Читать книгу Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen - Jane Baxter - Страница 23

To my delight, PSB, as we know it, has enjoyed a renaissance over the last few years, as people tire of the bland predictability of hybrid calabrese. It has the great advantage of coming into season from January to May, when other home-grown greens are in short supply. At the height of the season, through March and April, we make no apologies for including it in virtually every veg box and every meal in the Field Kitchen. Supermarkets have tried to respond to this rise in popularity but have been frustrated by PSB’s wild appearance and its seasonality. There is a pressure to ‘tidy it up’ with uniform hybrid varieties, as has been the case with calabrese, and to banish its seasonality by developing varieties for the summer and early winter – despite the fact that these out-of-season hybrids are tough and nasty to eat. Seasonality and variation are anathema to supermarkets. They keep trying to bully farmers into trimming the individual shoots and laying them geometrically in trays so they look as if they came from a factory, regardless of the fact that the spears come in all different shapes and sizes and the discarded leaves make wonderful greens.

The harvesting of a single variety can be spread over three to six weeks, depending on the type and the time of year. Once the primary head has been harvested, the side shoots develop into secondary spears, which we pick with a rosette of leaves. If the plants are strong and the pickers sufficiently nimble, there can be a third generation to pick. The secret is to pass through the crop frequently enough to avoid the spears bursting into flower or the stems becoming tough, without spending too much time searching rather than picking.

The varieties we grow come mostly from Tozers, one of the last independent English seed producers. We start the season with Rudolf, normally in January or early February, then move on to Redhead and Red Spear. There is always a glut in late March and April, as the highest-yielding Claret comes into season. We finish the season with Cardinal, or with Tozer’s ‘late selection’, in late April or early May. Such is the popularity of PSB with our customers that over the last few years we have been trying to breed our own late-heading variety to allow us to continue picking a little later into the spring ‘hungry gap’. I would not recommend buying PSB between mid-May and December, when you will be getting the inferior modern hybrids.

We tried white sprouting broccoli but it is lower yielding, goes off quickly and normally doesn’t taste as good anyway, so it has been dropped. Because it is possible to continue harvesting over a long period, right down to the small spears that would be uneconomic for a commercial grower, I would recommend PSB as a crop for any keen cook with access to a reasonable-sized garden or allotment.

If you cannot snap the spears cleanly when you receive them in your box, we have probably got a bit behind with the picking, and you may need to trim the bottoms a little to get to the tender stalks. Other than that and picking off any diseased leaves, the whole lot is edible. The stalks themselves can be very sweet, and normally don’t take much cooking. If they are large, it is sometimes worth splitting them from the bottom with a knife to ensure they cook before the flower is overdone. My mother was a big fan of purple sprouting broccoli and would carry on picking a few plants well into May, when the spears were the size of matchsticks. She would bunch them with a band as she was picking and then boil them standing up in the pan, as you might asparagus, so that the flower buds did not get overcooked.