Seasonal food in July

Of all the produce available throughout the year, much of which I have eulogised over in these pages, no matter what I say about how I look forward to the start of the asparagus season or how I use the first early beetroot, extol the virtues of parsnips after they have seen a frost or the joys of seeing the first sprouting broccoli of the season in the shops, nothing can compare with the first flush of summer fruits.

They are just such a joy, if you grow your own vegetables and find that satisfying then growing your own fruit is almost hedonistic. The opportunity it gives to pluck and eat a strawberry straight from the plant, a raspberry from the cane, warm with the sun on a mid summers day or even something more exotic such as a Japanese wineberry is something not enough people experience or can appreciate.

These days of course the joy of picking your own fruits is much diminished as cheap airfreight now brings us exotic fruits from all over the world to our tables every day of the year. We no longer need to grow our own or even wait for our own varieties or our seasons to come along to be able to enjoy a strawberry, raspberry, even a redcurrant, they are now available to us at almost anytime of the year we fancy.

Some of you may be quite happy with this situation, some are more likely to be blasé about it but I have always taken the view that seasons are important, that strawberries are never as good in December as they are in June or July. True we eat mangoes, paw paws, rambutans and passion fruit and they come from the world over all year round, as too do our bananas and oranges that we all take too much for granted these days, but none of these grow in this country so I see no comparison.

The problem I suppose with having all these exotic fruits available to us year round as well as the ones we were more used to such as strawberries, is that it has a tendency to breed complacency, because we can have whatever we want, when we want it then a sort of ignorance sets in, we forget that we have seasons and what flavours real fruit has when grown and picked at the right time. In order to bring fruits to us from around the world and have them arrive on the supermarket shelves in the perfect state they all have to be picked before they have ripened, this has to and most definitely does affect flavour dramatically.

When our own fruits are grown and ripen on the trees then sold locally or picked in our own gardens and eaten soon after, the flavours are unbeatable. They actually have flavour, something which in our global market has become a rare and cherished commodity.

Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating that we abstain from eating banana or oranges or any of the more exotic varieties of fruits but what I am preaching is that as consumers it is best to be aware of the time of year, of what is coming into season locally, look out for the moment that the hard dark red almost bullet like strawberries from Israel or California come off the shelves and make way for the full flavour, properly ripened local ones.

Not only should they be far cheaper but also they will have not only flavour but also fragrance, another essential part of the eating experience. If you don't have the opportunity to grow your own and are resigned to having to buy your fruit, which must be the scenario for the majority, then be careful with what you buy.

Having rattled on about fruit from exotic climes and the virtues of local produce it can often seem to be more difficult to buy good local fruit than may first be expected. Handling fruits, especially the soft ones that I am concerned with in this article, can be a difficult and expensive occupation if you are a greengrocer.

We all want to buy our strawberries soft ripe and fragrant but too often they come while still a little hard or tart, either that or they go bad within a day. Well such is the nature of the beast I'm afraid and too few people recognise this problem.

All fruit and especially soft fruits are at their best at their peak of ripeness, straight from the plant, preferably on a warm day and eaten there and then. And it is for this very reason that pick you own farms have done so well as it is the closest you will get to growing your own, possibly even better as you do not have the hard work of actually doing the growing bit. After that the best place to buy then is from your local greengrocer, roadside stall or market stall, all of which in peak season are probably taking daily deliveries of local just-picked fruit. Fully ripe fruit will only last about 24 hours after that even the slightest bruise turns into a soggy patch of mould and decay, if you are buying fully ripened fruit like this then do not expect it to last very long, eat it the day you buy it for optimum flavour and freshness.

Fruits picked for the supermarkets on the other hand would generally have been picked a few days prior to the fruit becoming fully ripe and chilled immediately to stop, or at least drastically slow down, the ripening process. These will last longer, kept in the fridge then even longer still, but to get the best out of them try sitting them on a sunny window sill, or even outside on a warm day, for a few hours before eating, it will improve them considerably, direct sunlight is the best thing for all soft fruits. Imported strawberries for instance are picked while still very hard and extremely unripe to allow for the time it takes to transport them the vast distances they have to travel.

They are then subjected to ethylene gas in order to colour them up, this may turn them red but it does nothing either for their flavour or their texture. Soft fruit does not like to piled up on its self either, soft fruits are normally sold in punnets where the fruits are often up to 3 or 4 deep yet this has to be the worst possible way to pack them.

They press down on each other squashing and bruising the ones at the bottom causing them to weep and go mouldy much quicker than they would if laid out flat. So once you get them home it is best to gently lay them out on a tray before putting them on that sunny windowsill. Gooseberries, red, white and black currants are easier fruits to buy and they do keep much better and longer than raspberries and strawberries do even when ripe.

The start of the currant season is always one I look forward to with great excitement, as there is just so much you can do with them. Not only that but once their season is over they are not the most common of fruits to find imported year round and if you do find them out of season the are so prohibitively expensive as to make them unattractive. Of all the soft fruits these and raspberries freeze well, so if there is a glut, freeze them whole or try making them into a sweetened puree for use later in the year, or make them into an ice cream or sorbet.

Now raspberries do make a fantastic sorbet or granita, and this method will also work for strawberries. Once made and almost frozen try folding it into an equal quantity of slightly soften vanilla ice cream which is then popped back into the freezer for an hour to firm up again, it makes the best rippled ice cream you've ever tasted. Use the best of vanilla ice creams or make your own.

Raspberry or Strawberry Water Ice 1kg/2lb 4oz fresh raspberries or strawberries juice of 2 lemons 350-450g/12oz-1lb icing sugar Crush the fruit and rub them through a sieve to remove the seeds. Stir in the lemon juice and the sugar to taste. Either churn in an ice cream machine until frozen or pour into a tray and place in the freezer stirring occasionally until frozen. Cherries in this country have a very short season, one that is always augmented by the imports at the beginning of the season from Spain, Italy and southern France and at the back end of the season by ones from the USA but again there is little to beat a freshly picked English cherry.

They do tend to travel better than most soft fruits but always try them before deciding to buy, an unripe cherry is pretty awful and they do not ripen much once picked. Try putting your purchase of cherries into heavily iced water and chilling them right down, whereas most other fruits are best eaten warm there is just something about ice cold cherries this way that makes them irresistible.

Then there are peaches and again is there much that is better than a ripe English peach? Certainly it is a rare commodity but so too is any ripe peach these days, or so it seems, nectarines too are prone to being rock hard and semi green when bought and they never seem to soften up or sweeten at all preferring it seems to wrinkle up and dehydrate before becoming mouldy. Certainly an unripe peach is a travesty as much as a ripe one is a truly mouth wateringly (or should that be dribblingly) delectable.

Again they suffer from premature picking and being subjected to prolonged cold storage. And, like strawberries, they will benefit from a time spent sitting on a sunlit and warm windowsill prior to eating, but even this sometimes does not work. If you do manage to buy a ripe peach once again do not try to store it, eat it there and then, do not buy enough for days on end better to go out again tomorrow to buy more than to over stock with peaches that will wither before being consumed.

Later in the summer we see the emergence of the plum, when the strawberry and the raspberry season are almost over, with the exception of the late cropping varieties, along comes plums in all their different guises which include damsons, mirabelles and greengages. Again a fruit that is available for much of the year, but to what purpose? Flavourless and hard they often look pretty but is pretty really what we want?

Here I go again, back to the old theme, home grown or local grown plums are going to be so much tastier, I have a small Victoria plum tree in my garden, every year it provides a small but extremely welcome harvest of the most deliciously sweet slightly fragrant rosy skinned and sweet plums. Buy foreign plums, me! Not on your Nellie!