Roots

Why do even the best restaurants persist in serving those awful flabby mangetouts? I was in a country-house hotel in Scotland one winter looking forward to a gala dinner in which surely the local potatoes and swedes as well as salmon and beef would feature. I was disappointed. Filo pastry swathed everything and physalis garnished every empty space on the plate. ‘Seasonal vegetables’ turned out to be the ubiquitous limp khaki pod from Guatemala and a pallid spike of baby corn from Thailand. ‘New’ potatoes were simply small imports. Where were the bashed neeps? The parsnips? The home-grown potatoes? This last was a particularly sad omission, since we were not many miles from the late Donald Maclean’s potato collection in Perth, where he grew hundreds of varieties.