Fish

Most flat fish – and especially lemon sole – are in fine nick until they start to put their energies into spawning at the end of the month. Haddock is tailing off. Plaice are pretty poor already or roey, the term used by Chris Ramus, a Yorkshire fishmonger with two first-class shops in Harrogate.

Cod is excellent just now. Plainly cooked thick steaks, cut across the whole fish, can take very strong flavours; try a chilli-hot sweet and sour sauce, or a curry spiked with fennel on a cold evening. Farmed salmon is also particularly good, although, in my book, it always has a tendency to woolly blandness. February also marks the beginning of the rod season for wild salmon; there used to be as much palaver about the first landings as about the first grouse of ‘the glorious twelfth’. This should be excellent, firm and lean with a more complex flavour than farmed, but also extraordinarily expensive.