Hungry Gap Fatigue?

For the first time in my life, the vast majority of my produce and meat are coming from a select group of farms within 100 miles from London (many are even closer). Whatever your feelings on the ‘locavore’ and ‘slow food’ movements, there are good and bad bits to both, this has been an exercise in relationships and creativity. Relationships, because purchasing select food products from the same grower/producer each week builds a trust and an understanding on each other’s offerings and needs. Creativity, because there are limited options based on what is in season. While I have previously discussed the social construction of season food and its implications, this is both a culinary discourse we face in Britain and is a climatological reality we cannot escape. Indeed the past month and a half – the ‘hungry gap’ – has been a sobering reminder of this reality and it is creativity we are celebrating.

Northern European climates endure a so-called ‘hungry gap’ each spring. This gap is the product of winter vegetables withering away due to warming weather and the odd freak-frost, while the new spring/summer crop is waiting to germinate. Stored potatoes and onions offer somewhat of a bridge, but aside from these staples, dark leafy greens are the reality of the season. The gap begins with purple sprouting broccoli, but soon becomes laden with spinach, spring greens, and Swiss chard. These are all lovely, delicious, and healthy vegetables, but a month and a half of them can become tiresome. Thankfully there is a bit of a positive externality.

Supplemented by meats, fish, cheese, and pulses, a whole array of delicious possibilities awaits the hungry gap. In fact, one resorts to an unbridled creativity in the kitchen, a creativity lacking in the age of over-designed cookbooks and omnipresent celebrity chefs. Supermarkets have their place, but deny the reality of the actual environment. To discover your culinary Jackson Pollock you must relegate the supermarket to emergency backup. So many techniques require exploration to rid this minimal list of ingredients of monotony – boiling, steaming, roasting, sautéing, frying, braising, simmering, grilling. Every technique should be used, ‘without fear and without favour’, to quote the FT. Variation in technique, rather than ingredients, is the key to enjoying such provisional paucity. This is the great understanding of classic French techniques – they offer wide variety of flavours even with a limited palate of ingredients. The same can be said for Chinese cooking, with its reductive sauce bases.

This is not a column to address the varied recipes available to transform greens, potatoes, mushrooms, and onions into tasty meals. That would be defeat the creative opportunities placed by nature in your kitchen. Mistakes will be made, but no good cook learns much of anything without the odd culinary disaster. I have a found a good laugh makes such experiences tolerable. I eagerly await the end of the hungry gap, but do not regret its existence. In many ways it has made me a better cook. Now that is something to be thankful for. Embrace what the local fields bring you and an ocean of possibilities lies ahead.