It happens each spring, as sure as sun showers and swarming midges. The grass greens up, the blossoms pop and a switch flips in cooks across the country. We suddenly crave the tastes of summer corn and fresh, tender greens, of local strawberries and sun-ripened tomatoes. And then the waiting starts, because while it may be spring outside, local produce still needs weeks and even months to catch up.
I used to wait it out like a good locavore, scurvied but smug on a diet of shelf-aged potatoes and manky kale. These days: forget it. I cheat, and happily, thanks to another spring phenomenon you can always count on. Every April, a new crop of fruit- and vegetable-focused cookbooks appears in the bookstores, bursting with recipes for fresh cherry belle radishes sautéed in lemon brown butter, or pert, Green Goddess-drenched grilled corn and asparagus salads or sublimely verdant watercress and spring garlic soups. (Also: Shut it, Vancouver. We all know it’s already practically peak-produce season there.)
And so I can’t help myself. Neither should you. Here’s my look at three of the best picks from the new spring cookbook crop.
A Girl and Her Greens: Hearty Meals from the Garden, by April Bloomfield
British chef April Bloomfield became known, as if by default, for her meat-centric dishes. She’s good pals with the nose-to-tail pioneer Fergus Henderson, and two of her most famous dishes at the restaurants she runs in New York – the Spotted Pig and the Breslin – are burgers: a dirty and delicious beef version at the former and a feta-draped lamb one at the latter. Oh, right, and the cover of her last cookbook was a shot of Bloomfield holding a dead piglet, sack of potatoes-like, over her shoulders.
But the best recipe in that book by far was Bloomfield’s simple radish salad, in which you massage radishes, chopped parmesan and a bit of basil together, and then toss the lot with lemon, oil and a bit of arugula. It was time she did a veg-focused book.
A Girl and Her Greens doesn’t forsake meat entirely. Bloomfield interleaves sliced potatoes with sheets of the Italian cured pork fat called lardo and then roasts them, and she often relies on salt-packed anchovies – if you don’t have a tin, do yourself a favour – for umami-packed depth and punch. Still, the vegetables take the centre of the plate with most of these new recipes. The results had me rushing to the produce store.
There’s an unbelievably tasty salad that combines licorice-y roasted fennel with blood orange segments, fennel pollen, a few arugula leaves and grated Italian bottarga, the cured, salted mullet roe. After I made Bloomfield’s tagliatelle with fresh asparagus and Parmesan fonduta the other week, I nearly ate the entire pot. She does whole roasted Tokyo turnips – those are the sweet little white ones that brown up to a crisp in a hot oven – with greens, and Basque-style tomato-and-peppers pipérade with eggs poached into it, a little like the Middle East’s shakshuka. There’s a superb piccalilli, too, and roasted carrots that she dresses with carrot-top pesto and (you can’t lose, really) burrata cheese.
Though she’s now based in the U.S., Bloomfield is very much a British cook, and a working-class one at that. She’s never developed the brand of bougie preciousness that bedevils so much recipe writing. “So long as you find the right snap peas, you’ll have a smashing salad,” she says at one point. At another, she writes of growing up on Brussels sprouts “boiled to buggery.”
She fills A Girl and Her Greens not just with superb recipes and ideas (Morels with Madeira cream on toast, anyone? Or how about an extraordinary polenta stirred through with mascarpone cheese and kale purée?), but also with a you-can-do-this sensibility. I expect my copy will be well-worn and sauce-splattered before peak produce season hits.
My New Roots: Inspired Plant-Based Recipes For Every Season, by Sarah Britton
Britton was born and raised in Canada but lives in Denmark with her husband, Mikkel, and their son, Finn. She is young and gorgeous and strews her yogurt with rose petals in the mornings and cooks and eats a lot of raw/vegan/gluten-free dishes. In the winter she sips chaga mushroom tea.
She is also, according to her bio, an “acclaimed holistic nutritionist,” and has spoken at Ted Talks. If you’re thinking right now, woowoo, she’s coming for you, Gwyneth, yeah, that’s also what I was thinking. The problem is, My New Roots is an excellent everyday cookbook, filled with healthy, sensible and cravings-inspiring recipes.
Britton’s book does both showy, dinner-party-ready dishes and more-basic ones for eating at your desk. (Or after kettlebell booty camp, as you see fit.) She does a roasted grapefruit, for instance, that’s dressed with coconut sugar, ginger and rosemary and which she sides with a frothy, deeply flavoured macadamia nut cream that you whip up in a blender – it’s pretty much a perfect start to a lazy Sunday brunch party.
If that’s not your speed, she’s got a glorious Provençal chickpea flatbread called socca, which she tops with grilled white asparagus, feta and dill. There’s a whole lot of smoothie and energy bar-sort recipes, too.
All of this is interspersed with some great advice. My New Roots has a section on how to grow your own sprouts from adzuki beans, amaranth seeds, pinto beans and even walnuts (there’s a table with instructions for 33 different types of sprout). I haven’t tried this yet, but I will admit I am sorely tempted. Maybe I’ll try making mung bean sprouts right after my next kettlebell booty camp class.
The Broad Fork: Recipes for the Wide World of Vegetables and Fruit, by Hugh Acheson
Acheson is from Ottawa and learned to cook in the capital city, but he didn’t come into his own as a chef until moving in the 1990s to Athens, Ga. There, he combined his French training and love of fresh food with the traditions of Southern cooking. Today he’s one of North America’s best-known chefs, a fixture on the likes of Top Chef (U.S.) and a vocal advocate for sensible, healthy home cooking and eating.
The Broad Fork is aimed largely at all the people out there who want to cook and eat well but don’t know what to do with the weird produce in their weekly community supported agriculture baskets. (“ ‘What the hell do I do with kohlrabi?’ my neighbour asked me,” is how the book begins.)
Acheson takes readers through the seasons – through most of the produce aisle and the farmers’ market – with his trademark brand of simple, tasty cooking, and plenty of wiseacre advice.
Each ingredient gets a few recipes. Typically, Acheson includes at least one that’s dead-nuts basic, and another one or two that are progressively more complex. So for parsnips, he’s got a parsnip purée made with chicken stock and heavy cream, but also an oat risotto made with oxtail; the parsnips are shaved and used as a paper-thin garnish. For asparagus, there’s the basic stuff, but there’s also individual asparagus custards that you froth in a blender and then cook in a water bath on the stove.
What’s best about Acheson and his cookbooks, though, is how infectious his enthusiasm gets. Acheson’s tone stems from the school of if a dummo like me can make this, so can you. He’s no dummo of course, but the schtick works. The Broad Fork even sold me on kohlrabi, which is no minor trick.