Side

The smell you get from slicing freshly picked runner beans and the warm, herbal notes attached to the stalk of a tomato are, to my mind, the very essence of summer. Put those scents together and you have a recipe that is pure pleasure to make. A dish that could only mean midsummer—something to eat with cold salmon, a slice of crab tart, or a plate of grilled sardines.

My version of classic Italian baked peppers, but without the anchovies and with a last-minute stirring in of basil. There are some gorgeous flavors here, especially when the tomato juices mingle with the basil oil.

Midsummer is a time of extraordinary activity in my garden. Every day brings with it a new shoot, a newly opened rose, a froth of lettuce seedlings. At this point I make a soup of the older lettuces and peas, and yet there is no reason why I shouldn’t make it throughout the year with frozen peas and produce-market lettuce.

It is often worth introducing some sort of richness to vegetables with a heart of starch. Ideal suitors include butter, cream, bacon fat, and honey. Jane Grigson suggests cheese, often in the form of Gruyère or Parmesan, as do others, who have been known to roll a stiff parsnip mash in grated Parmesan and deep-fry it as a croquette. To this list I add my own, a shallow cake along the lines of a pan haggerty (potatoes and onions topped with cheese), made with thin slices of the root layered with grated cheese and herbs. Parsnip haggerty, anyone?

Eventually, possibly toward the end of your meal, you reach the point where the salty, herbal juices from the meat mingle with the sweet creaminess of those from the parsnips, a moment of intense pleasure. While winter was in its death throes, and the first white narcissi were starting to peak through the damp earth, I produced this for Sunday lunch with a leg of lamb spiked with tough old rosemary twigs. We passed round a bowl of winter chicory and watercress for everyone to take handfuls with which to clean the mixture of juices from their plates.

The tools for my winter gardening sessions tend to lie on the kitchen floor from one week to the next: the pruning knife, my leather-handled pruning shears, the largest of the two spades, the rake. They serve as a reminder that even though the garden may look crisp and neat from the window, there is still work to be done. It is during these cold, gray-sky days that I sometimes feel as if I live on soup. Roots—fat carrots, artichokes, and woody parsnips— are part of the lineup, along with onions and the occasional potato. I take much pleasure in the way something can be both earthy and velvety at the same time. Rather like my gardening gloves.

Whatever magic it may contain (and I certainly believe it does), honey is still sugar, and it seems extraordinary to add it to an already sweet root. But for some reason it works, bringing out the vegetable’s flavor and lending it a distinct depth. I can’t think of any better accompaniment to roast pork.

The thyme is essential here, adding an important herbal note to the general sugar-fest. You need something savory alongside, and nothing works quite so well as gloriously rare roast beef. Sausages come a close second.

I cook them in dripping or butter for preference. Peanut oil if there is nothing else. They take forty minutes to color interestingly but an hour will turn them into vegetable toffee. The initial steaming is worth the ten minutes’ wait and the pan to rinse and dry, helping as it does to keep them moist during the roasting and preventing them from toughening up in the heat.

These are the onions to have alongside a few slices of rare roast beef. The marriage of flavors is superb. If they are to be truly tender and silky soft, it is crucial to take them as far as you dare in the pre-cooking stage, before you scoop out the center and stuff them. They need to be boiled for a good half an hour, depending, of course, on their size. Any layers that are not supple and easy to squash between your finger and thumb should be discarded. There is no reason why these onions with their mushroomy, creamy filling couldn’t be served as a main dish. You would need two each, I think, and maybe some noodles, wide ones such as pappardelle, on the side, tossed in a little melted butter and black pepper.

I have eaten this for supper with a spot of harissa sauce stirred in (let down with a little water) but that is not really the idea. It is meant as an accompaniment to grilled lamb or fish, or perhaps some spicy meatballs. Instantly comforting, and as soothing as a pashmina.

Banana shallots (sometimes known as torpedo), the most generously proportioned and mild tasting of the shallot family, roast superbly, their translucent flesh almost melting inside their skins. I have eaten them this way with creamy goat cheese mashed with herbs (thyme, tarragon, chives) and with a lump of good, mouth-puckering Cheddar too. Yet they will also stand as a vegetable. I think it worth including them here for that alone.

One of those soups that doubles as a main course, earthy, filling, and beefy. The soup relies on the onion to add depth and body.

Like asparagus, leeks produce a particularly subtle risotto. The crucial point is not to let them color. Cook them over low heat, with a lid on if you wish, or maybe with a piece of wax paper on top. Either way they must not brown.

Onions were never a big deal at home when I was a kid. One or two turned up in the occasional stew, floating in the languid stock along with thickly sliced carrots, parsnips, and a bay leaf, but they were not stalwarts of our kitchen. In my teenage years I was finally introduced to the liver and onions so hated by most of my school friends, the onions cooked lovingly in our battered aluminium frying pan, blackened from years of Sunday fry-ups, until they took on the color of varnish and their flesh turned from acrid to a deep, honeyed sweetness. I took to this marriage of the intensely savory meat and sugary-sweet onions straightaway, though more for the glistening alliums than the panfried organ. My first attempts at cooking onions to match those luscious little nuggets I had been enjoying at home failed for lack of a heavy-bottomed pan and a little patience. The gorgeous, caramel-edged stickiness of a fried onion needs time in which to develop. A quick ten minutes in the thin frying pan that accompanied my crummy bedsit was never going to work. To make perfect fried onions, you need a shallow, heavy-bottomed pan. The temperature should be low to medium and the onions should be allowed to soften slowly. Winter onions, which contain less water, will produce a sweeter and deeper gold result. Summer onions, full of water, will produce rather a lot of liquid, which will have to be evaporated away by turning up the heat. The essence of frying onions is to let them soften in an unhurried manner with only the occasional stir to stop them sticking. You want their sugars to caramelize on the bottom of the pan; it is what gives fried onions their characteristic gloss and sweetness.

This sounds too spartan a recipe to be true but, when cooked slowly in butter, the leeks take on a deep sweetness that makes these cakes so much more than the sum of their simple parts. They are great with broiled bacon or cold roast beef.

In spring, the young leek is a welcome sight with its stick-thin body and compact green flags, particularly after the thick winter ones with their frozen cores. They are worth steaming and dressing with a mustardy vinaigrette or, as here, using as a base for a fava bean and bacon lunch. We sometimes have this in the garden, with inelegant hunks of bread and sweet Welsh butter.

A good side dish for Monday’s leftover cold roast meat. The quantities are deliberately vague because of the nature of leftovers. A recipe for which we must use our instinct.