Leafy Greens

I ate this rather soothing way with lettuce twice last week, once for lunch, accompanied by a piece of salmon, the second time for supper, with nothing but a hunk of soft farmhouse bread, the sort with a dusting of white flour on top. Light, juicy, and clean tasting.

A good soup for a spring day, bright green and not too filling.

Two of these cheese-and-potato cakes are ample for a main course with maybe a spinach or chicory salad to follow.

A sweet-sharp salad with a creamy dressing. Avoid the temptation to overmix the salad, as the beets are inclined to send everything a very unfetching shade of marshmallow pink.

The stuffed baked potato, that bastion of comfort eating, given a contemporary treatment.

As much as I like big flavors, I sometimes want something more gentle, a little genteel even. French beans lend themselves to such cooking.

Anyone who has shelled a bag of peas will know how good they are raw. Far too little is made of their scrunchy sweetness, and I put forward the pod-fresh raw pea as an idea to throw into salads of pale yellow butterhead lettuce, cracked wheat, or dishes of cooked fava beans. They work in their uncooked state only when very young and small. Old peas are mealy and sour. One rainy lunchtime in June, I put them into a simple salad of Peter Rabbit lettuce, crisply cooked smoked bacon, and hand-torn ciabatta. The result—restrained, refreshing, and somehow quintessentially English.

Midsummer is a time of extraordinary activity in my garden. Every day brings with it a new shoot, a newly opened rose, a froth of lettuce seedlings. At this point I make a soup of the older lettuces and peas, and yet there is no reason why I shouldn’t make it throughout the year with frozen peas and produce-market lettuce.

Among the charcoal and garlic of midsummer’s more robust cooking, a quiet salad of palest green can come as a breath of calm. Last June, as thousands joined hands around Stonehenge in celebration of the summer solstice, I put together a salad of cool notes: mint, fava beans, and young peas—a bowl of appropriate gentility and quiet harmony.

One of those soups that doubles as a main course, earthy, filling, and beefy. The soup relies on the onion to add depth and body.

Even though much of the bitterness of this cultivar has been bred out, some extra sweetness is often welcome. Casting around for something sweet to scatter over a plate of steamed kale, I suddenly remembered the Sicilian habit of adding golden raisins to soft, sweet onions. The contrast between the leaves and their seasoning is strangely comforting. Quite when you might eat this is debatable. We first ate it with treacly rye bread and Gruyère cheese, next to fillets of smoked mackerel. It is tricky to know where it would sit most comfortably.

Kale is just one possibility for bulking out this supper of pork balls and broth. I use it because I like the fullness of its leaves with the smooth pork balls. You could use any member of the greens family, and particularly Savoy cabbage. The important bit is not to overcook the greens.

The soup-stew, a bowl of spoon-tender meat, beans, and aromatics that partly collapse into the surrounding stock, is one of the suppers I hold dearest. More often taken as lunch, this is food that feeds the soul as much as the belly, enriching, calming, quietly energizing. This is the cooking on which to lavish the cheapest cuts going, the fatty, bony lumps that butchers sell at reduced prices: mostly cuts from the neck and lower legs. Ingredients whose sole purpose is to give body to the liquid in which they cook. A knuckle end of prosciutto would be a sound addition here, if your local deli will sell you one. Most will charge very little. Butchers are an excellent source of ham bones with much meat attached. Failing that, I use a lump of ham, complete with its thick layer of fat.

I often take bright young leaves and their sprouting shoots, cook them briefly in boiling water, then toss them into sizzling butter seasoned with garlic and lemon as an accompaniment for grilled pork belly, a roast fillet of lamb, or a nice piece of fish. That said, it still takes up more room on the plate than the meat. Red Russian kale, which I often cook in this way, is finer boned than the curly plumes we know so well. The heavily laced leaves have a fragility to them, and wilt quickly after picking. For all their gentility and mauve-pink blush, they still carry something of the coarseness of the stronger stuff.

A fantastic little recipe, cheap, simple, and fast. I usually have some bread with this, if only to rub round the plate afterwards. This is best on very hot plates.

I have long made a simple artichoke soup by adding the scrubbed tubers to softened onions, pouring over stock, and then simmering until the artichokes fall apart. I often add a little lemon juice, bay leaves, and sometimes a thumb of ginger. I blitz it in the blender, then stir in lots of chopped parsley. Some might introduce cream at this point but I honestly don’t think it’s necessary. The soup is velvety enough. It has become a staple in this kitchen over the last few winters; its warm nuttiness is always welcome on a steely-skied January day. Late in the winter of 2008, possibly having had one day too many of what Beth Chatto calls “dustbin-lid skies,” I changed the soup’s tone by adding a stirring of bright green spinach. As often happens, it came about by accident—a bowl of creamed spinach left over from a boiled ham lunch—added to the soup just to use it up. The magic in this soup is in the marriage of earthy cold-weather food and a shot of mood-lifting chlorophyll. Spring is obviously stirring.

A damp January morning (2006) and a walk round the vegetable patch reveals only two herbs in reasonable condition: rosemary, which loses some of its potency in winter, and parsley, most of which has collapsed in a dead faint to the ground. I value both enormously, feeling even now that they have an edge on the imported basil and spindly thyme in the markets. Both respond well to earthy winter cooking. Chilled to the bone (I find it’s the damp that gets to me more than the temperature), I come in and use the parsley where it really matters: in a pan of braised artichokes and pork sausage, whose brown depths I freshen up with Italian lemons and, at its side, some crisp and chewy greens.