This Month

Forced or – as the growers call it – Champagne rhubarb from Yorkshire’s Wakefield Triangle (You can visit the Wakefield Rhubarb Festival) is as different from outdoor-grown as a vintage wine is from plonk. Its pale to startling-pink sticks are delicately textured and its flavour invigoratingly fresh. Still tart but nowhere near as sour as its outdoor summer-seasoned cousin.

Forcing rhubarb indoors is a uniquely British technique that dates back to the 19th century. To this day it is still produced in darkened, dank, Victorian forcing sheds lit by candles or tilly lamps. It takes three years to produce a crop as for the first two years the rhubarb crowns are grown outside with a particularly nitrogen-rich diet. The sticks are never picked but left to die back, ensuring all the goodness reverts back into the crown.

In November of the third year, once the necessary frosts have struck, the crowns are carefully lifted and placed on the floor of the forcing sheds. Here they grow from within themselves, producing slender sticks of the tenderest rhubarb with its mild astringency. Look out for varieties revelling in such names as Victoria, Stockbridge Arrow and Early Superb.

Visit FoodFinds for FoodLovers Approved rhubarb producers

Cook In Season
Baked Ginger Parkin with Rhubarb Ice Cream
Rhubarb & Marmalade Open Tart
Rhubarb & Ginger Cobbler

Own-grown potatoes are as good as it gets. The quick-off-the-mark may already have their seeds planted, if not, there’s still time. With Hampshire Potato Day and National Chip Week this month, it’s an ideal time to look around for different varieties and colours – whether heritage or modern. FoodLovers favourites include Edzell Blue with its striking violet skin or Roseval for a pink-blushed flesh. You can buy both seeds and actual potatoes from Carroll’s Heritage Potatoes.

Whatever variety you choose to grow it’s important to consider when you’ll want to lift them and how you’ll want to cook them. With maincrop potatoes, it’s the cell structure and the proportion of starch to dry matter that affects the cooked texture. ‘Waxy’ potatoes, with a lower starch content, boil and deep fry beautifully but are hopeless for baking or mashing; ‘floury’ potatoes, on the other hand, are ideal for purees as they collapse on boiling.

Visit FoodFinds for FoodLovers Approved potato producers

Cook In Season
Henrietta’s Roast Potato Chips
Chunky Chips
Champit Tatties

With the stock of cod in a parlous state, it remains the nation’s favourite fish. If you insist on buying it, make sure it comes from a sustainable source such as a properly managed fishery certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. It may be more expensive but Food Lovers should certainly think of cod as worth more than the fish & chip paper it comes in.

A lazy scavenger fish, cod lives on or near the sea bed in the North Atlantic and is one of the easiest fish to catch - one of the reasons that its population has been near-decimated - by 90% - since the 1960s. Normally gutted and frozen while still at sea but it is incomparable when fresh. Fishermen tell me that, aboard ship, they eat it ‘rested’, a mere day old, when its flesh has firmed slightly and the sweetness has intensified – we should be so lucky.

Cod is available every which way – filleted, in fingers, frozen, battered, crumbed and of course whole or in fillets or steaks to make the most of its meaty pearly-white flesh. The other option is to think of substituting it with less threatened – and often cheaper alternatives such as pollack or coley.
For FoodLovers Approved fishmongers and more, visit FoodFinds

Cook In Season
Poached Cod with Capers
Cod baked with Horn of Plenty
Deep-fried Cod
Fish & Chips