The other night, I made Claudia Roden’s famous boiled orange cake. So much more wonderful than that rather prosaic description suggests, this cake is the stuff of legends in the recipe world. Variations on its theme in cookbooks are invariably accompanied by an introduction reassuring you that you need not be sceptical of boiling two oranges in their entirety then folding their pulverised forms into a cake batter: the result is a delectably moist, fragrant cake packed with citrus aroma and the moreish (and, indeed, Moorish) hit of slight bitterness that only boiled orange rind can provide.
Felicity Cloake, in her Guardian ‘Perfect’ column from 2017, argues that neither tangerines nor navel oranges ‘can touch the gloriously tangy Seville for flavour’ in this cake: during their short season, ‘you can’t beat them’. Luckily for me, it happens to be Seville orange season. So why did I make this cake the other night using two rather sad, bullet-hard sour oranges from the freezer, when in my fridge’s salad draw sat an entire drawstring bag full of fresh Sevilles?
Because, as I have long suspected, I am afflicted with a condition I can only describe as ‘seasonal stockpiling’. Or, as we might also term it, ‘hoarding’.
In order to understand seasonal hoarding, you have to understand how stretched the term ‘seasonality’ has become in food parlance, to the point that – much like our oft-derided obsession with using the term ‘literally’ to mean ‘metaphorically’ – its usage has tended towards the arbitrary and unfounded. I recently saw a post in the Guild of Food Writers Facebook group querying the fact that a British food magazine had included apples in January’s ‘In Season’ list of ingredients. As the writer pointed out, there are no apple trees in the UK in January laden with fruit; has ‘seasonality’ in fact come to mean ‘availability’?
It sparked a lot of interesting discussion: some commenters opined that seasonality, for them, means when the produce can be harvested; others pointed out that it’s important to follow the seasons of other parts of the world, in order to support growers in poorer countries. Several commented on the fact that, so often, food media lists of what is ‘in season’ are somewhat out of touch with reality, and/or reflect the fact that, in our heady modern days of air freighting, pretty much anything is available in any season.
Because I am a masochist and a literal glutton for punishment, at some point in my life I seem to have fallen head over heels in love with a tiny family of ingredients – whose members you can probably count on one hand – that are truly, intensely seasonal. Either because they cannot be grown anywhere else (Yorkshire rhubarb, for example, as its name suggests), or because demand for them appears to be so low that it’s simply not worth establishing gigantic monocultures in the global south with which to satisfy our greedy, impatient appetites.
I speak of gooseberries (too sour, too redolent of unpleasant school dinners, and a faff to prepare). Blackcurrants (again, there’s an awkward sourness factor. Blackcurrants need effort that all you bland strawberry-loving types are unprepared to put in). Bergamots (their bitterness and mass of seeds aren’t exactly inviting, so most of us just stick to sipping our Earl Grey instead). Blood oranges (some strange souls are apparently so put off the concept that Waitrose have to resort to calling them ‘blush oranges’, but as someone with a blood phobia I can tell you that this is nonsense and there is nothing quease-inducing about a beautiful blood orange. The reason we don’t get blood oranges year-round, incidentally, has to do with the highly specific microclimate in which they are grown, and which also causes their flesh to redden in that characteristic fashion).
And, of course, Seville oranges.
I sometimes wonder if my love for these ingredients would abate somewhat if they were available year-round; is it their precious rarity that makes them taste all the more delicious, or do I adore them in spite of their elusive, fleeting availability? Either way, their incredibly short season is a kind of tantalising bait to me. I spend most of July on high alert, like a quivering deer with its ears pricked, waiting and watching for the first punnets of blackcurrants and gooseberries to appear in the shops. Then I pounce, buying kilos at a time. In fact, I think I was once single-handedly responsible for a price hike in my local supermarket in Oslo: seeing punnets of blackcurrants for sale for only 29kr (about £2.50) each, I bought the entire shelf-full, only to find on my next visit that they’d put the price up to 65kr per punnet. That’s supply and demand for you.
And I demand berries. Specifically, the kind of sour, tannic berries that remind your tastebuds that they’re alive: no foamy, sickly-sweet strawberries for me please. No out-of-season raspberries with drupelets so hard they crumble dryly on your tongue, rather than showering your mouth with sweet-tart juice. Gooseberries and blackcurrants, in addition to being addictively sour, also offer complex, nuanced fragrance that very few other fruits can match: the muscat perfume of a pan of simmering, jade berries or the herbal, grassy astringency of a blackcurrant compote cannot be beaten.
So I hoard. I stash punnet after punnet in my freezer – I actually have two freezers, because one was simply not sufficient to facilitate or contain the great summer berry hoarding process. Sometimes I make them into compotes or curds before storing; most of the time they are simply tumbled into freezer bags and sit in frosty clumps in the corner of a drawer. They are joined, in January, by slender candy-coloured fingers of Yorkshire rhubarb and bright Seville oranges. There may be other guest appearances, too, by squat, fuzzy quinces in autumn, or slivered marigold apricots in late summer.
It’s not that I don’t have plans for them. I have plenty. I could rattle off a list of my favourite gooseberry and blackcurrant recipes (and, indeed, four of them appear in my first cookbook), and I’m well aware that Seville oranges are not only for marmalade – in fact, one of my favourite uses for them is in an aromatic spiced rice pilaf that I enjoy possibly even more than a slathering of marmalade on toast. But, as I have come to realise slowly over the past few years, the entire joyous point of seasonality is that every few weeks, another exciting ingredient starts to appear in the shops as ample consolation for the loss of whatever precious produce is on its way out.
I have the attention span and loyalty of a small child or a puppy when it comes to raw produce. I’ll have just finished stashing away the blackcurrants in the freezer when crisp local apples start to appear in droves. I’ll be simmering those same apples into compotes for storage when crates of dusky plums line the shelves of the greengrocer. Those plums will be festooning tarts and crumbles when the quinces start brightening their corner of the shop like curvaceous baubles. From quinces to cranberries, cranberries to blood oranges, blood oranges to Yorkshire rhubarb. Yorkshire rhubarb to asparagus, asparagus to Jersey Royals, Jersey Royals to blackcurrants.
Before I know it, I’ll be bulk-buying punnets of blackcurrants while the freezer is still full of last year’s. Just as I realised, while filling a bag with a couple of kilos of Seville oranges at the shop the other day, that I still had a small bag of them in the freezer from the previous January. The hoarding instinct – a desire to be able to access and enjoy all these delicious flavours year-round, whenever I should fancy it – suddenly seems rather pointless when I only fancy it at the time those ingredients are actually in season. Having planned assiduously for that time in November where I would really crave a blackcurrant cheesecake, I find that time has never come. Nor will come, until, most likely, July.
Perhaps it’s also because I have come to associate certain ingredients inextricably with their time of year, and its attendant emotions and rituals. The first blackcurrant and lemon verbena cheesecake of the year marks the peak of high summer, and wouldn’t taste quite right when there’s snow on the ground outside and one craves a hot, bubbling crumble or sticky toffee pudding instead. Those refreshing blood oranges are ideal for blowing away the post-Christmas cobwebs, particularly in delectably sharp salads, but their red glow seems awkwardly festive in May – ditto cranberries. Seville oranges don’t seem quite so vital in August, when you’re not stumbling through a fug of seasonal depression from which only a hit of sour to the tastebuds can wake you. Hoarding comes to make no sense if you never find yourself needing or craving that which you’ve hoarded.
So with this in mind, having learned the lesson taught by the sadness of those frozen Sevilles, this year I’m trying gradually to break out of the compulsive stockpiling cycle, and to embrace the true joys of seasonality. This means gorging myself on gluts of short-lived ingredients while they last, before making my peace with the fact that it will be many months before I taste them again. As we used to do, I’m sure, before the days of the deep freeze and the aeroplane cargo hold. I’ve resisted the temptation to make Seville orange curd for the freezer (there’s already a jar in there from last year), and to stash piles of rhubarb in there too. Instead, I will make the glorious Seville orange tart from Diana Henry’s book How to Eat a Peach, which looks like the best possible thing one could do with those beauties, and savour every slice, before saying a solemn goodbye to the sourest of citrus until next year. I poached the rhubarb with vanilla and enjoyed a few delicious breakfasts of rhubarb, granola and Greek yoghurt, before it was gone for good. I’m enjoying blood oranges in at least one meal every day, so that I don’t end up trying to preserve them in a panic as the season draws to a close.
And, in the hungry gap between the decline of the blood oranges and the arrival of the asparagus, I will make a start on using up that blackcurrant stash.
I suppose this new philosophy is the food equivalent of carpe diem, or living in the now: feast with heady abandon on that rare thing, a truly seasonal ingredient, so that as its availability dwindles you can face its departure with a sense of peace and satisfaction, safe in the knowledge that you lived its brief appearance to the full. And then look forward to the next treasure, whose appearance is just around the corner.
Embrace the season. Empty the freezer. Seize the Seville orange.