in something new you will find lots of ideas for cooking with it in these pages.

      Eating with the seasons naturally leads us to putting vegetables at the centre of our tables. This is how I eat every day and increasingly how many of us are eating. In the five years since I started writing my first book, the food landscape of how we eat has changed dramatically for the better. Vegetable- focused meals a few nights a week have become the norm for many and for that I am deeply grateful. We have damaged this planet, there have been decades of misuse and eating mostly