This article was also published in the Financial Times.
Menus that rely on seasonal ingredients are now ubiquitous. But are they always in the customers' best interests?
I was left wondering this point after a recent conversation with an American restaurateur who had just had a heated exchange with his chef over whether the extremely popular hamburger should continue on their bar menu.
The debate raged over the seasonality of the three condiments served alongside the burger. Each is made in-house but the chef wanted to take the whole dish off the menu because he could no longer buy the tomatoes for his tomato relish at his local farmers' market. As far as he was concerned, the absence of locally grown tomatoes made the dish unseasonal.
The week sees the first appearance in any volume of two very particular but very different seasonal British ingredients: asparagus and new season's lamb. These ingredients will, however, be received very differently by professional chefs despite their seasonality.
The former will be embraced with glee by every chef who sees the appearance of these thick, verdant stalks as a symbol – along with wild garlic, spring greens, purple sprouting broccoli, wild leeks and nettles – that spring has finally sprung.
New season's lamb will not engender the same enthusiasm at all. For many chefs this meat simply does not have the same depth of flavour as the lamb they have been buying for the past six months. This older lamb, now technically called hogget because it is a year old, having been born last spring, is what they will continue to delight in cooking.
2011 looks like being a vintage crop for British asparagus, according to Vernon Mascarenhas of Secretts Farm, Surrey, who supplies 280 professional kitchens. Down a crackly mobile from a muddy field he reported that the crown of the nascent asparagus had already appeared in a good position thanks to unseasonably warm weather at the end of February and early March. His only regret was that the potentially lower prices due to increased supply would be offset by higher fuel costs.
Tom Pemberton, the talented chef at Hereford Road, west London (photo courtesy of Jean Goldsmith), and a stickler for British ingredients, has been kept informed of the development of Secretts' asparagus by a series of emails from Mascarenhas that he described as 'highly detailed'. 'I'm expecting my first delivery on Monday 11 April and, if the price isn't too high – and sometimes it is at the very beginning because of the novelty factor – it will go straight on to the menu', he reported.
And although the asparagus will appear in various different forms on his daily changing menu, the overriding cooking principle will not change. Nothing too dramatic is his leitmotif for cooking asparagus: grilled and topped with a grated, hard British cheese; steamed alongside a fried duck egg; or steamed and anointed with rapeseed oil. Then, sounding like the good housekeeper that every chef/proprietor has to be, he added 'and we'll be using all the trimmings for an asparagus soup'.
But this enthusiasm for asparagus pales compared with the pleasure Pemberton derives from cooking lamb, an ingredient that is never off his menu due to his weekly purchase of one whole lamb from a Welsh farmer whose name, he assured me, really is Tom Jones.
Our dinner began with an excellent combination of lambs' sweetbreads with pearl barley and thyme that Pemberton had created to give an English twist to a dish initially inspired by a recipe from the Middle East. Lamb appeared twice more in the main courses: as slices of a pink rump alongside an exceptionally well-judged arrangement of celeriac and anchovy; and as a whole lamb shoulder with leeks and laverbread for four. (Dinner for three came to £109 with wine but excluding service.)
Pemberton's appetite for cooking lamb with the requisite age and flavour extends to lambs' tongues, which they brine, kidneys, the saddle, the leg, and the breast rolled around a plethora of herbs and well-seasoned. The passion in his voice dissipated only when I asked him about new season's lamb and when it might first appear on his menu. 'I think new season's lamb has only half the flavour of the lamb we're buying at the moment. I won't be putting it on the menu until July at the earliest.'
For clarification of just why this is the case I turned to Tim Wilson, who over the past decade has become the source of great meat, and up-to-the-minute meat counsel, to both domestic and restaurant chefs.
Wilson farms extensively in Yorkshire and, since 2004, has developed four successful branches of The Ginger Pig butcher's shops across London. He kindly interrupted a meeting with his accountant to talk to me but laughed somewhat resignedly when I mentioned that the topic was going to be new season's lamb.
'When we first opened in London, we never stocked new season's lamb but we've been forced to because that's what our customers believe is right to eat at Easter. But it isn't.
'New season's lamb refers to lambs that are born now rather than lamb that is ready to eat now. To have young lamb ready to eat now means tupping the ewe in September and October rather than in January. This can be done, although it's much more expensive. But the problem is that these lambs then have to spend the next few months in sheds on a diet of mother's milk, cereal and hay. They never go out to pasture, and certainly not during the winter we've just had, to develop the flavour that is so wonderful when it's slow cooked or with rosemary and garlic.'
When I asked Wilson when his spring lamb would be ready to eat, his response was precise. '2 July, when they've been out in the fields for 20 weeks.'