The perfect dishes for the end of winter
Despite a more limited palette, you can still arouse your palate, Laura Brehaut writes.
Bitter chicories, bright citrus and earthy roots bring life to winter cooking.
From jewel-toned pomegranates to pink radicchios and sunny pomelos, there’s an abundance of colour and flavour in seasonal produce.
Acclaimed British cook, stylist and writer Anna Jones says she finds joy in “waking up” her palate at the start of the year. After the cosy cooking of early winter, she gravitates toward dishes with vibrancy.
“That challenge of finding really, really interesting things to cook within a more limited palette of ingredients, I always find really interesting,” Jones says.
Dishes should feel joyful and celebratory, she adds, while incorporating the lightness and freshness many are looking for this time of year.
In writing her third cookbook, The Modern Cook’s Year (4th Estate), Jones developed a new appreciation for just how much seasonality influences her cooking — both in ingredients and techniques.
Recognizing that the changes in her own kitchen are subtler than the four seasons, she took a more flexible approach.
The more than 250 vegetarian recipes are presented in six chapters, each covering roughly two months each.
“I felt like I needed to bring a few more interruptions into the year. And for me, those came mainly in winter and in spring,” Jones says.
“The stretch approaching Christmas felt very different than the stretch of January-February. And I’m not talking about detoxes or juice cleanses. But just the energy and the change in how we eat in those two times, both called winter.”
A bowl of pomelo and peanut soba noodles or a warm salad of spelt berries, pickled pears and bitter lettuce offer layers of taste and texture.
Cheerful and inventive, Jones’s dishes invite cooks to “marvel at the ingredients on their doorsteps.”
As a young chef in London (where she still lives), Jones says that learning how to approach food seasonally was “a miraculous discovery” that changed her cooking forever.
Weekly trips to the legendary Borough Market ignited her lifelong adoration of produce, she says.