A small crop of recent seasonal morsels from @tracingpaper:

• Know your seasons: Eat Seasonably calendar, River Cottage tables, Eat the Seasons weekly list9/6/2009
• Extreme seasonality: vegetable assassin Ninjin cracks down on unseasonal produce. Remember, every vegetable has its season4/6/2009
• In season in pictures1/6/2009
• UK government goes seasonal (part 1): DEFRA backs the Eat Seasonably campaign1/6/2009
• UK government goes seasonal (part 2): DH advises hospitals to source seasonal food (to the disgust of the Fresh Produce Consortium)1/6/2009
• Excellent seasonal fruit and vegetable guide from Mostly Eating – spring edition 5/4/2009

For the very latest morsels, follow The Tracing Paper’s twittered morsels of news, information and observation: on Twitter @tracingpaper, closer to home on The Tracing Paper’s homepage, sidebar and The Twittering Paper (subject to Twitter’s slightly erratic feed).

Related posts:

1. Seasonal food cloud for April
2. Seasons’ greetings
3. Morsels: local sourcing, spring food, Gary Nabhan, urban farming, honest poultry, polluted produce, giant bins, gastronomical investigations

It’s April – nearly time for hot cross buns, though the mass-produced variety is increasingly available almost year-round.

The Taste of Britain, by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown, specifies just what constitutes a hot cross bun:

A circular bun about 100mm in diameter, 50-60mm high. Weight: about 50g. Colour: golden brown, highly glazed, with a white cross marked on the surface. Flavour: lightly spiced.

but finds little of substance to say about their cultural origins:

Hot cross buns are baked for Good Friday in Britain. Their early history is unknown. Speculations have been made about possible pagan origins, but no firm conclusions have been reached.

The Oxford Companion to Food says a little more about the flavour and their (speculative?) wide-ranging origins:

a round bun … containing … spices, such as cinnamon, nutmeg, allspice, and cloves … marked on top with a cross … The mark is of ancient origin, connected with religious offerings of bread, which replaced earlier, less civilised offerings of blood. The Egyptians offered small round cakes, marked with a representation of the horns of an ox, to the goddess of the moon. The Greeks and Romans had similar practices and the Saxons ate buns marked with a cross in honour of the goddess of light, Eostre, whose name was transferred to Easter.

England in Particular: A Celebration of the Commonplace, the Local, the Vernacular and the Distinctive, by Sue Clifford and Angela King of Common Ground, offers a selection of religious and pagan origins:

the cross … links them to the communion wafers marked with a cross and consecrated on Good Friday. Their origins may go back much further, the crossed bun perhaps representing the four quarters of the moon, or the sun and our four seasons

Home-baked hot cross buns are far superior to plastic-wrapped shop-bought imitations, though many good craft bakers produce excellent buns. To bake them at home, take your pick from dozens of recipes from Delia to Dan (Lepard).

(On the subject of Easter, ever wondered how Easter eggs are made? See inside Cadbury’s Bournville Easter egg factory.)

Related posts:

1. Seasonal food cloud for April
2. The making of Easter eggs: inside Cadbury’s Bournville factory

It’s March – eat some hedge garlic.

Hedge Garlic (Alliara petiola) is one of the earliest fresh spring greens of the hedgerow, its bright green garlicky leaves appearing from February and at their best as the plant flowers in April and May.

Otherwise known as garlic mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge, it has a more delicate, but nonetheless distinctly oniony, aroma and flavour than the better known wild garlic or ramsons (Allium ursinum).

Much of the flavour is lost in cooking but it holds its own in a salad. As well as the leaves, the young flowers are edible and particularly attractive.

John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) – notes that:

Jack-by-the-Hedge … has many Medicinal Properties, and is eaten as other Sallets, especially by Country People, growing wild under their Banks and Hedges.

Evelyn knows the herb also as sauce-alone, for hedge garlic works well as a garnish and in uncooked sauces.

Richard Mabey’s Food for Free (Collins Natural History) gives a simple but delicious recipe for a sauce for lamb along the lines of mint sauce – just finely chopped hedge garlic (with a little hawthorn and mint) mixed with vinegar and sugar.

Like both garlic and mustard (though it’s not related to either), hedge garlic is highly versatile in the kitchen. Roger Phillips, in his beautifully photographed and meticulously researched Wild Food (Natural history photographic guides), reports that it was once often matched with mutton, salt fish, bacon and herrings.

Related posts:

1. Garlic from the hedgerow
2. St George’s mushrooms, a sublime taste of Spring

Related posts:

1. What is seasonal food?

Related posts:

1. Brassicas up close

The Tracing Paper looks forward to 12 months of delicious seasonal food.

Related posts:

1. Seasonal food cloud for April
2. Seasonal morsels: calendar, tables, lists, government support, assassinations
3. What is seasonal food?

Discovery apples

First of the season: Discovery apples

Discovery is the earliest main commercial variety, ready for picking in mid-August and on sale almost immediately. Find them at markets, in greengrocers and the more enlightened supermarkets.

For a brief few weeks, these green and red flushed apples are the best around, deliciously juicy, crunchy and aromatic. As a summer apple, it is perhaps appropriate that there’s a hint of strawberry about the flavour. They don’t cook particularly well but are sublimely delicious eaten simply raw, pair well with soft fruit in a fruit salad and make good juice.

The earliest apples

According to leading top fruit marketer, Norman Collett, this year’s early summer heatwave brought forward the start of the Discovery harvest, with the very first apples on sale at Tesco’s Pembury store on Tuesday 24th July. Discoveries went on sale across Kent on 3rd August and nationwide a week later.

Not for storage

Unlike some later varieties, such as the Cox’s Orange Pippin, the Discovery is best eaten soon after harvest and only becomes soft and tasteless if stored for more than a week.

Many of the later varieties store well enough to be enjoyed as late as March, but only cookers like the Bramley are good throughout the year.

A recent heritage

The Discovery is a relatively new addition to the hundreds of varieties of apple grown in Britain (the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale has 1,882 varieties, from ADW Atkins to Zomer Delicious) but venerable in the company of other commercially grown apples.

Discovery’s origins

Essex farmworker, Mr Dummer, of Langham, near Colchester in Essex, raised the very first Discovery seedling in 1949, probably from the pip of a Worcester Pearmain, crossed with Beauty of Bath. (Local exotics: the journey of apples from Kyrgyzstan to East Anglia describes how the genetic diversity of apples is such that the seedling of any pip is effectively a new variety.) According to the excellent East of England Apples and Pears Project, the original tree still survives.

Legend has it that, having only one arm, he asked his wife to help plant out the young seedlings, but she slipped and broke her ankle. The seedling was left lying on the ground, protected only by some sacking, but somehow survived. Dummer recognised the qualities of the new apple: ripening early like its parent the Worcester Pearmain, resistance to disease and late frosts, a tendency not to drop and better storing potential than other early apples.

From garden tree to national markets

Dummer’s apple was eventually noticed by Jack Matthews, a nurseryman from Thurston, near Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. He took grafts and started selling trees under the name Thurston August. In 1962, the name was changed to the snappier Discovery and the apple went on to become the leading early commercial British variety.

The Discovery is an easy apple to grow and the fruits are all the more delicious eaten straight from the tree. Keepers Nursery sells one and two year-old trees on various rootstocks.

More to come…

The Discovery is just one of the first English apples to enjoy, soon to be followed by Laxton’s Early Crimson, Early Windsor, Blenheim Orange, D’Arcy Spice, Ribston Pippin, Cox’s Orange Pippin and many, many more.

Further reading on apples

Read the Tracing Paper on the origins of apples and Bramley apples.

Find links to apple resources online and in print at foodresources.co.uk.

This post is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by Marija from Palachinka.

Related posts:

1. Bramley apples, an English culinary icon resurgent
2. Exotic locals: apples’ journey from Kyrgyzstan to East Anglia
3. Peach blossom

For their sublime aroma and intense sweetness, and for the sake of our desperately declining cherry orchards, do whatever it takes to find and eat some British cherries over the next couple of weeks. We’re losing our cherry orchards at an alarming rate and the only way to save them is to eat more British cherries.

Finding British cherries

Henrietta Green’s Foodlovers Britain is running the CherryAid campaign to promote and support the British cherry, leading up to British Cherry Day on Saturday 19th July. Particularly useful is the directory of Pick Your Own and farm shops selling cherries.

The wonderful and distinctive Common Ground also celebrates cherries within its Orchard Path “journey through trees, blossom, fruit…”

The Romans to thank

Cherries have been cultivated in Britain since their introduction – like so much else – by the Romans, but almost all our once extensive cherry orchards have been lost since the War. Of the 30 to 40 thousand acres of orchards 60 years ago, we’ve now under a thousand acres left.

Cherries were grown across the south and west of the country, with the greatest concentration of orchards in Kent – close to the hungry London market and the growing expertise of the continent – since the 16th century. British cherries are almost exclusively English cherries – though much grown in nearby Herefordshire, I can find no record of cherry production in Wales.

Traditionally grown as large standard trees, harvesting cherries was a laborious process involving long ladders, scissors and sieves. Like other commercially grown fruit, almost all modern cherry growers now use dwarfing rootstock for smaller trees. Harvesting is far easier and the trees can be netted to protect the valuable fruit from hungry birds. A few old orchards survive, such as the illustrated Park Farm orchard, where the custom of letting sheep graze beneath the trees also continues.

Sweet and sour

A little like cooking and dessert apples, cherries come in sweet and sour varieties, though the sour are now very little grown. There are dozens of varieties of both types – the Brogdale National Fruit Collection has 306 varieties of cherry in cultivation, from Alba Heart and Aldridge’s Unknown to Yellow Spanish and Zweitfruhe – all descended from two species still found growing wild in Britain.

Prunus cerasus is the parent species of the sour cherries, while Prunus avium (known as the gean or mazzard) is parent to the sweet varieties. The fruit of Prunus avium can be as delicious as any cultivated cherry but the birds generally get to them first. Legend has it that the wild trees still grow along old Roman roads, where passing Romans discarded the stones.

Eating cherries

What to do with cherries? It’s hard to resist just eating them, savouring them one by one. But the food blogging community has plenty of suggestions for more adventurous uses of cherries, from traditional Kentish cherry batter (better known by its fancy French name, clafoutis – cooked and blogged by Alex at Eating Leeds and Cook Sister!, amongst others) and madelines with cherries to lemon and cherry posset to Girl Interrupted Eating’s inspired Wild Mallard Duck with Balsamic Cherries and Lentils.

Farewell huffkin, long live the cherry

Another traditional confection, the cherry huffkin – a flat, round tea-cake with a hole in the middle filled with hot cherries – seems sadly extinct. By eating more British cherries, we can help make sure the cherry doesn’t go the same way.

Postscript – The huffkin lives!

Happily, it appears that the huffkin lives on after all. In his travels round Britain with a fork, Matthew Fort tracked down a baker who’s recreated the huffkin – Martin Flynn of Oscar’s Bakery at 3 Limes Place, Preston Street, Faversham, Kent. There’s talk of the distinguishing dimple in the top but no suggestion that it might contain cherries.

Related posts:

1. Promise of summer fruit, threat of a blackthorn winter
2. Bramley apples, an English culinary icon resurgent
3. Peach blossom

Cherry plums (Prunus cerasifera also known as myrobalans) vary in colour from a deep, almost ox-blood, red to pale yellow, with the fruit ripening any time from mid July to late August. A small group of trees along a hedge-line can give a good harvest over several weeks.

Cooking and eating cherry plums

The fruit are versatile and delicious. Taste and texture, like the colour, vary between trees, but most of the fruit are excellent eaten raw. Cherry plums can be substituted for ordinary plums or damsons in almost any recipe, from cobbler to chutney. With a high pectin content, they’re ideal for jams and jellies (the Cottage Smallholder has good recipes for both chutney and jelly). Alternatively, try pressing them for their sweet juice.

Finding cherry plums

Cherry plums are common across Britain, particularly south of the Wash-Severn line (as the Science and Plants for Schools website’s distribution map illustrates), but too often overlooked. By late August, most of the fruit ends up as a jammy mass beneath the trees.

The fruit can be difficult to spot when ripe, the bright colours masked by the dense green foliage, but their early blossom is easily spotted in the winter – it’s worth noting the sites of trees for summer foraging. Cherry plum trees are frequently found in small groups along hedgerows and garden boundaries, while a purple leaved and fruited variety is often grown in suburban streets.

The cherry plum is sadly neglected by some writers on wild food. It is unaccountably omitted from Roger Phillips’ otherwise excellent Wild Food (Natural history photographic guides), while Richard Mabey cursorily dismisses it in his classic Food for Free (Collins Natural History), suggesting that the trees rarely produce fruit, and that, even when they do, it’s only palatable if sweetened and cooked. I’ve enjoyed delectable sweet fruit every summer for more than 10 years – perhaps a consequence of the changing climate.

Though neither cherry nor plum (but a parent, with blackthorn, of the domestic plum), cherry plums are often mistaken for wild plums. Escaped domestic plums (Prunus domestica) are also found in the wild, their fruits as various as damsons, bullaces, greengages, ordinary plums and the small, yellow, cherry-plum-like mirabelle. All are superb fruit and worth gathering wherever they’re found.

(This post is my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted this week by In Mol Araan)

Related posts:

1. Promise of summer fruit, threat of a blackthorn winter
2. Peach blossom
3. Eat British Cherries now! (if it’s July)

Hedge Garlic (Alliara petiola) is one of the earliest fresh spring greens of the hedgerow, its bright green garlicky leaves appearing from February and at their best as the plant flowers in April and May.

Otherwise known as garlic mustard or Jack-by-the-hedge, it has a more delicate, but nonetheless distinctly oniony, aroma and flavour than the better known wild garlic or ramsons (Allium ursinum).

Much of the flavour is lost in cooking but it holds its own in a salad. As well as the leaves, the young flowers are edible and particularly attractive.

John Evelyn, in his Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets (1699) – (UK)(US)- notes that:

Jack-by-the-Hedge … has many Medicinal Properties, and is eaten as other Sallets, especially by Country People, growing wild under their Banks and Hedges.

Evelyn knows the herb also as sauce-alone, for hedge garlic works well as a garnish and in uncooked sauces.

Richard Mabey’s Food for Free gives a simple but delicious recipe for a sauce for lamb along the lines of mint sauce – just finely chopped hedge garlic (with a little hawthorn and mint) mixed with vinegar and sugar.

Like both garlic and mustard (though it’s not related to either), hedge garlic is highly versatile in the kitchen. Roger Phillips reports that it was once often matched with mutton, salt fish, bacon and herrings.

Essential Reading

Wild Food (Natural History Photographic Guides) by Roger Phillips (UK)(US)

Acetaria: A Discourse of Sallets by John Evelyn (UK)(US)

Food for Free by Richard Mabey (UK)(US)

Related posts:

1. It’s March – eat some hedge garlic
2. Alexanders: a forgotten vegetable
3. St George’s mushrooms, a sublime taste of Spring