Cooking With the Season Instead of Against It

Last February I made a tomato salad. I had a picture of it in my head left over from the previous August: tomatoes so ripe they bruised under the knife, torn basil, juice pooling in the bottom of the bowl for the bread to mop up. What I actually produced was six pale wedges sitting in pink water. They had travelled a very long way in a truck and they cost more than the fish I served beside them. I ate two pieces out of stubbornness and scraped the rest into the bin, which is a thing I hate doing.

It was not a disaster. It was a small, avoidable, entirely self-inflicted disappointment, and it taught me more than any cookbook has. For years I cooked the way most of us are taught to cook. I decided what I wanted, wrote it down, and then went hunting for ingredients to make my decision come true. The decision came first and the food had to catch up with it.

Shopping backwards

The fix was not complicated, though it took me two seasons to trust it. I stopped going to the shops with a list. I go now with a rough shape of the week in mind, three dinners I need to cover, some idea of who is eating, and nothing more specific than that. I walk the whole produce section before I pick anything up. Then I buy what looks alive: the bunch with stiff leaves and no wilt at the edges, the thing piled high because there is too much of it, the item that is suddenly and suspiciously cheap. Cheap and abundant almost always means local and ripe. Only then do I go home and work out what dinner is.

This sounds like chaos, and it is, mildly, for about a month. After that it becomes the easiest way to cook I have found, because the hard question is already answered by the time you open the fridge. You are not standing there trying to remember what you meant to do with the third pepper. You are looking at two kilos of something excellent and asking how to use it up before Thursday, which is a much friendlier problem.

There is one failure mode and it is worth naming. Some weeks I buy beautifully and then life happens and I cook none of it, and by Sunday I am staring into a drawer of expensive regret. The defense is to do something rough to everything on the first evening. Roast the tray. Blanch the greens. Get the beans on. Half-finished food keeps for days and asks a great deal less of you on a Wednesday night than raw food does.

A season is shorter than the word suggests

The other thing I got wrong for years was the scale of it. I thought of seasons as four large boxes. They are not. Seasonal eating in practice is a run of short, overlapping windows, some of them only a few weeks wide, and the same ingredient is a different thing at each end of its own window. The first asparagus is sweet and grassy and wants almost nothing done to it: three minutes in a hot pan, salt, done. The last asparagus of the same year is thicker and more mineral and is better roasted hard until the tips go brittle. Same vegetable, six weeks apart, two entirely different recipes. Once you start noticing that, the phrase in season stops being a label on a sign and turns into actual information you can cook from.

The shoulder weeks are the hard part

Nobody warns you about the gap. There is a stretch, usually late winter tipping into early spring, when the roots have been in storage so long they taste faintly of the cellar and the new growth has not shown up yet. This is where good intentions collapse and everyone quietly buys the trucked-in berries. My honest answer is the pantry. Dried beans cooked slowly with a lot of olive oil and a bay leaf. Something preserved or pickled from the back of the cupboard to cut through the softness. Cabbage, which is patient and much better than its reputation, shredded thin and cooked in butter far longer than seems reasonable, until it goes sweet and collapses. And yes, frozen peas. I am not going to pretend otherwise.

What it actually changed

• I waste far less, because I buy what is good rather than what a recipe demanded of me.
• My cooking got simpler. Produce at its peak resents being covered up, so there is less to do to it.
• I spend less overall, even though I now buy the expensive nice thing without flinching when it is genuinely at its best.
• I repeat myself for weeks at a time and I have made peace with that. Five broad bean dinners in a row is not a failure of imagination. It is what people have always done.
• Vegetables started arriving in the middle of the plate on their own, which opens up a longer conversation about the gap between a side and a dish.

Where I am not pure about it

I use lemons all year. I use olive oil that came from somewhere else, and black pepper, and tinned tomatoes in January when I want a slow red sauce, and I do not feel remotely bad about any of it. The trade in dried and preserved goods is older than most of the countries doing the trading. The point was never a rule about distance. The point is that when I let the calendar make the first decision instead of me, the food tastes like something, and I pay more attention while eating it, which is its own reward and something I have written about at more length.

Try one week of it. Buy nothing you planned. Cook what you carried home. The first two dinners will be awkward and the third will be one of the better things you have made all month, and you will not be able to explain exactly why.