Vegetables

This is the month of almost over-abundant salad stuff. Can it really be only a decade ago that salad inevitably meant wet leaves of flimsy butterhead lettuce? These days supermarkets come on with ever more numerous varieties of interesting and competitively priced leaves – oakleaf, lamb’s lettuce and curly endive are becoming more common names at the check-out than their snob-gourmet equivalents, chêne, mâche, and frisée, ever were in Hampstead greengrocers.

Corn on the cob should now be coming in from the Isle of Wight, with supplies from Kent to follow. British grown runner beans should be through by mid-month. Cauliflowers should be looking plumper and healthier than for a while. With courgettes in full spate, their larger cousins, the European marrows and squashes, begin to make their appearance.