What Counts as Fresh Food?

To rejoice the spring in Rome, they occasionally take in a vegetable stew termed vignarola. Like the summer season succotash of the American South or the ratatouille of France, vignarola is a vegetable stew that, in its ideal form, is radiant with freshness. It is manufactured from artichokes, tiny contemporary fava beans and freshly shelled peas, all braised collectively with spring onions and white wine with clean mint additional at the close. Vignarola is a mellow mixture of all factors eco-friendly and new. It would when have marked the start out of the new year right after the hungry hole of late wintertime. But in an period when frozen peas are available all yr spherical, the dish’s stunning spring freshness no for a longer time signifies as much.

The good miracle of our present day foods system has been to source us with the freshness of spring all yr round—or at the very least with an approximation of it. We can buy juicy aromatic herbs in the depths of winter and spring chickens in the slide. When I discover myself acquiring twinges of nostalgia for the foods of the earlier, I try to remember how grim it ought to have been to endure for fifty percent the 12 months on tiny but salt pork, bread and molasses (as explained in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s publications for young children). Before refrigeration and modern approaches of agriculture, even butter and eggs ended up seasonal foodstuff. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks bundled unappetizing recipes for retaining eggs “perfectly good” by coating them in a thick layer of grease or submerging them in saltwater. By some means, these do not sound completely good—or at least not as excellent as dwelling in a time when fresh new eggs are readily available 12 months-spherical.