voices in food.
PHOTOGRAPHS: HANNAH HUGHES. FOOD STYLING: JESS MEYER. STYLING: VICTORIA ELDRIDGE
It’s a funny time of year, isn’t it? No longer winter, but not quite reliably balmy, beautiful spring. The mornings are still crisp when I walk the dogs.
It’s a transitional time, as they say in fashion. The what-to-wear dilemma – shrug off your big coat, but hold tight to scarves, cardigans, warm jackets – is matched by the question of what to eat.
After a winter of casseroles (which we must, apparently, always describe as ‘hearty’, in a slightly medieval-merchant manner) and thick soups, I’m longing to dive into a salad…
By salad, I don’t mean a simple green salad – which I eat almost every day, often after that ‘hearty casserole’ – but those salads that have ambitions to be dinner all on their own.
But I recommend we all hold out for a bit. If I commit to cold food too early in the year, I find it damply unsatisfying and am raiding the fridge for the makings of cheese on toast or a scrambledtogether pasta dish within the hour – with a generous hand on the chilli flakes too. Or I’m just disappointed, after the faff of preparation, that it’s not a pie (see this month’s recipe).
“Some days it’s full steam ahead with light soups and salads... Other days, it’s all fondue and fur knickers”
Soup is my friend at this time of year. Perhaps not the beany, lentily, hefty soups of midwinter, but lighter, brothy soups filled with wild garlic, watercress, sorrel and spring greens. To stretch my fashion analogy perhaps a step too far, it’s like swapping your winter 100 denier merino wool opaques for sprightly 20 denier sheer tights.