Читать книгу Kitchen Memories - Lucy Boyd - Страница 50

When I arrived at Petersham, I wanted to grow vegetables and salads that were difficult to obtain here and for Skye to use in the restaurant and Gael (Francesco’s wife) to cook with in her kitchen. I wanted to pick the male flowers from the courgettes when they first opened up in the morning to take to the kitchen, and to choose at what stage of growth to harvest the courgettes for eating raw when they are still relatively small and firm and delicate in flavour, without too many seeds and flesh, or to leave them on the plant for longer and allow their skins to thicken and the flesh to swell. These I use for grilling, as the moisture evaporates over the heat and condenses the flavour in the skin.

Rocket, the commercial varieties of which are so bland, is a delicious and incredibly versatile leaf used as either a herb or salad. The broad-leaved varieties are hard to find and the tastiest mainly sold in Middle Eastern stores, tied in bundles. I scattered a packet of seeds in some of the herb pots in my garden the other day and three days later they have already germinated and are showing signs of growth. Perhaps that is due to the warm week we have had this March.

All the chards are easy to grow here, despite the fact they are sold as specialist produce, along with cavolo nero, the black kale from Tuscany. I sow broad beans, peas, French and runner beans and borlotti beans (which are expensive to buy, that is, if you can find them). Start the borlottis off under glass in March to give them the long growing season they need, then plant them out in May for a September crop.

The most challenging Italian ingredient I attempted to grow was radicchio ‘Rosso di Treviso Tardivo’. Tying up the summer and autumn growth of leaves to ‘blanch’ the inner hearts was my inexperienced way of trying to figure out how to grow this specialist plant. It was successful to a degree in that during the winter I dared to untie the plant and peep at the leaves within: there were, huddled in the dark heart, beautiful cold-white spines dividing the dark wine-red leaf, crisp and dense and beginning to fold like a death at the tips.

Tomatoes: last year we grew an avenue of them in terracotta pots, tying the stems to string attached to the roof of the glasshouse. Francesco had instructed me to fill the glasshouses with them, so we did. He also suggested I ask his housekeeper for any old linen sheets we could tear up and use to wrap around the supports for the tomatoes as they grew. I did ask but got one of those ‘you must be insane’ looks. Varieties we grew included ‘Tigerella’, little yellow plum, ‘Gardener’s Delight’, ‘Bull’s Heart’ (‘Cuore di Bue’), ‘Black Russian’ and ‘Costoluto Fiorentino’. I love tomatoes, missing their wonderful flavours and aroma in the winter months.