I was going to the market today. After all, it’s Saturday mid-June in France, and the farmers are just beginning to share their summer abundance—tomatoes appear in every color, local peaches and nectarines replace the imported Spanish ones, and lettuce sprouts in every color and leaf shape—green, red, compact, curly, and crisp. The Instagram photos would be amazing!
Then I looked outside at my poor, soggy garden (it’s the wettest year so far in 20 years!) and realized the time would be better spent harvesting my own abundance and practicing what I preach—Gardening is Cooking. This is about Finding France in your own backyard. So here goes, on a damp and cloudy mid-summer day when certain things thrive regardless of the weather.
The fava beans have been in that hidden raised bed since February, so I’ve basically ignored their green towers, white flowers, and puny pods until now—wow! Huge, well-developed, mature fava beans for cooking. They are so different from the first bright green waxy pods that we pop into our mouths raw or barely blanched at the first sign of spring, some no larger than my pinkie nail. These larger, bigger than two thumbs, will be starchy and pale yellow/green and perfect for cooking into a stew or making a type of hummus with garlic, salt, tahini, and pumpkin seed oil that a recent resident artist brought me from Austria along with some amazing poppy seed pesto. I can taste a simple supper coming my way.
I was too timid when harvesting the winter radicchio, as it was so beautiful, just leafing out in deep red and green colors. Now, it has more than bolted and is sporting beautiful blue chicory flowers and draping lazily over the garlic, which has suffered from rust and… overshading from the radicchio. I must look up cooking with chicory and see if I should harvest it or wait to just let it go into the all-forgiving compost bin.
The three pomegranate trees I planted four years ago (one in a massive pot) are flowering like crazy this year. At last! So, while I know I can thin out some of the fruit now, I will dry the flowers for summer ice tea and other herbal concoctions.
Ditto with the sage. Massive! And needs cutting back. So look out, evil spirits, as there will be enough for smudge sticks and Judy Witt Francini’s porchetta salt made with sage, rosemary, and garlic to use on everything throughout the year.
Turnip greens success! The easiest of all the greens to grow, I bought the seeds in Spain last year for growing grelos—a turnip plant grown for just the tops or greens. I have enough to harvest an entire basketful, which I’ll cook down with some caramelized onions, chop up, and use over the next week in different recipes, reserving the brothy “pot liquor” for poaching a few eggs for lunch. Delicious as well as super nutritious, although the French don’t eat them, turnip greens star in many northern Spanish dishes with potatoes and pork. I will treat them more like a mains dish vegetable and build a few meals around the fragrant cooked leaves— as a bed on which to serve grilled mackerel or folded into an arroz con grelos, rice and greens dish.
A small basket of black currants becomes a cooked-down syrup for pancakes or other desserts. Each day, there is a handful of ripe raspberries to harvest that will be eaten immediately before I reach the kitchen.
Last year’s tall swaying fennel heads are opening, and I will let most develop into seeds for later harvesting, but there are enough tall stalks to clip for drying now and use when grilling fish or braising with rabbit.
Ditto, with the one lost celeriac root that escaped harvest last year; it has now sprouted and going to seed, beginning with its delicate white flowers threaded amongst the fennel.
I was hoping to find ten things, but eight is really enough. Although I still need to buy more vegetables, and the summer fruit is too delicious to pass up, I am happy to start my weekend shopping in the potager first.
Finding France: A Memoir in Small Bites is an edible tale of a young traveling cook who gets stuck on a barge in France and stays to become a wise old woman with a head full of ideas on French food and cooking. Kate Hill—cook, teacher, mentor, and author—invites you into her world of French food as she learned over three dozen years of practice in the rural farmlands of Gascony. Read more here.
Kate Hill is the author of over a dozen cookbooks, including A Culinary Journey in Gascony, Cassoulet: A French Obsession, and A Gascon Year Series of 12 recipe and story volumes (available here). Published in America’s Best Food Writing 2019, curated by Samin Nosrat, Kate Hill has written for Saveur Magazine and The Los Angeles Times. Kate and her cooking, butchery, and charcuterie programs have been featured in Bon Appétit, Food and Wine, Condé Nast Traveler, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Boston Globe, Faire magazine, My French Country Home, and countless websites.
The Relais de Camont welcomes writers and artists to work on the side of a quiet French Canal. For more information, read this- Relais de Camont.
Envious!!
I have a backyard overgrown with volunteer Everglades tomatoes and I keep buying those hard, tasteless ones from the store. [face slap here].