"Tis the season"
Posted: 25/09/2009 4:04:38 p.m.
The constant availability of things that once were seasonal makes the food year less interesting. I’m old enough to remember when tomatoes were seasonal, not something that always greet you in a giant, slightly insipid looking pile when you walk into the produce section of the supermarket.
There must be so many people growing up nowadays who don’t think of tomatoes, and for that matter, zucchini, green beans, peppers, cucumbers and eggplant as seasonal. They just think of them as something that is there all year. This sort of mindset even inhabits the realm of the consumer price index measurements, where, last August I heard the news reports quoting how “over the past quarter the price of lettuce had doubled”. Hardly surprising. So it’s a great relief that there are some things that remain unavailable for large parts of the year.
But there are so very few now. I can only really think of asparagus and new potatoes in the vegetable realm. Of course there are Whitebait and Oysters made seasonal to some extent by the control of harvesting, but seasonal nevertheless. And I can hear some people saying that the round red things in the supermarket in August are not actually tomatoes…that the only real tomatoes are the ones we eat in February and March that have ripened on the vines, and that is a fair observation, but most tomatoes eaten in NZ are those tomatoes. I’m very fond of the seasons, especially the part where we don’t have something and spend our time imagining the time when we will get to eat it. In the world were everything is right there in front of us when we want it, it’s nice to have to wait, to anticipate, to look forward to something.
I’d be interested in reader’s observations about other things that are still truly seasonal. And in ways that they like to prepare asparagus when it’s finally in season.