Murray Chalmers ventures out to support his local independent shops while savouring the delights of spring
Isn’t it great to feel the green shoots of optimism start to appear? That this happens at the same time as wild garlic so pungently scents the air of Balmerino (other pillaging sites are available) and the finest asparagus starts to emerge from the verdant earth of Eassie Farm seems just too good to be true after such a gruelling winter. We made it!
Omnipresent as it is, wild garlic isn’t the only thing that’s running wild and free right now. In this past week I’ve actually left my house every single day, even venturing as far as Edinburgh on one particularly emancipated Saturday.
The capital and all its glories might be a mere 55 miles away but it felt like going to Hawaii after being grounded in an airport terminal with Carole Malone for a year – a prospect only just preferable to slow death by Chinese water torture, or having Douglas Ross whisper manifestly sibilant sweet nothings in your ear as you try to work out who this irritant is.
Simple lunches
Spirits have been raised by a series of good, simple lunches, often with ingredients from the increasingly essential Urban Grocery in Newport which now stocks a selection of cheese from IJ Mellis and – joy of joys – a pungent, viscous nectar of a balsamic vinegar from A L’Olivier, imported to the UK by the excellent oil merchant in London and now available in Fife.
This balsamic is miles away from the watery sink-water stuff you normally get in supermarkets, and tasting it is a revelation. A lunch of burrata, artichoke and bread became food of the gods when drizzled with some River Café olive oil, rasping in its intensity, and a very few drops of this essential aromatic elixir.
Warning! It’s expensive but in terms of cost per wear, treat it like you would treat the purchase of expensive knickers or a cologne from Chanel and you will be mightily rewarded. A few drops are all that are needed to raise a dish to celestial levels.
Much as I love the Urban Grocery, Wormit and Fife in general I have to admit I’ve really been climbing the walls to leave.
I mean, I wouldn’t say boredom has set in but there’s only so many Antiques Road Trip repeats you can watch before Hollyoaks starts to feel like Fassbinder or Coppola. There’s only so many times you can go to bed thinking that tomorrow’s another day, only to find that it’s just the same as this one – only longer.
Not for nothing is Candi Staton’s Young Hearts Run Free one of my Desert Island Discs and not for a long time has this rather more vintage heart needed to breathe some new, more expectant air and feel like a stranger in a strange land.
This used to be what we would call a holiday but now we live in an age when a day trip needs to feel like a week in the sun, without the thrill of the duty free or the risk of being turned away from the entry gates of Europe.
Lochee holiday fortnight
I remember when we were young and mum couldn’t afford to take us on holiday – these were the leanest years when even Butlins in Ayr was just as unrealistic for us as Mustique – and I was drilled in what to say if anyone asked why we were still in Lochee during the holiday fortnight.
With hindsight I have to admire mum’s resilience and stoicism, albeit now seen through the eyes of pathos. Even then it was all about saving face from what the neighbours might think and it was always about keeping up appearances – although we were a long way from hyacinth bouquets and a semi in suburbia.
Spring was always a problem because it heralded summer and summer meant lying about holidays. Stuck in our one-bedroom tenement flat, mum often lied to spare any perceived shame, just as she found that if she called macaroni cheese “magic soufflé” then I would stop throwing a food strop and happily eat it.
Our holidays really invented the staycation in that they would take us “a day here and a day there”, which was really mum’s euphemism for doing jigsaws at home while boiling condensed milk for tablet and inventing magic soufflé.
A day here and a day there was stretching the truth somewhat – being poor and not having a car, most days we never made it anywhere close to there because remaining here was easier and infinitely cheaper.
May is such a great month and that’s before we even remember that today is May Day, often signified by amateur photographers lurking like lizards near rivers, aching for the money shot of a female student jumping off a bridge in a cheesecloth bikini. Meantime those of us who still unashamedly identify as lefties like to acknowledge the significance of May 1 in the continuing struggle for worker’s rights.
The Independent Cook
My favourite May meals will inevitably include asparagus, Jersey Royal potatoes, trout, salmon, broad beans and early strawberries – not on the same plate but as part of a simple-yet-hugely-luxurious banquet.
As Jeremy Round and many others have pointed out, asparagus and Jersey Royals are the epitome of amazing seasonal food in that they are available for such a short time and that’s why I eat them so much when they’re at their peak.
Reading Jeremy Round’s incomparable book The Independent Cook it’s inevitably the chapter on May that always leaps out, the very words seemingly inviting sunshine into our lives after a winter of gales and cold.
Round’s much-missed mix of waspish humour, expansive knowledge and brilliant writing combine to make this – his only book before his death in 1989 at the age of 32 – a true classic, and one that is often overlooked in the rush to find a new writer with a daring twist on gluten-free brownies. The Independent Cook is serious and studied, but also very funny.
Cucumber soup
Here is Jeremy Round writing about cucumber and prawn soup, the opening recipe in the May chapter of the book: “cucumber soup sounds such a good idea – refreshing, delicate, ideal for elegant lunches on the lawn – but the reality generally turns out to be at best faintly metallic, at worst one of the culinary blights of the British summer.
Otherwise perfectly rational cooks, who would not expect to get carrot soup by grating carrots into yoghurt, or chicken soup by chopping cold chicken into cream mixed with a chicken stock-cube, nevertheless plough on with recipes that promise magical transformations of raw cucumber by such means”.
This soup, along with his recipes for broad bean and artichoke salad, baked sea trout with cucumber and dill sauce, and elderflower fritters, is the embodiment of seasonal joy, the start of long, languid days that we could only dream of in February.
When I lived in France two of the highlights of April and May were the most astonishingly perfumed Gariguette strawberries and white asparagus, neither of which I am convinced would taste as good eaten outside France, just as a great wine you find on holiday never tastes the same when you get it home.
I have never found Gariguette strawberries in a UK shop although a recent quick search did show they are sometimes available online – or, of course, you could try growing your own. The season is very short but it’s so worth it. These are the best strawberries you will ever eat, and I speak as a man who pays daily visits to the glorious West Friarton Strawberry Shed all summer.
Mme Debillard
One of my fondest memories of life in France is cycling up to the next village where Mme Debillard ran her épicerie, a classic grocery that was a true Aladdin’s cave of all that was good, French and local.
Going in there was always an adventure because Mme didn’t speak English and my French was only marginally better than her English. Despite that we struck up a respectful friendship, initially based on the fact that she was friendly with the couple we bought the house from and she would excitedly run off to telephone them in their new home in Paris, updating them on what we had done to their house. I would go to the shop once a day, as much for the thrill of feeling so quintessentially French as actually buying something.
A bell would ring when you entered the dark space and, for a few minutes, you’d be quite alone because Mme lived in the back of the shop and her advancing years meant it took her quite some time to walkthrough. She would appear through a curtain-like she was arriving on stage and, hobbling towards the counter in the gloom, it felt like a theatrical event.
Here was a part of French culture that was essentially dying, stifled by the arrival of large supermarkets with sections of international produce like HP sauce and Carr’s water biscuits. Mme Debillard’s shop was resolutely French.
This grand dame knew everything and everyone and to be accepted into the community by her was laudable.
Mme took great pride in being the first to stock the local strawberries and it was here that I tasted my first Gariguette. Here was the essence of strawberry in a small, intensely sweet fruit bursting with flavour.
Coupled with white asparagus from the fields up the road, here was a distillation of hope in the form of a simple, local lunch.
As more businesses here open up after lockdown please support your local independents, this spring and always.
The Urban Grocery, 52 High Street, Newport-on-Tay, DD6 8AD. Tel 01382 541974 @theurbangrocerynewportontay
Jeremy Round. The Independent Cook. Out of print but used copies online from £14
