Spring Vegetables: The Cook's Guide to the Year's Best Season
After months of root vegetables and brassicas, spring arrives with asparagus, peas, and young greens. Here is how to treat them properly.
Spring is the cook's reward for enduring winter. The vegetables that arrive between March and June — asparagus, peas, broad beans, new potatoes, wild garlic, radishes, young courgettes — have a sweetness and tenderness that their summer successors have lost. They are also perishable: asparagus begins converting its sugars to starch within hours of harvest, which is why supermarket asparagus, cut days earlier and transported from Peru, tastes so differently from asparagus bought from a market and eaten the same day.
Asparagus: The Short Season
British asparagus season runs approximately from St George's Day (April 23rd) to Midsummer's Day (June 21st). Within that window, the asparagus available from domestic growers is genuinely incomparable. Outside that window, it is imported and not worth the same attention.
The cooking principle: the less the better. Griddled, roasted, or briefly blanched and dressed with lemon and good olive oil. Asparagus with a fried egg and good bread is one of the most satisfying dinners the season offers. Don't overcomplicate it.
Peas and Broad Beans
Fresh peas in the pod are a different vegetable from frozen peas — sweeter and more delicate. They are also considerably more work. The compromise: frozen peas for cooking (they are frozen within hours of picking and retain their quality remarkably well), fresh peas eaten raw or barely cooked when you find them.
Broad beans require double-podding — first from the pod, then from the skin around each bean — for best results. The inner bean is bright green, nutty, and tender. Skip this step and the beans are tough and slightly bitter.
Wild Garlic
Wild garlic (ramsons) carpets UK woodland floors from March to May, identifiable by its broad leaves and the unmistakable garlic smell when crushed. It is completely free to forage in quantities for personal use and makes an extraordinary pesto: leaves blended with olive oil, lemon, and pine nuts. Use it as you would basil pesto, but expect something altogether wilder.
Spring vegetables require very little cooking and absolutely no complicated technique. Their point is freshness — honour it.
