In 2022, the website TasteAtlas published their annual ‘World’s Best Cuisine’ awards. The award involved ranking 95 world cuisines according to audience votes for ingredients, dishes and beverages, and its methodology and subjectivity were thus somewhat questionable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Italian, Greek, Spanish, Japanese and Indian cuisines topped the rankings, and so the media were less interested in these predictable front-runners than in the cuisine with the dubious honour of coming bottom of the list: Norway. 

Forbes published an article simply titled, ‘Is Norway’s cuisine really so bad?’ The subreddit r/Norway posted a link to the piece, garnering (at the time of writing) 295 comments. Most interesting, to my mind, was the reaction from Norwegians themselves, or from those who call the country home. ‘Does Norwegian food deserve to be ranked the worst in the world?’ asked Anglophone Norwegian news website TheLocal.no. It quoted chef Filip August Bendi, soon to compete among the world’s culinary elite for the Bocuse d’Or, who condemned the ranking as ‘completely unfair’. The article noted that Norway can claim the highest number of prestigious Bocuse d’Or awards in the world, with its chefs often scoring highly in European and World chef championships, and that ‘there are many Michelin-starred or recognised restaurants in Norway’, including the three-starred Maaemo in Oslo.

Citing the fact that the Grandiosa frozen pizza is considered to be Norway’s unofficial national dish, the Forbes article pointed out that ‘there remains a clear gap between the blossoming fine dining scene and the everyday food eaten by most Norwegians and visitors to the country’. They might also have considered another curious Norwegian preference: ‘Taco Fridays’, in which cheap beef mince is mixed with packet spices and shoved inside a supermarket crispy taco shell with some shredded lettuce, a tradition treated with borderline religious reverence. Or what I think of as Norway’s alternative ‘national dish’: the matpakke, or packed lunch, which predominantly comprises some kind of processed fish or cheese paste squeezed out of a tube onto a piece of knaekkebrod (crispy rye bread), and whose bland uniformity actually led the BBC to write an article declaring that ‘In Norway, you’re not supposed to look forward to your lunch’. For more anecdotal evidence, I might add the fact that I once saw a colleague tip some dry oats into a shallow soup bowl, add a splash of water from the hot water tap, and take that into a meeting for lunch; or the fact that the customary time to hold meetings in my Norwegian workplace was from 12 to 2pm, and that no one but me ever seemed to take food to these meetings. 

But this is not a Norway-bashing rant (I’ve already done that, anyway, here; moreover, I would like to acknowledge that Norway produces excellent waffles, fine berries, and some very good lamb). What I want to think about is how we (at least in Western Europe; I acknowledge that this is a very situated and biased look at the matter) take the true measure of a cuisine or food culture: where we might go to gather the evidence that will enable us to make some kind of value judgement on the relative rankings of world cuisines. Such judgements will always be, of course, subjective, but one cannot deny that your average city is far more likely to contain an Italian restaurant than an Icelandic one, or that your average northern European is more likely to be able to reel off a list of notable Indian dishes than specialities from, for example, Latvia. 

It’s not just familiarity, though: certain countries also possess a reputation for enshrining food at their very core. There is a reason that Italians often make headlines with their outrage over the apparent bastardisation of their beloved cuisine by clueless foreigners (in fact, there’s even a Facebook group, ‘Italians Mad At Food’): a perceived assault on food is an assault on the very heart of the nation itself. France, of course, with its long history of culinary extravagance and exactingness, and its boulangerie on every corner, is widely held up as a kind of gold standard for food - almost literally, in the shape of the coveted Bocuse d’Or. In several East Asian countries, a phrase akin to ‘Have you eaten yet?’, or, sometimes, ‘Have you eaten rice yet?’ is, under certain circumstances, used as a greeting in the same fashion in which we might say ‘How are you?’ 

In my mind, there is no strange discrepancy between the amount of Michelin stars and Bocuse d’Or awards held by Norwegian chefs, and the country’s pitiful ranking on the list of world cuisines, because they are completely different entities. In fact, I would go so far as to argue that fine dining restaurants are not a true reflection of a country’s food culture or standard of culinary excellence. Yes, the exceptional ones - in Scandinavia, Noma springs to mind - make use of fine local produce and call attention to localised techniques of cooking, fermentation and preservation, but the concentration of Michelin stars in a country is not indicative of the beating heart of that country’s food culture - as Noma’s prices, notorious waiting lists and forthcoming closure will attest. Fine dining restaurants can be found the world over. You could visit Norway and eat in fine dining restaurants every night of your visit, but this would hardly be reflective of the country’s food culture. This is arguably even more pronounced when visiting countries where Michelin-starred restaurants are unaffordable for the majority of people.

More reflective might be what your average worker takes in his or her matpakke; what children are fed at school (my friends, who had raised their four-year-old in Finland, were horrified to discover that porridge with jam passed for ‘lunch’ at his Norwegian kindergarten); the average lunch or snack options available at the train station or corner shop. You might also pay attention to the level of choice and accessibility of quality ingredients in the supermarkets. It’s no secret that Norway is notorious for its expensive groceries and high prices. As a Redditor pointed out in response to the country’s TasteAtlas ranking, ‘we have been quite poor to make good use of our resources. Considering all the wild life and fish we have, it’s surprising how taco, kebab and pizza is the shit among people. We seriously need a food revolution here’. Such an observation would also remind us that it’s not necessarily the quality of local ingredients that defines and bolsters a national food culture, but how accessible those ingredients are to the masses - not just the top chefs - and whether those masses actually use them. This is also true of small food businesses: two of my favourite eateries in Oslo and Aarhus, both of which offered much more interesting and high-quality food than elsewhere in the cities (one was a vegetarian Mexican restaurant, the other an Australian micro-bakery and brunch spot that made the best banana bread I have ever tried), closed after a couple of years, declaring sadly that people just weren’t ready for what they wanted to provide.

I’ve thought about this a lot, ever since I moved from Norway to Belgium, and felt a warm kind of reassurance: I was back in a country where people value their food. No more meetings scheduled at lunch time. No sitting eating alone in a deserted, sterile space curiously and paradoxically designated both møterom (meeting room) and pauserom (break room): instead, a work kitchen always home to someone enjoying a meal or drink of some kind, and frequently to piles of home-baked delicacies from generous colleagues. A country where it is seemingly impossible to eat in public without someone wishing you ‘smakelijk!’ (the Flemish equivalent of bon appetit), whether a train ticket inspector or a random man on a Brussels station platform. The amazing phenomenon of the broodautomat, a vending machine for bread, so that people have 24/7 access to a fresh loaf, and even the Neuhaus chocolatautomat at Ghent station, so you can pick up your emergency box of beautifully-wrapped pralines in a hurry. Ordering a coffee and always receiving a small square of chocolate or a speculoos biscuit on the side. Work lunches that do not constitute a fridge-cold, somewhat chewy sandwich, but instead involve three courses and a glass of wine at a restaurant. A constant stream of cakes and pastries, whether in the communal kitchen at work or proffered from a tupperware at the end of a boxing class by the guy who loves to bake. 

I’ve had the same feeling wandering cities where street food is a vital part of the urban fabric, where the goings-on of everyday life are glimpsed through a haze of smoke and steam, scented with the tang of charring meat or the cosseting perfume of spiced tea. In such places, I adjust my eating habits and appetite accordingly, grazing on sumptuous morsels grabbed from street corners throughout the day rather than sitting down for a full meal that would waste valuable stomach space. I think often about train rides through India and Myanmar, where vendors at every station would bring baskets of hot, fresh snacks and vats of steaming sweet tea, ensuring that you’d reach your destination nourished in a way that a sad cold sandwich from a convenience store could never achieve. I think about countries where fresh produce practically spills out of markets onto the streets, where locals poke and prod at trays of tomatoes and melons, sniff honeyed mangoes and assess the fresh snap of leafy greens; where herbs are sold in bunches with the heft of a horse’s tail and fish flail around in buckets on the floor. I think of sun-drenched lunches on Greek islands, where ice-cold raki and watermelon are an unspoken part of the deal without ever being ordered or paid for. I think of the Syrians who thrust searing falafel, swollen figs and sticky dates into my eager hands as I wandered the market in Aleppo, so proud were they of their wares. I think of the Indian family who turned me into human foie gras, following up lavish five-course breakfasts with immediate trips to the city for sweets and roti, because ‘if she doesn’t put on five kilos in India, when will she?!’

The nuance of this, of course, will be lost in any ‘World’s Best Cuisine’ awards, or the number of Michelin stars arbitrarily allocated to a country. The way in which food irrigates a nation, seeps into its very fabric and floods the veins of its people is altogether more subtle. It becomes part of the rhythms of life, enshrined in the language: a bedrock of metaphor upon which to build a community united by the hedonistic pleasures of passionate consumption. We don’t need to take the pulses of these food cultures: their beating hearts are worn on their sleeves for all to see, taste, and enjoy.

In the pilot episode of HBO’s hit series Six Feet Under, funeral director Nathaniel Fisher Sr. is hit by a bus while driving home on Christmas Eve. Receiving news of her husband’s untimely death, Ruth Fisher hurls first the phone, then the Christmas dinner she is in the midst of cooking, to the ground. A tray of roasted meat and vegetables clatters to the floor. Amidst staccato shrieks, she sweeps jars, pots, knives and plates from the worktop, then sits hunched against the oven, the dismantled debris of a feast around her feet. A ladle, slicked with grease, lies redundant on its side. ‘Your father is dead,’ she tells her son. ‘And my pot roast is ruined.’

The preparation of food is so often framed as an act of care and devotion that scenes like this are all the more unsettling by contrast. A nourishing love language that conflates heart and stomach, cooking a meal for someone is a means of making manifest our regard or affection. It might be a way of saying the unsayable, or a gentle reminder of our enduring fondness. It might be a grand gesture, or the simple daily ritual of ensuring those we love are ready to face the day, or slay the monsters under the bed, on a full stomach. Love is not, usually, throwing food on the floor.

But for every abundant feast prepared for those we hold dear, there are also a series of shadowy, truncated doppelgangers: the meals that never were. The Christmas feast abruptly overturned in a frenzy of grief. The romantic diner à deux that soured before it even started. The wedding cake order, unfulfilled when someone changed her mind. The self-care supper whose ingredients never made it to the counter as their exhausted purchaser succumbed to the sweet oblivion of sleep in the midst of crushing depression. The quesadillas, instantly unmade when their intended recipient suddenly found herself in the urgent pangs of labour. The misshapen quinces languishing in a bucket outside a front door somewhere on a mountainside, never to soften into syrupy russet tenderness and fated to remain as bitter as the goodbye that saw them left behind. 

As with love, food is also inescapably intertwined with stories. I know I’m not alone in finding the notes and anecdotes that preface recipes in cookbooks the most enjoyable part of the package. But sometimes I think about the spectral existence of all those food stories that never were: recipes that never coalesced into concreteness; feasts that never materialised; meals unexpectedly annulled by the wild vicissitudes of life. We hallmark the big occasions through food - the wedding breakfast, the Christening cake, the funeral catering - but so often the fraught journeys to those milestones scupper the best-laid culinary plans. Death, birth, grief, all-consuming love: food can be a vital component of all such moments, but sometimes a roiling tempest of emotions sits uneasily on the stomach. 

It’s a cliche from medieval literature and Renaissance sonnets that one pines away for love, but sometimes the wings of a thousand frenzied butterflies really do beat too furiously in the belly to allow space for subsistence. We talk of comfort eating, but in the storm of abject grief, food is often little comfort. We measure out our lives in coffee, soup and dessert spoons, our friendships cemented and charted by meals and beverages shared, but what of those imagined but never brought to fruition, and the diners cruelly taken from the world before they could taste the food we planned just for them?

Recently, one of my close friends left us forever, taken senselessly by an extremely rare form of cancer. We met online as young teenagers, part of a group of misfits who found solace from the bitterness of adolescent existence in a Harry Potter fan forum, where we would chat for hours to people we had never met. We shared our joys and triumphs, our heartaches and frustrations, getting to know each other far better than the classmates we would see every day - and certainly better than our parents, mystified and concerned by our late-night computer activity, knew us at the time. Despite having been online friends for twenty years, she and I only met ‘IRL’ for the first time a few years ago.

As with so many people I have loved, my memories of her are threaded through with food. Cardamom buns savoured in the summer sunshine when we both found ourselves coincidentally in Stockholm. Photos of her lockdown baking projects shared over instagram, leaving me awed and envious. Tales of her culinary adventures in Korea. Platters of coconut bread, crisp samosas and treacly desserts enjoyed together amidst the petrichor of monsoon season in Sri Lanka. My first waffle as a new-found resident of Belgium, savoured as she gave me a crash course in life in this most underrated of countries, and a revelation as I learned that there are, in fact, two types of Belgian waffle (a cause of fierce cultural division). The apple and marmalade loaf cake I took to her as she sat, elfin and resilient, at home in her pyjamas after multiple rounds of chemo, Mary Berry cooking in the background on TV. Never in my wildest dreams did I suspect that would be the last time I would see her, that the next time I made an apple cake it would be to take to her funeral. 

We will never cook that Korean feast together, nor enjoy the best pizza in Brussels, just over the road from her old workplace. I will never recreate our favourite Sri Lankan dishes as she sits at my dining table, regaling me with her latest dazzling accomplishment, language learned or self-improvement project completed. There will be no return to the gelateria in Antwerp we stumbled upon together as she kindly accompanied me on a quest to buy a new sofa, nor a repeat of the crêpes with warm cherries she so rhapsodised over as she visited me for the first time in Ghent. 

Our food story ends here, then, and yet it also goes on. I will think of her, with a pang deep in my chest, every autumn as I fold chunks of apple and bittersweet shreds of Seville orange into Nigel Slater’s marmalade cake. I will reach for my phone to share with her the latest Asian-inspired baking craze, before remembering she is somewhere beyond the reach of social media now; and perhaps I will bake it anyway as a tribute. I will pour every ounce of love I hold for her into the wedding cake I make for our mutual friend in May, trying to capture in elegaic confectionery a tiny fraction of the beauty she always so insistently saw everywhere in the world. I have a hard preference for the richer, denser Liège waffle, as opposed to the airy, grid-like Brussels variety, but in honour of her I shall revisit that cafe where we sat together and treat myself to a feathery lattice of dough as light and fleeting as her undeservedly short life. Now, I must savour every morsel of this wild, wild world for the both of us.

Somewhere, I like to imagine an ephemeral archive of food stories that should have been, could have been, but never were. While tales of cooking for our loved ones are uplifting and important, the chaotic patchwork of life is littered with unmade meals that tell their own, often fraught, stories. Stories of extremes, of ruptures, of shattering grief and blinding joy. Stories so visceral, so literally hard to stomach, that they often defy our attempts to put them down in words. Perhaps we need those stories too, in our darkest times, to remind us that we are not alone. 

For Miruna. Rest in peace.

There is perhaps no greater conversation stopper than, as a woman in your early-to-mid thirties, responding to the question ‘Do you have children?’ with a simple ‘No.’ Having dealt with the life admin of moving countries for the third time this year, it’s a question I have been asked a lot, and it has become increasingly apparent that answering with unadorned factual accuracy and nothing more is likely to kill the conversation before it even started. There’s no bonding over shared parental experiences; no easy sharing of candid family snaps on phones. There are only two possible follow-up responses on the part of the enquirer: ‘Oh, OK’ (R.I.P. conversation) or ‘Why not?’ (R.I.P. the person who asks this question). Thoroughly British at heart in terms of my heightened sensitivity to social awkwardness of any kind, I noticed I had taken to filling the uncomfortable silence with the jovial comment, ‘But I have 120 houseplants, so that’s almost the same!’

I’m not alone. One has only to glance at the way in which millennials and gen Z’ers talk about their houseplants to notice that this is a considerable trend. We fawn over our ‘plant babies’, referring to ourselves as ‘plant moms’ or, my personal epithet of choice, ‘crazy plant ladies’. We caption our urban jungle photos with ‘#PlantsAreTheNewPets’. The mainstream media ascribe this trend to the shocking rise in cost of living and the fact that younger people today may never enjoy the financial security required to own even a pet, let alone a home, and for whom procreating may be genuinely unaffordable, with data showing it costs over a quarter of a million dollars to raise a child. It’s perhaps no wonder, then, that we choose to be plant ladies, festooning our rented dwellings with little green dependents. It is also no coincidence, I think, that most of these self-confessed plant parents are women. Prepped from a young age by patriarchy for the role that is seen to be our birthright, socialised to gravitate towards caring for others, we have a whole lot of nurture coursing through our veins and nowhere financially viable to offload it. We turn to plants. 

In much the same way as ‘cat lady’, these botanical monikers imply something slightly tragic in our decision to devote all our feminine nurture not to tiny humans, but to beings that our inherent speciesism and anthropocentrism still designate less worthy of care. And yet I find myself proud to be a #plantmom, to advertise the fact that where friends of mine swap stories of breast pumps and potty training, I swap cuttings of variegated monstera and calathea white fusion; where society tells me I should be a slave to my ever-quickening biological clock and desperately seek to ‘settle down’, I revel daily in the sheer bliss of waking up alone and spending my days in utmost calm, the house always just as I left it. I know I am not alone in choosing the gentle, gradual needs of plants - needs that coil themselves smoothly around the jagged shapes of our lives, slotting in seamlessly like vines between brickwork - over the all-consuming demands of progeny, nor in being happy to admit it in a world that still considers children to be a woman’s ultimate desire (even if she doesn’t know it yet). In identifying ourselves as plant parents, tending to our plant babies - or joining the ‘Cats Not Kids’ brigade and hashtagging our photos ‘CrazyCatLady’ - I would dare to suggest that we perform a gently subversive feminist act, ironically and proudly reclaiming titles that have certain hints of social condemnation and ridicule about them. We choose alternative pathways of care, to be different kinds of mothers.

This crazy cat lady recently tested her maternal instincts by fostering a mama cat and her two kittens for the local animal shelter. When asked how it was going, I would summarise the state of chaos that constituted my life with the simple statement, ‘Well, it has confirmed that I could never manage having children’. And, while facetious, it was true. In those wild days of running around after mischievous kittens while attending to the seemingly perpetually empty belly of a nursing mother (and not just because she’d occasionally vomit on my favourite rug), I was no longer able to attend to the quiet rhythms that usually gave a semblance of structure to my everyday. ‘If I ever want to have children,’ I said to people, ‘I realise I would have to give up everything I enjoy. There is just no time.’  Plants went unwatered, cuttings unplanted. Tomatoes unpicked. The aquarium wasn’t cleaned. The fridge resembled a game of very cold, somewhat stale tetris. Recipes I wanted to try were tossed aside for taking too long or being incompatible with three boisterous felines running around my feet. But, even worse, recipes I had already begun went neglected. My sourdough starter congealed in protest, seeping the grey liquor known to aficionados as ‘hooch’: an unmistakable, acetone-esque reminder that you’ve been lax with the feeding. Kombucha went unbottled, becoming increasingly sour with each passing day. The black radishes I had stockpiled from the farmers’ market sat in a bowl on the counter, whispering reproachfully in a voice only I could hear: ‘We should be kimchi by now.’

In the midst of pitter-pattering tiny feline feet crashing into plant stands, charging after toy mice and using my expensive new sofa as a climbing frame, I gained a new respect for the magic of fermentation and its unassuming dignity, requiring only the briefest of attentions. I missed the calm that came from having the time to stretch and fold dough, massage salt into jewel-bright ribbons of red cabbage or whisk gentle clouds of homemade ricotta. I missed Sunday mornings tending to my plant babies - snipping a cutting here, pulling off a wilting leaf there - while waiting for my sweetened tea to cool for the next batch of kombucha. Far from feeling broody watching Siena nurse her two chunky kittens on my lap, I looked forward to the day they would go to their forever homes and leave me with the simpler, calmer duties of parenting my easier charges: things in pots, and things in jars. I felt a visceral horror at the thought of giving all of that up, forever, for a tiny being who would demolish any semblance of calm and routine I had built up over my life so far; at the thought of making myself vulnerable to constant need and demand. Perhaps it’s the long hangover of what I now recognise to be burnout suffered in the past couple of years, but there is simply not enough of me to give, for that, right now. My care quota will not stretch to that kind of need. I am just too tired. In some ways I envy the jars of gradually fermenting pickles and preserves with which I have lined my kitchen shelves, as they slumber, unhurried, in the warmth and the dark.

It occurs to me that perhaps there is something to be said for prioritising fermentation over fertility. The quiet, understated needs of the ferment - like those of the plant - suit me just perfectly. The needs of the ferment are not dramatic or irruptive. They are, by and large, stable, aside from subtle variations caused by the heady, fluctuating soup of microorganisms in which they, and I, and all of us, are perpetually suspended. They just get on with it, with a minimum of fuss. Barely perceptible, bubbles form and dissolve, textures change, flavour deepens. A jar of sauerkraut is in fact all the better for being forgotten, the time allotted it by your neglect only allowing it to further mature its earthy tang. There are few emergencies with fermentation, unless you count exploding kombucha incidents that shower your kitchen in glass and leave nuggets of pineapple and ginger glued to the walls for months to come. Fermentation is rarely, if ever, urgent. It is the opposite: it demands patience, even neglect. It needs you only for very brief intervals, and even then it is fairly forgiving. Stir the hooch back into that starter and add more flour; it will be fine in a few days. Such is the slowness of the ferment that it will unobtrusively and politely fold itself into your weekly or monthly schedule, making only the gentlest demands. 

There is, it seems to me, much to be said for an ethics of slow and sporadic care. The kind that comes in fits and starts, as and when, largely when it suits us. Stirring a teaspoon of revitalising flour into a sourdough starter that has lingered a little too long at the back of the fridge. Scooping the lively foam off the top of a jar of fizzing amber tepache. The careful ‘burping’ of a bottle of kombucha undergoing its secondary fermentation (one of the only similarities, it occurs to me, between booch and babies). A care that fits around the life you already have, rather than consuming it. A care that deliberately chooses slow, silent objects. It is understated, and never overwhelming, but it is nurture nonetheless. In an increasingly frenetic world, fermentation is an act of quiet resistance: slow down; take time. Care on your own terms, follow your own schedule. Have patience. 

To claim I am a parent to four healthy scobies, a litre of kimchi, a genealogy of sourdough loaves dating back to 2010 and five jars of sauerkraut is patently absurd in a society that still accepts only one legitimate object for all of that patience, nourishment and time. Yet perhaps I will do so, going forward. Choosing to care slowly, and at my own pace, is a conscious rejection of a hegemonic narrative of nurture, patriarchal at its roots and linked predominantly to the reproductive capacity of my own body - a body that, incidentally, may not be capable of bearing children at all. The myriad of glowing bottles and jars on my kitchen shelves - alive in their own way, dependent on my nurture in understated quietude - are testament to my conviction that there are infinite ways to mother, though most of them go unrecognised. There is, I would go so far as to say, a radical freedom in being able to choose those that suit us best, at any particular moment in time. 

I have long nursed a deep love for Charlotte Brontë’s 1853 novel Villette. It is a love made stronger by the fact that it is rarely shared. My friend and colleague Matt, upon hearing that I had decided to put Villette on my Victorian literature syllabus, responded with a derisive snort and expressed his sympathy for my poor students. Those poor students went on to prove him right, bursting into violent critique at the beginning of the seminar when I asked, as I always do, for their general thoughts on this week’s reading. They argued hotly for its tedium, its highly unlikeable narrator, its excessive length. Voices were raised. Passionate gesticulation occurred. I was thrilled.

Villette is a novel in which, depending on your point of view, absolutely nothing happens – or the nonsensical, tangled everything of an entire life happens, in minute, excruciating detail. It is narrated by the enigmatic Lucy Snowe, one of literature’s greatest unreliable narrators. An evasive tease, she will unabashedly inform you, halfway through the novel, that she has been keeping a secret from you since Chapter Three. She is – both by her own admission, and according to Brontë’s cast of supporting characters – plain, uninteresting, and content to hide in the shadows. She tells us that she ‘value[s] vision, and dread[s] being struck stone blind’, a particularly pertinent remark for a character constantly analysing and interpreting the social language around her. A somewhat Puritan bastion of resistance amidst the lascivious Catholicism of continental Europe, Lucy resolutely denies herself that which must bring her joy – down to her coffee and sweet breakfast rolls, which she regularly gives away to the beautiful and coquettish Ginevra Fanshawe, who needs them to sustain her appetite for constant flirtation.

Instead, Lucy vacillates between moments of intense stagnation and wild, delirious yearnings for motion and change. On resolving to remain housebound to care for the ageing Miss Marchmont, she tells us that ‘two hot, close rooms thus became my world’. Lucy is ‘almost content to forget’ that ‘there were fields, woods, rivers, seas, an ever-changing sky outside the steam-dimmed lattice of this sick-chamber’. She is ‘tame and still by habit, disciplined by destiny’, her appetite small enough to be sated by the ‘tiny messes served for the invalid’. Yet after a violent storm during which the lady dies, Lucy is given renewed strength by the sight of the Aurora Borealis in the sky. ‘Leave this wilderness’, it seems to say to her, ‘and go out hence.’

The journey takes her to London, and then to Belgium, where she becomes an English teacher at a boarding school run by the formidable Madame Beck. A quiet introvert, Lucy delights instead in telling the stories of those around her, finding comfort and sustenance in the simplicity of the daily routine. The novel is Brontë’s most autobiographical, drawing on the time she spent in Brussels as a teacher and her unrequited love for schoolmaster Constantin Heger. It paints Belgium in a somewhat unflattering light – indeed, the novel’s very title is a joke, referring to the capital city as a ‘little town’ (Belgium itself becomes Labassecour, ‘the farmyard’).

Despite its perhaps unpromising context, the story has always spoken to me. I find something of myself in the infuriating Lucy: her introversion, her love of simplicity and routine, and her emphasis on extreme self-reliance, to the point of isolation. Like Lucy, I too waver between intense hedonistic longings to roam, and a deep-seated ache for stability. Travelling abroad on a whim, she takes the opportunity to reinvent herself, fading into a blank canvas upon which others can paint their fancies, furies, and desires. She is sensible to the point of stubbornness, refusing to let herself succumb to another’s orbit: far safer to remain beholden only to herself. Having fallen in (requited) love with fellow teacher Monsieur Paul, she tells us that the three years he is away on a voyage were the ‘happiest of her life’. As someone whose favourite part of a social event is returning home to quiet solitude, or who enjoys cohabitation most when my co-inhabitant is elsewhere, I can relate.

Villette features possibly my all-time favourite line in all of literature: ‘Happiness is not a potato’. Out of context, this phrase is simply excellent. Put into context, it becomes exquisite. Having been advised to ‘cultivate’ happiness by Doctor John – for whom she nurses a painful, unrequited passion – Lucy talks to herself in exasperation:

“No mockery in this world ever sounds to me so hollow as that of being told to cultivate happiness. What does such advice mean? Happiness is not a potato, to be planted in mould, and tilled with manure. Happiness is a glory shining far down upon us out of Heaven. She is a divine dew which the soul, on certain of its summer mornings, feels dropping upon it from the amaranth bloom and golden fruitage of Paradise.”

In February this year, on part of a wider mission to cultivate happiness, I too moved to Belgium. I packed my life, precariously and badly tessellated, into the back of a transit van. I wrapped a hundred and twenty houseplants in fleece, nestling hot water bottles in amongst their mummified silhouettes to keep them warm on the journey – a journey for which they had even been given their own passports, in accordance with EU law. I de-assembled my Ikea furniture for what felt like the fiftieth time in my life, not even needing a manual – just the muscle memory of a nomad. I slipped on chunks of ice on the Oslo road as I hauled box after box into the back of the van, once again cursing myself for owning so many books, glass jars and kitchen equipment. I felt the strangely hollow pleasure of watching the sunrise for the last time from the window of my Norwegian apartment. It was spectacular, with streaks of purple and fuschia. Perhaps it knew.

I had imagined this moment for some time. Ever since moving to Oslo in 2018, I had fantasised about the day I would leave – lamenting the fact that there would be no American-style signage next to which I could pose for an ecstatic selfie: ‘You are now leaving OSLO. Please drive safely!’ As anyone who ever dared to ask me about life in Norway knows, the country was not for me. I enjoyed brief moments of joy – at the top of a mountain under the midnight sun; cross-country skiing on fresh powder through a silent forest; launching myself from the sauna into the semi-frozen fjord in January – but a combination of winter darkness, a job I hated, exorbitant prices, a culture of complacency and a dearth of good food sent me into long periods of depression. I felt a constant nagging sense that my life was slipping out of my control into stagnant monotony; that I was a pale shadow of the person I once was, and that she might cease to exist altogether if left long enough in this pallid wasteland. Like Lucy Snowe, I had to leave this wilderness, and go out hence.

I remember vividly my first week in Belgium, where I existed in a strange haze of exhaustion, alienation and relief. On my first night, as I fell asleep in my new bedroom on a mattress on the floor, I was struck by a pertinent sense that this was, finally, home. Long, tiring days of endless box-moving, unpacking and rearranging were punctuated with trips to the local supermarket, a treasure trove of reasonably-priced cheese and wine (wine that could be purchased in any shop, at any time of day, without the need for a trip to the state-owned monopoly during its erratic opening hours). I subsisted off baguettes and butter for at least three days, since all the equipment needed to make an actual meal lay at the bottom of a box, somewhere. I then feasted on balls of goat’s burrata, exquisite French-style pastries from newly-discovered bakeries, and waffles. There were no charming coquettes around to whom I could donate my breakfast rolls and coffee, so I ate them myself. It was more than just food I was enjoying: it was the sweet, sweet taste of hard-earned stability.

As any academic will know, the precarity of the job wears you down in pernicious ways. Never being able to throw away moving boxes, because you know you’ll need them again soon – for where, which country, you have no idea. A compulsive fear of buying too much stuff, particularly heavy or bulky things (hello, Kilner jar collection) that will be a pain to sequester into said moving boxes in the foreseeable future. An inability to commit to long-term projects, hobbies, clubs, or pets, because you don’t know where you’ll be in a year or two. For me, it even went so far as becoming a pathological fear of having too much food in my fridge, freezer and cupboards, in case I wouldn’t be able to finish it all before my next move inevitably came.

It is perhaps no surprise then that, faced with stability for the first time since embarking on an academic career, I began to lay foundations in food. No longer daunted by the inevitable prospect of having to pack my life into boxes at some point in the future, my food projects started to colonise the seemingly boundless time and space that had been granted to me. I set aside a spacious nook next to my kitchen for a walk-in larder, lining it with cheap Ikea shelves that my father had to kick and warp to get straight. I (re)assembled a set of bookshelves that have now travelled with me across three countries and five different apartments, dedicating them solely to my cookbook collection – a collection I no longer felt a guilty compulsion to streamline. I rifled through my enormous stash of food-themed prints and pictures, sticking them to the wall with expensive damage-free Velcro strips – which I could justify, knowing I wouldn’t have to rip them down a year later. I up-cycled an ugly shelving unit into a beautiful, 1920s-themed bar cart in grey, gold and dusky pink, loading it with bottles of spirits that I could acquire for affordable prices. For someone who doesn’t really drink, I have a veritable encyclopaedia of weird and wonderful distillations and concoctions (fancy a watermelon raki mojito? A pomegranate liqueur gin fizz? A yuzucello and vodka? I’m your girl!)

I set up a shelf for fermentation, filling it with jars of tangled sauerkraut, brick-red kimchi and a vat of gelatinous, golden kombucha. (One thing was conspicuously absent: yoghurt. No longer priced at €6 a tub, I could go back to buying it rather than making my own – a relief, as I still remember the failed batches that were either fizzy or curdled). I felt a curious affinity with these fermenting foods; plain, unassuming, quietly undergoing a magical transformation at their own sweet pace: rather like Lucy Snowe and myself, as we found ourselves both blank slates in Belgium. No longer hyper-aware of how jarred goods are possibly the most irritating cargo during a house move, I stocked the fridge and larder with condiments, preserved lemons, olives, and five different types of mustard. I dedicated an entire shelf of the kitchen cupboard to my honey collection. I bought the fancy apricot and peach vinegar from the gorgeous olive oil shop in the centre of town, even though I already own at least ten other exotic types of vinegar. I got gadgets: a pressure cooker, a slow cooker, a salad spinner, joyfully allotting them space in cupboards I no longer had to share. I bought a second freezer to accommodate my love of homemade gelato and highly seasonal berries, free from the anxiety that had plagued me during my entire time in Oslo: don’t fill the freezer too full; you’ll need to eat everything in it before you move. I found secret spots to pick elderflower and wild garlic, when the seasons came – and preserved them in various concoctions that I stashed in my new freezer. Forget where the heart is: home for me is where you have your own secret elderflower foraging spot.

On top of all this – literally - I built a roof garden. The spacious concrete terrace that tops my apartment was bare when I arrived, but it didn’t take long to fill it with raised beds, grow bags and pots, and then to start planting seeds saved from my last harvest in Oslo. Only this time, I wasn’t faced with the inevitable prospect of having to clear hundreds of litres of compost from a balcony once I moved out (a prospect whose reality turned out to be even more onerous than I had possibly imagined, given that said compost was frozen in a solid block to the ground at the time – a hairdryer, buckets of boiling water and a broken shovel later, it was finally loosed through brute strength and a better shovel). I carried a thousand litres of compost back from the shops, a bag at a time, on my bike. It became home to a dizzying array of unusual herbs (mandarin sage, ginger mint, orange thyme, rose geranium), enough tomatoes to keep a pizzeria in business for at least a week, a tomatillo forest that would be the envy of Mexico, and a jungle of leafy greens that made my anaemic heart sing. I still remember the morning I saw my first bee, taking refuge in the floral oasis I had created in the middle of a landscape dominated by concrete and asphalt. I knelt down and welcomed him.

As I put down roots, I put down roots. I found the people warm, welcoming and easy-going – a far cry from the mendacious, arrogant Labassecouriens depicted by Brontë in Villette. No one made passive aggressive remarks to me in the street about using the recycling bins incorrectly. Strangers wished me welcome when they found out that I’d just moved, or helped me, unprompted, with heavy luggage on trams and trains. A group of skateboarding youths, smoking and drinking under my bedroom window at night, apologised profusely and wished me a good evening when I asked if they’d mind moving on. A motorcyclist who nearly hit me after taking a corner on my side of the road circled back round to apologise. An elderly lady offered to help when she saw me struggling to put my brand-new compost tumbler onto my bike to get it home. Having fainted during a doctor’s appointment, I was promptly offered a chocolate waffle from the staff supply by the kindly doctor. Strangers in shops offered unsolicited but highly appreciated recommendations for local cafes and restaurants.

I moved into my palatial office at the university, spending hours arranging my books in alphabetical order and hanging up outlandish tropical print wallpaper (they will rue the day they said no to a simple blue feature wall, but yes to ‘wall stickers’, a term I have interpreted in its most extreme sense). For the first time in years, I ate my lunch around a large table of colleagues, laughing about nothing or concocting outrageous speculative schemes, rather than alone hunched over my desk. Strangers commented on beautiful bunches of flowers I had bought myself (the price being approximately a quarter of what they cost in Norway), or wished me bon appetit as I tucked into my takeaway porridge on a station platform in Brussels.

Some days, I found myself close to tears with sheer joy and relief. It felt like waking up after a very long, deep sleep; warming back up after hibernation, like a shrunken butterfly waiting for the sun to bathe its wings. Literally, in fact: no more icy pavements, or spending five months of the year in the same uniform of wool and Gore-tex. Like Lucy Snowe, I revelled in a solitude that was the opposite of lonely, enjoying the prospect of – once again – reinventing myself, reassessing my priorities, finding a new routine. I cooked whatever I felt like eating, rather than whatever was reduced in the supermarket or needed clearing out of the fridge or cupboard. Old habits die hard. I reacquainted myself with tastes long missed in a country where anything imported gets slapped with a hefty tax premium: burrata, halloumi, gnocchi. Unlike Lucy, though, I sought out and enjoyed a huge variety of cake, all for myself.

As I wandered the Sunday flower market, arms full of peonies, or perused the window of my local bakery, or plucked the latest fat tomatillo from its thick sun-drenched vine, it occurred to me that for several years – especially those of the pandemic – I had been merely existing. Here was a place where I might start living.

So, in fact, perhaps happiness is a potato after all. It draws energy from the darkness, germinating in void. Cosseted in cold, dark and damp, it bides its time, awaiting the moment it can start to send tentative tendrils up into the sunshine. When it finds its place, it unfurls gentle roots and starts, reassuringly anchored in sun-warmed Belgian earth, to blossom.

Thank you to Catherine for the roof garden action photos!

Every few weeks, it seems, we’re treated to a swathe of articles across the media aimed at helping us to waste less food. It has recently been recognised that food waste is not merely a symptom of our growing food insecurity – thrown into sharp relief by the pandemic – but a cause of it too. Food waste accounts for approximately 6-8% of all human carbon emissions, with approximately a third of the food the world produces – some estimates run as high as 40% - going to waste. Rotting food in landfill produces the greenhouse gas methane, which is directly linked to climate change, but it’s also a huge waste of all the precious energy used to grow, harvest, package and transport that food. It is a senseless crisis on both an environmental and a humanitarian level, with famines raging across the globe while perfectly edible food rots in dumpsters thousands of miles away.

It’s a no-brainer that we need to stop wasting food. What is less clear, however, is whether the solution really lies in yet another feature from a celebrity chef instructing us how to repurpose our leftovers. One of the problems with this was succinctly illustrated by an article in The Times in July 2021, entitled ‘Fighting Food Waste – The Italian Way’. In this article, ‘superchef’ Massimo Bottura – of Osteria Francescana, famous for its ‘dropped lemon tart’ dessert – noted, quite rightly, that it’s a crime to allow the building blocks of Italian cuisine – pasta, bread, cheese – to go to waste. One of the solutions posited was a recipe for a pasta pie designed to help you use up those leftovers. Said pie involved making a bechamel sauce and required you to have approximately ten other ingredients kicking around in your fridge.

And therein lies the problem. It has become increasingly apparent to me over the past few years, as the kind of person perhaps most likely to come into contact with these sorts of articles, that they are targeting completely the wrong demographic. If I took a quick inventory of my fridge and freezer right now, I’d find: the leftover whey from making yoghurt, in a plastic tub waiting to be used in breadmaking; breadcrumbs from stale bread, frozen to use as a topping for gratins; some leftover sweetened raspberry pulp from making frozen yoghurt, which will later be used to flavour kombucha; old parmesan rinds, which at some point will go into a soup or risotto to add plenty of umami flavour; odds and ends of vegetables – carrot peelings, the tops and bottoms of leeks, the pods of peas, the shells of broad beans, the ends of onions – that will be simmered at the weekend into a vegetable stock; a frozen bag of prawn shells that will later become the base for a bisque.

I do not need more articles on how to avoid food waste, because by now it is built into the fabric of my life. I am borderline incapable of throwing food away. I will use up every last scrap in one way or another, unless it poses an imminent risk to my life (I draw the line at blue meat or orange polka dots atop my cream cheese, but will happily cut mould off bread or scrape it off jam). I take pride in finding wonderful ways to repurpose food that would otherwise go in the bin. Some of my best soda breads and scones have been made with a random assortment of soured milk and cream from the fridge, or even the liquid drained from a ball of mozzarella, and I have lost count of the number of times I’ve made a batch of financiers to use up egg whites from making ice cream and whatever past-its-best fruit or berries I’ve got lying around. Leftover pastry scraps become baked and used in a cheesecake base at a later date (thanks to Nadiya Hussain for that tip). Squashy fruit is given a new lease of life as a smoothie.

But clearly, I’m in the minority here. We are still wasting food, by the truckload. Might it not be time to start looking more closely at why?

Because surely, surely, it is not down to lack of recipes. Surely it’s not because people are standing there contemplating their fruit bowl and thinking ‘if ONLY I knew what to do with this black banana!’ The majority of the population have access to the internet. It takes seconds to clock those blackening bananas in your fruit bowl and acquire a recipe to help you make the most of them – not just one, but thousands, with levels of complexity and combinations of ingredients to suit every requirement and dietary preference. Ditto sour milk. Ditto stale bread. Ditto pretty much anything you’ve got weighing on your conscience in your fridge or cupboard – the internet provides. So why are we still bombarding people with the same old articles, when they clearly don’t work? We have millions of recipes. We are still wasting food.

The kind of person reading your Times article about the world-saving pasta pie is very likely the kind of person who already stockpiles breadcrumbs and parmesan rinds. These recipes are pointlessly targeting the people who will already have pangs of conscience around food waste and so are probably already engaged in minimising said waste. This messaging is telling them nothing they don’t already know. They might pick up a fun new tip on ways to use up those pastry scraps, but this is not going to enact major behavioural change – the kind of change needed – because those people are already at the coalface of that change. What about those who are actually throwing their bananas in the bin and pouring their milk down the drain?

The problem is, that to really tackle food waste on a meaningful level, we need to engage with the complex and often unsavoury realities behind the issue.

Food waste is confusing. On the surface, it makes no sense and is hard to explain. Why would you throw away something that can be eaten? I have very well-educated, privileged, middle-class friends who I have seen throw away a full tray of leftovers because they couldn’t be bothered to deal with them. I’ve seen an entire plate of freshly-baked jam tarts go into the bin simply because everyone had eaten their fill, and the apparent logical next step was to throw the surplus away. I don’t even want to dredge up the traumatic memories of attending a cookbook shoot, where whole meals and packages of unopened fresh ingredients were chucked into a black bin bag at the end. Yes: those glossy lifestyle shots strewn across the pages of the expensive cookbooks you love to leaf through come at more than a financial cost.

Let’s go off on a seeming tangent for a second. In 2004, BP (British Petroleum) popularised the term ‘carbon footprint’, launching a carbon footprint ‘calculator’ so that each individual could assess how much his or her lifestyle was contributing to the climate crisis. As this article points out, it was ‘one of the most successful, deceptive PR campaigns maybe ever’, designed to ‘manipulate our thinking about one of the greatest environmental threats of our time’. BP produces millions of barrels of oil and gas every day, investing a tiny proportion (less than 3%) of its budget in renewable energy sources. They’re certainly not about to reduce their own carbon footprint any time soon, but intend to displace the responsibility onto the average consumer, hoping that our guilt around taking the car to the shops or jetting off to the Med twice a year will distract us from the fact that companies like themselves are destroying our planet on a colossal scale and have no plans to slow down. The burden is foisted onto the individual, along with all of the guilt and anxiety that comes with it.

How much of food waste is a systemic, institutionalised problem that has been shifted, along with accompanying culpability and guilt, onto the individual consumer? As @foodycatAlicia pointed out when I discussed this on twitter: how responsible are we, really, for the food going off in our fridge? How long has that food been in storage or transit, with the opportunity to deteriorate on the way? Might it have been improperly stored or handled, leading to increased perishability? ‘Saving’ that bread or banana before it goes off is not going to change the fact that a shocking quantity of food is wasted before it even gets to our kitchens. There is also the thorny issue of sell-by dates, which have been associated with unnecessary food waste – many see them as gospel rather than guideline, not daring to rely on the evidence of their own eyes or nose. Supermarkets are going some way to address this issue. In Norway, many manufacturers have replaced the ‘sell-by’ or ‘use-by’ phrase before the date with the label ‘beste før, ofte god etter’, which translates as ‘Best before, often good after’, and an accompanying graphic urging the consumer to ‘Se, luk, smak’ (look, smell, taste). In the UK, Tesco announced in 2018 that it was removing these dates from some of its products in an attempt to avoid waste. It’s something, but it’s not enough. Supermarkets, cafes and restaurants are a huge contributor to food waste, as several documentaries around ‘dumpster diving’ have pointed out, with tons of perfectly good food thrown into skips where, in many countries, it is illegal for the individual to retrieve it. All this is far bigger than a harassed parent tipping the kids’ leftovers into the bin one night or a single person pouring away the milk they haven’t managed to finish over the course of a week. Clever marketing and PR has, once again, foisted the blame onto us, with the media complicit in making us feel guilty if we don’t have time to turn those odds and ends of cheese into a quiche, or make healthy crisps out of our vegetable peelings.

These articles and recipes also ignore other, even more complex, parts of the problem. It’s all very well offering us the Michelin-starred chefs’ ways of dealing with their sourdough excess, but those ‘solutions’ often assume that you possess a well-stocked storecupboard and – often overlooked – the means to whip up those food-saving recipes. What if the reason you’re ‘wasting’ food is because you can’t afford to run a fridge or freezer to keep it fresh for longer? What if you can’t batch cook, because you can’t afford the electricity or don’t have a proper hob or oven? What if you are living in temporary accommodation without access to proper kitchen facilities? What if you simply don’t have the cooking skills to repurpose any leftovers at all, relying on convenience food that you can’t store or reheat (or that would be unpalatable if saved and reheated)? To blithely advise people to grate their sourdough into crumbs for the freezer assumes incredible privilege – and physical ability – on so many levels. Food waste – as with food poverty, to which it is surely linked – is intricately bound up with class and education. Asking star chefs to champion the anti-food waste narrative is spectacularly missing the point if you want to reach out to people for whom the concept of a Michelin star might be as alien as the concept of financial security. These are not relatable narratives.

I could go on. What if you have a mental health issue, perhaps an eating disorder that causes you anxiety around food? What if you know you can’t resist the temptation of leftovers, so throw them in the bin before you have to deal with the significant stress they cause? I remember an old ‘diet tip’ from the nineties instructing you to pour washing up liquid on leftovers to avoid temptation. Horrifying on many levels, but an indicator of the under-discussed connection between mental health issues and food waste. What if you’re simply too depressed to ‘meal plan’, unable to see further in life than getting out of bed in the morning? What if you’re dealing with a colossal anxiety disorder that does not allow you the headspace to imagine a future trajectory for that wilting bag of salad in the fridge drawer?

Speaking from personal experience, it is absolutely exhausting to keep on top of a fully-stocked kitchen and avoid letting anything go to waste, particularly when you have a small household or live alone, since most shops still sell groceries in quantities catering for the nuclear family (why, when the recommended/average serving of pasta is 100g, do they sell it in 500g bags? Explain this to me). For me it is a source of intense anxiety, and I’m privileged, have access to a vast range of kitchen tools, and am blessed with friends who will show up at short notice to eat the results. I cannot even imagine how anxious I might be if I didn’t have all of the above. It is mind-numbingly exhausting to constantly monitor the contents of your cupboards for signs of deterioration, and then act accordingly, often in ways that involve buying myriad other ingredients in order to repurpose the offending parmesan rind or black banana (I wrote about this, and the mythical concept of ‘larder zero’, here). It is exhausting to simultaneously shoulder the guilt and burden of what we are doing to the planet, and realise that making one more soda bread is going to achieve absolutely nothing. I don’t have a family to care for (unless you count 120 houseplants), nor a stressful job or financial worries to throw into the mix. I’m one of the ones who can whip up Bottura’s pasta pie. It’s those who can’t that we need to be reaching out to with our narratives. But in order to do so, we need to learn a whole lot more about what drives this relentless food waste we keep hearing so much about.

We need to detach the narrative from facetious lists of banana bread recipes and ‘kitchen hacks’. We need to start accommodating questions of class, privilege, education and mental health, and all the thorny, tangled issues that accompany them. We have already started to realise this when it comes to the shocking case of food poverty, and the dialogue needs to continue. I am no expert, but there are experts out there who need to start being invited to weigh in on the conversation. People living in food poverty. People who run food banks. Mental health professionals. Government ministers. But bombarding us with more and more recipes, particularly championed by star chefs, is not the answer. ‘Let them eat banana bread’ isn’t going to cut it for much longer.

A few weeks ago, my neighbourhood exploded in crimson. Like beads of blood shaken briskly from a deep wound, pendulous redcurrants started to dangle from the bushes lining the streets. Their weighty chain-like stems drooped abundantly, inviting birds and passers-by to gorge on their bright, tart goodness. And yet gorge they did not. Every time I wandered past I would survey the crop covetously, convinced that those who had an actual right to the bushes and their bounty would soon awaken to the ripeness of the harvest and take full advantage, but the day never came. The currants lingered. I waited. I decided enough was enough.

If there’s one thing I cannot stand, it’s perfectly good food going to waste. Even the birds didn’t seem interested in the gleaming treasure, let alone the inhabitants of the buildings in whose front gardens they grew. I had left it long enough to be polite and considerate. The thought of serviceable currants languishing in the dirt was too much to bear. I took a pair of scissors and an ice cream tub and strolled purposefully: a woman with a mission. I snipped, tugged and twisted until the tub overflowed with glistening tangles of scarlet. Alert, I was ready to cease and desist if requested, but the residents didn’t bat an eyelid.

It’s hard to know what to do with redcurrants, beyond the traditional British sauce of which I am not a fan. They appear with such haste, and in such quantities, that a glut can feel overwhelming. I simmered them into a sorbet (add a splash of elderflower cordial and a whisked egg white, and you end up with the most ethereally light, bubblegum-pink clouds of tart sweetness), whipped up a sublime sweet-savoury relish with brown sugar, red wine vinegar and red onions to accompany slices of grilled halloumi or lamb sausages, and fell in love with a Danish concoction, rysteribs (‘shaken currants’), which simply involves shaking a handful of de-stalked currants with sugar in a jar and letting them sit in the fridge, becoming sweetly mellow and releasing a delicious scarlet syrup – excellent on granola with a dollop of properly sour Greek yoghurt.

It occurred to me that the eye-opening pop of a sherbet sour currant might work wonderfully punctuating the crumb of an American-style (that is: triangular, busy with various flavours, and designed to be eaten without jam and cream) scone. After all, I’ve made delightful versions with cranberries and raspberries, and redcurrants sit within the same flavour family, in my mind. That thought also led me to pecans, and these lovely little treats were born.

As I say, these are not scones in the traditional British sense. Jam and/or cream wouldn’t really make sense here, I don’t think. They are best eaten warm, split and adorned with nothing but a lick of salted butter. Lemon curd maybe, if you really must. A handful more berries on the side, perhaps. They’re not overly sweet, making them ideal for breakfast or a snack, though they have a delightful crunchy sugared topping. The feisty currants are tempered by the caramel sweetness of pecans and the warmth of cinnamon. You must freeze your currants first, so they don’t become squashed and difficult to work with in the dough, which means they’re a good way of using up frozen berries – raspberries, blueberries and cranberries would also work well, or even whitecurrants or blackcurrants. I consider myself having done a tiny service to the world, in offering up more uses for the summer glut.

Much more palatable than lacklustre currants slowly rotting on the ground.

Redcurrant and pecan scones (makes 6 medium or 8 small):

• 220g spelt flour

• 35g light brown sugar

• 2 tsp baking powder

• ¼ tsp salt

• ½ tsp ground cinnamon

• 90g cold butter, cubed

• 60g pecan nuts

• 110g frozen, de-stalked redcurrants

• 130ml milk, plus 1 tbsp for egg wash

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 1 tbsp lemon juice

• 1 egg

• Demerara or granulated sugar, for sprinkling

Pre-heat the oven to 220C. Line a baking sheet with baking parchment or silicone.

Put the spelt flour, brown sugar, baking powder, salt and cinnamon in a food processor or, if making by hand, a bowl. Pulse to mix if using a processor, or stir well if using a bowl. Add the butter and pulse a few times until the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs. If doing it by hand, rub in with your fingers as quickly and lightly as possible until you get the same result. If using a food processor, add the pecans and pulse two or three times to roughly chop them into the mix. If making by hand, roughly chop and add to the bowl. Transfer the mix to a bowl (if using a processor), then stir in the redcurrants.

Whisk together the milk, vanilla and lemon juice. Pour into the bowl and bring the mix together with your hands to form a dough – try to work it as little as possible. Press into a round about 15cm wide and 4cm high, and pat down. Use a sharp knife or dough scraper to cut into six or eight wedges, depending on how big you want each scone to be. Transfer the wedges to the lined baking sheet, spaced at least 5cm apart.

Whisk the egg with the 1 tbsp milk and use to brush the tops of the scones. Sprinkle with a little demerara or granulated sugar. Bake for 15-20 minutes, until risen and pale gold. Leave to cool for 10 minutes before eating.

It is a myth universally peddled that Scandinavia has excellent baked goods. The British press, in particular, would have you believe that if you walk into any coffee shop or bakery across the entire Nordic region (they very rarely pause to acknowledge that Finland and Iceland are not, technically, part of Scandinavia) you will be greeted by an exquisite smorgasbord of soft, buttery delights, the gentle waft of cinnamon and cardamom softening the pungent accent of freshly ground coffee. And indeed this would be the case, were you to walk into any bakery across Sweden or Denmark. Norway, however, is another story.

Oh, Norway. Sharing a border with Sweden; once owned by Denmark…how did you get your buns so catastrophically wrong? Dry, doughy, and somehow managing to taste stale even when fresh, what the Norwegian bun lacks in taste and texture it attempts to make up for in size. For these buns are nearly always the size of your head, with a price tag to match: an average bakery bun in Oslo will set you back the best part of £5. Yet they are, universally, a disappointment. Dry, mealy, stale – often the only redeeming feature is a puddle of sumptuous vanilla custard in the centre, but even that starts to cloy after a while. Don’t even get me started on the appalling lack of cardamom. Cinnamon buns (kanelsnurrer or kanelboller) are ten a penny in Norwegian bakeries, but if you want a buttery twist accented by the citrusy rasp of cracked cardamom seeds, sprinkled on so thickly that they’ll cling to the gaps in your teeth afterwards, you’ll have to go over the border to Sweden on what I like to term a ‘bun run’. Cinnamon buns have a universal appeal – an unarguable-with quality that makes them easy to like but not very interesting to eat. Cardamom buns are their edgy, grown-up older cousin, keeping things cool and interesting with their zingy perfume.

I remain mystified by Norway’s inability to produce decent buns – and, believe me, I’ve tried a fair few. Where Denmark excels at feather-light wienerbrød (literally, ‘Viennese bread’, which is what the Danes call our ‘Danish pastries’, because they actually originated via Austrian bakers) and Sweden at buttery knots of spice-flecked dough, Norway lags sadly behind, hoping to score a few points with its cheerful-looking but somewhat saccharine skolebolle (‘school bun’), a snowy ring of coconut-sprinkled dough encasing a lake of golden custard. They go for quantity not quality, which makes no sense because why would I want a more sizeable portion of disappointment?

I was recently made to reconsider all of the above, however. Stopping at the absurdly cute café Anne på Landet on a seaside stroll just outside Oslo a few weeks ago, I made a beeline for a blackcurrant bun. The Norwegians do love their solbær (literally, ‘sun berries’) when in season, which is lucky because so do I, and I am always thinking of new ways to use them. Pillowy soft dough gave way to a light custard flecked with tangy blackcurrants and a sprinkling of crunchy sugar, and I devoured it, enraptured, swinging my legs over the ocean. Most importantly, it was not the size of my head but perfectly proportioned, a glorious harmony of sweet dough and sour currants with nary a morsel of spongy staleness in sight. This was the Norwegian bun grown up, sized down, and given a makeover.

This is my attempt to recreate it. I’ve amped up the quantity of currants, for I am a currant fiend, but otherwise they are fairly close to the original – perhaps slightly less sweet, which is a plus in my opinion because then I can justify eating them for breakfast. I also garnished with a few sprigs of lemon verbena, which works so wonderfully with both blackcurrants and with custards. You could use these as a happy blueprint for experimentation: redcurrants, whitecurrants, raspberries, blueberries or gooseberries would work wonderfully in place of the blackcurrants, or even some thin slices of summer rhubarb. You could flavour the custard with herbs instead of vanilla: lemon thyme, rosemary or blackcurrant sage would work particularly well. You could garnish with those herbs instead of, or in addition to, the verbena. Go wild. They freeze well, so there is no excuse not to let them be a beautiful blank canvas for the bounty of summer.

And if you want the ‘authentic’ Norwegian bun experience, make them double the size, leave them out on the counter for two days and then eat them. But I don’t recommend it.

Blackcurrant custard buns (makes 9):

For the dough:

• 250ml whole milk

• 50g butter, plus extra for greasing

• 1 egg

• 500g plain flour

• 75g caster sugar

• 2 tsp salt

• 7g instant yeast or 25g fresh yeast

For the filling and garnish:

• 250ml whole milk

• 60g caster sugar, divided, plus extra for sprinkling

• 1 tsp vanilla extract

• 1 egg

• 30g cornflour

• 100ml sour cream

• 180g blackcurrants, fresh or frozen

• A few leaves of lemon verbena or lemon thyme, to garnish (optional)

First, make the dough. Put the milk and butter in a small saucepan and bring to just below the boil, until the milk is steaming and the butter has melted. Set aside and leave to cool to room temperature. Once cool, beat in the egg. Set aside 2 tbsp of this mixture in a small bowl to use as an egg wash later.

Put the flour in the bowl of a stand mixer fitted with a dough hook (or a large mixing bowl if mixing by hand). Add the sugar and salt to one side of the bowl, and the yeast to the other (crumble it in if using fresh yeast). Pour in the milk, butter and egg mixture and use the mixer, or your hands, to bring together into a dough. Knead for around 5-10 minutes, until the dough is soft, silky and elastic, then cover with a tea towel and leave to rise until doubled in size (1-2 hours).

While the dough is rising, make the custard. Put the milk and half the sugar (so 30g) in a small saucepan and bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and add the vanilla extract. In a small bowl, whisk together the egg and the remaining sugar, then sift in the cornflour and whisk that in too. Add half the warm milk mixture to the egg and flour mixture, whisking constantly, then tip it into the pan with the rest of the warm milk. Put over a medium heat and whisk constantly until it thickens – around 3-5 minutes. Set aside to cool to room temperature (you can cover it with cling film to prevent a skin forming, but I just whisk it before using to get rid of that anyway).

Once the dough has doubled in size, divide it into nine equal pieces. Grease a high-sided oven dish with butter. Roll each piece of dough into a ball and place in the oven dish, with about 2 inches space between each ball. Using your fingers, press to make a hollow in the middle of each ball that you will later fill with the custard. Leave the buns to rise in a warm place, covered with a tea towel, until almost doubled in size (about an hour).

Once they have risen, press down on the hollow in the middle again to open it out (it will have shrunk a little as the buns rose). Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Brush the reserved egg wash mixture onto the buns around the edges of the hollow in the middle. Divide the custard between the buns, spooning it into the hollow in the centre. Divide the sour cream between them too, topping each dollop of custard with around a teaspoon of sour scream. Divide the blackcurrants between the buns, pressing them lightly into the custard and sour cream mixture, and a few into the dough around the edge. Sprinkle the buns with caster sugar.

Bake for 25-30 minutes, until the edges of the buns are golden and the blackcurrants have started to release their inky juice into the custard and dough. Leave to cool before eating, and garnish with the lemon verbena or lemon thyme leaves. They freeze well (without the herb garnish).

For as long as I can remember, friends have been synonymous with food. Like T. S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, measuring out his life in coffee spoons, I’ve measured out my friendships over the years in myriad greaseproof-wrapped parcels. There have been salted caramel brownies posted across the country to someone I admired; still-warm cakes balanced across bicycle handlebars on the way to various birthday parties; homemade biscuits snatched from the worktop on my way out to meet the diverse companions of endless pandemic walks. Friendships have been forged in the fire of a hot oven, consolidated through the bestowing of a freshly-baked loaf or a tinfoil parcel of flapjacks still oozing the aromas of hot butter and toasted oats. When I think of my dearest friends, I think as much of the feasts we have shared together as of their faces. Like some strange form of epicurean synesthesia, my love for them can be mapped onto the devouring of particular dishes, the ambience of particular restaurants, or the minutiae of preparing a particular recipe. A close group of friends in London will forever be associated with the night we rustled up a feast that, owing to various last-minute cancellations, saw us eating an entire block of halloumi each. My best friends from university are inextricably tied in my mind with our annual New Year’s cheese feast, also featuring a chocolate concoction now referred to, following a memorable typo, as ‘desert mouse’. I cannot separate the thought of my friend Victor from the time I once watched in disbelief as he popped whole segments of raw quince into his mouth.

As a Brit, it’s in my blood to reach for the ‘on’ switch of the kettle at the first sign of crisis, but it’s even better if there’s a home-baked biscuit to accompany the resulting brew. So much of our discourse around food hinges on community, sharing, and companionship - a word whose very etymology derives from the social breaking of bread. We take it as a given that the way to our hearts lies through the stomach, and those holidays we celebrate with our loved ones have become increasingly defined by the dishes we are supposed to share with them: chocolates for your Valentine; eggs at Easter; breakfast in bed for Mother’s Day. It has become a cliche for TV cookery show contestants, asked why they push themselves to their limits on national television, to state that they feed in order to show love.

But what if this habit were crushingly inadequate, or even potentially dangerous? What if the very food you might usually rustle up to mitigate a crisis potentially became the source of that crisis? What place can we, as a society, offer to those for whom food is not a marker of celebration or affection, but a source of fear and intense anxiety?

My dear friend Sushi was one such person. She passed away recently after battling an eating disorder for over two decades. I was completely unprepared for the news of her death, which came as a terrible shock. It hit me like a truck: a violent, overwhelming grief that bored a sharp hole straight through my pandemic-induced tedium.

I forget exactly how we met and became friends, perhaps because she made such an impression that she seemed always to have been in my life. She had a devilish glint in her eye and a wonderfully dry sense of humour - like a modern-day Jane Austen or Jonathan Swift, surveying the world around her with mingled delight and disdain. I always thought it particularly cruel that her brilliant mind was imprisoned in a frail body that didn’t seem a remotely deserving vessel for it. It was a body forever clad in at least three layers, to try and keep the cold from penetrating its tissue-paper skin. A body that, wrapped in her trademark fur coat and perpetually shrouded in the smoke from her beloved e-cigarette, exuded a kind of brittle, resilient glamour that I couldn’t help admire. Most of all, it was a body that, try as I might, I could not make better with food.

When your adult life has been defined by a passionate relationship with food in all its guises, a real sense of impotence strikes when your close friend has a debilitating eating disorder. It is difficult to express affection when the usual language for such things is lost in translation. I was suddenly struck by the utter futility of those habitual gestures - the paper-wrapped brownies, the biscuits, the cups of tea. They seemed ghastly and garish, somehow; a hollow substitute for something I could not do, which was to make her well again.

We have become increasingly conversant with the debates and issues that fall under that broad umbrella, mental health. Yet, as those far more eloquent and knowledgeable than me have identified, there is a problematic rupture in this conversation: a conspicuous absence of one half of the coin. While many are increasingly open about issues such as anxiety, depression and even post-traumatic stress disorder, the less palatable mental illnesses are still dogged by silence and stigma. Eating disorders fall squarely in this category. I have seen, first-hand, how people shrink from the spectacle of an emaciated human body, and I recognise something of myself in them, too. It is so very hard for us, enmeshed in a society that normalises the enjoyment of food and systematically excludes or ignores those for whom it is painful, to comprehend those who seem wilfully engaged in the destruction of their own bodies.

Sushi was highly aware of the thoughts that often ran through people’s heads upon looking at her; the less kind among those people would voice them out loud. She was abandoned by former friends, who declared themselves unable to watch her struggle. I struggled too, I admit, but more because it seemed so unnatural, for me, to dissociate food and friendship. I tried to avoid scenarios where food would be involved during our meetings: I made sure I had always eaten beforehand, so there wouldn’t need to be any added stress. On the couple of occasions that she insisted we cook and eat together - usually because one of us was staying over at the other’s house - the process was painstaking and excruciating. There were disagreements about cooking methods: she wanted halloumi, but baulked at my suggestion she dry-fry it in a hot pan, even though I insisted that no extra fat was involved; just the word ‘fry’ was sufficient to trigger her anxiety. There was impatience on my part at the process of cooking and eating taking three hours when it should have taken one. How ironic, then, that I would now give anything for a three-hour meal with her, however fraught.

I laboured under the naive and arrogant misapprehension, at first, that I might be able to help ‘fix’ her. I tried to help her come up with plans, strategies, and life-affirming aphorisms. I realised, fairly quickly, that I would be unlikely to succeed where decades of medical and psychological intervention had failed. I decided I would just offer her my friendship, on whatever terms she wanted to take it. It meant a reassessment of everything I took that concept to mean - a steady stripping back of all the extraneous baking, wining and dining. In a way, I suppose, this was friendship at its most genuine and unadulterated, uncluttered by the trappings of arbitrary gastronomic ritual. I accepted that food had become both absent, and yet somehow still a gigantic, spectral presence. I had to dig deep to figure out what I could possibly offer as a friend, without all of the culinary substitutes to fall back on. It made me painfully aware of how little place society offers for those who do not conform to normative body images or who might want to shy away from the pervasiveness of food; how difficult it is to escape its siren call. 

We found life and joy in other things: our shared love of cats, English literature, and yoga. Food still made itself known, but in less conventional ways. Instead of sitting down to share a cake together, we would share our latest exasperations about social media food trends. She was at her witty best when providing scathing commentary on the insidious ‘wellness’ and ‘clean eating’ movements that plague our media, determinedly calling out their nonsense at every turn. No wonder, when such trends have been associated with rising anorexic or ‘orthorexic’ tendencies among a new generation of (overwhelmingly) women. My awareness of these is now heightened, and I hope in some way to continue the work Sushi did at calling them out for their dangerous lies. I will forever think of her when I see some bright spark flaunting their latest recipe for low-calorie, zero-sugar banana pancakes; what Sushi would refer to, with absolute disgust, as a ‘banana omelette’.

I will never feel that I did enough, and it is hard to acknowledge that what brings me so much joy in this world was, for her, the reason she left it behind. There is nothing left now but to do, in the unbridled space of my imagination, what I could never do for her in life: surround her with luscious tributes of food. I console myself by imagining her in a better place: a gilded Roman-style palace where she reclines on a chaise longue, fed delicious morsels by a band of minions. I like to think that somewhere she is voraciously sampling the most outrageous delicacies: white truffles, caviar, Wagyu beef. I festoon her, in my mind, with all the glorious treats that her vile illness never allowed her to enjoy, and I imagine her catching up, breathlessly, on a whole lifetime of flavours unexperienced.

I hope that, some day, we might meet again. On that occasion, you can be sure that I will rustle up the most epic feast I have ever created, and we will dine like queens.

We’ve reached that awkward, liminal stage of the pandemic where, rather than simply wallowing in misery, weight gain and relentless tedium, it has apparently become acceptable to turn to another person (from two metres away, of course) and ask them: ‘Where is the first place you want to travel to, when this is all over?’ Now that there is the tiniest sliver of light at the end of the plague tunnel, thoughts inevitably turn to how we might embrace our new-found freedom. It has taken precisely two iterations of this question for me to become sick of it. My standard response, now, is simply to roll my eyes and say ‘Literally anywhere. I don’t care.’

In spite of this, though, the question continues to sit there in my head, refusing to shift – a bit like the extra kilos around my waistline as I live by the mantra ‘a pudding (twice) a day keeps the crippling pandemic depression away’. It would be easy to answer with the list of places I’d planned to go in 2020, trips that I like to think of as postponed rather than cancelled, and destinations to which I still intend to flee as soon as it’s safe and legally possible.

But actually, I realise the question has a slightly more complicated answer, one which I struggle to put into words. Here goes.

What I really want, when this is all over, is to stumble, bleary-eyed, off an overnight bus, train or plane into the chaos of morning rush hour in a strange new city, and then to find something unfamiliar and wonderful to eat. Something that will taste doubly exquisite for having truly been earned, whether by cramming my body awkwardly into an uncomfortable non-reclining seat or surviving a fitful slumber punctuated by the perpetual stop-start of screeching wheels on rail tracks.

While breakfast, for me, is always a joy regardless of the context, there is something about the heady combination of fatigue, adrenaline and anticipation that accompanies travelling which adds a certain frisson to the experience. My morning granola tastes good as I sit at my kitchen table at home, but it doesn’t taste half as good as a warm, buttery, egg-stuffed roti fresh from the griddle at Colombo station after arriving off an eleven-hour flight, full of glorious anticipation for the days and discoveries ahead. Or that first tongue-blistering sip of sweet chai after a nineteen-hour train ride through Rajasthan, accompanied by whatever fried delights had just passed through the carriage in the baskets of the itinerant snack vendors. Whatever brunch treats I rustle up for myself at home simply cannot match the combination of a creamy flat white and a cardamom-strewn Swedish bun, eaten straight from the paper bag on a station bench after eight hours on a night bus and before the sun has fully risen. Nor that first bite of sushi plucked from a conveyor belt in Tokyo after waking up in the middle of the night to visit the famous fish market. I’ve enjoyed many a Vietnamese pho in my time, but none quite as potent as the bowl I slurped at a station in Hue after a mad early morning rush to catch the first train. I still remember the quivering slivers of rare beef that sat atop the noodles and whose iron seemed to work itself directly into my veins as I revived with every sip.

There are others, too. The sticky rice steamed in a bamboo tube, devoured in the streets after I’d risen before the sun to watch monks walk the streets of Laos collecting alms. The stack of peanut butter toast ordered for me by a kind stranger at a café in Malaysia, as he told me firmly that I needed to ‘get my strength up’ after a gruelling night train experience. The standard bakery-chain croissant eaten straight from its napkin to blow away the cobwebs after the overnight ferry crossing to Copenhagen. The pillowy steamed bun washed down with a mug of sweet, milky tea after a rainy early morning bike ride through the streets of Yangon. A bowl of miso broth tangled with freshly-cut udon noodles and crispy tempura vegetables sipped at a café in Hiroshima after an early trip to the Atomic Bomb Museum, and which served as a much-needed balm for both my appetite and my heart.

These moments are precious punctuation marks in the midst of otherwise frenetic travels. There are few things better than stopping to take it all in: the novelty of a new landscape, city or culture, and the anticipation of what lies ahead. That sense of having escaped your own reality for a while, and having swapped it for a new one. The best time in which to do this is before the world has quite woken up, when you can watch lives, routines and journeys unfold before your eyes. Even better if you can do so with something delicious in hand.

I miss the intoxicating sensation of arriving somewhere completely unknown in the small hours of the morning, inevitably exhausted from whatever ill-advised budget mode of transport I’ve taken to get there (perhaps it’s because I never, technically, left university that I constantly forget I no longer have to live like a student). I miss the thrill of knowing that I can – indeed, should – indulge in the delights of a proper, double-shot coffee, because I’m so tired that the caffeine would simply bring me up to normal energy levels, rather than sending me into a spiral of panic and anxiety as it usually does. I miss the anticipation of that coffee, and wandering brand-new streets with wide eyes, taking in the novelty while primed to pounce on the first decent-looking beverage outlet I can find. (I say coffee, but at times this niche has been filled variously by milky red Thai iced tea, delicate earthernware bowls of matcha, and Syrian mint lemonade, all of which were highly acceptable substitutes.) And then, said beverage in hand, I miss scouting for the best possible thing I can find to accompany it; preferably something that will deliver a quick shot of sugar to the brain, but I’m open to everything.

I remember reading once in a cookbook – I’m fairly certain it was an Ottolenghi one – that breakfast is the meal least likely to transcend cultures. While we might revel in unfamiliar ingredients and hitherto unheard-of dishes at every other time of the day, we are set in our ways when it comes to literally waking up our tastebuds. Breakfast, it seems, might actually be the most fiercely regional of meals, the ritual that ties you most firmly to your global and cultural origins, wherever they are. This might be one of the secrets behind the immense success of Mark Zee’s ‘Symmetry Breakfast’ Instagram account and cookbook: nothing is more evocative of a particular culture and its way of life than how its people start their day. In an age of globally available ingredients and experimental fusion food, certain dishes offer us an unadulterated ‘way in’ to their regions of origin: a purity and authenticity of experience that you just don’t get with lunch or dinner.

And perhaps that’s why breakfasting in unknown spaces offers such heady delights. You’re forced further out of your comfort zone – as if you weren’t literally out of it already. There will be no granola and berry compote on the train as it pulls into Jaipur. You will not find a croissant at Colombo station (well, OK, you might, but you’d be a fool if you chose that over the egg roti waiting to be devoured hot from the griddle). You’d be hard-pressed to locate banana and chia seed porridge in Hiroshima.

While it might be getting increasingly easy to stick to what you know, food-wise, in this modern age of rapid globalisation and cultural transmission, you’re less likely to do so when those morning hunger pangs assert their urgency. Lunchtime might offer opportunities for a leisurely stroll to try and find your home comforts, but morning hunger demands to be sated. It will give in to temptations, however unfamiliar. It will move you to accept a bowl of rare beef and noodles, where you’d normally have oats and milk. It will succumb to the promise of a chilli-spiked taco in place of a smoothie or toast. And, in so doing, that morning hunger will take you on journeys – both literal and metaphorical – of unimaginable delight, opening new culinary doors and giving rise to cravings that will resonate long after you’ve finally made it home.

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.

It’s been years since I last wrote anything substantial on here, but I decided on a whim that 2021 would be the year I revived this neglected corner of the food internet. I wish I could claim that such a decision was the result of an inspirational bolt from the blue, or a wholesome desire to do more things that I enjoy as a result of the miserable devastation wreaked by 2020…but the honest truth is that I had to pay 155 dollars to Squarespace for the privilege of reinstating my expired domain, and I’ll be damned if I let that money go to waste. I will chain myself to this desk and churn out post after post until I feel some arbitrary sense of having gotten ‘good value for money’. Welcome to 2021 on Nutmegs, seven: powered by stubbornness, excessive thriftiness and a vague, directionless sense of spite. It’ll still be an improvement on 2020.

I’d love to begin with some luscious, instagram-worthy recipe and a chirpy anecdote, but that is precisely the point. I haven’t felt inspired to post anything of the sort for over two years, and although there are a number of factors involved in this – laziness, possibly; a desire not to spend my entire day at work looking at a screen only to then come home and start writing at a screen again; having expended a lot of my creative energy on my first cookbook – it occurred to me that perhaps the feeling is best summarized by the thought that it just…stopped being fun.

And I can pinpoint with some precision the moment it stopped being fun. I can trace it to a September afternoon in 2018, the day after I moved my life to a cramped, dark apartment in Oslo, when I went for a walk to buy something for breakfast the next day. I can still remember taking the tub of Greek yoghurt and four pears to the till, and finding out I’d be paying the equivalent of £11 for the privilege. (Just for context, this would probably set you back about £2-3 in a British supermarket).

What an epic journey of frustration, disappointment and apathy it has been since then.

When your entire life revolves around food, Norway is not a good place to be. There, I said it. Beklager, Norwegian patriots – I’m not intending this to be a critique of the motherland you know and love, and once quick look at my Instagram feed will assure you that there are plenty of aspects of Norwegian life I do very much enjoy, so don’t hate me too much. But from personal, lived experience (and I’ve given it 2.5 years): being a food lover and a food writer in Norway is slowly eating away at my soul.

Let’s begin with the prices, for this is probably the heart of the matter. I’m lucky enough to have grown up in the UK which, for all its many problems, has astonishingly cheap groceries (and, I should point out that Brexit may well change all this in the horrible dystopian future that is no doubt around the corner). I’d be the first to argue that they shouldn’t be that cheap. I have taken my fair share of umbrage over the years: Sainsburys selling whole chickens for less than the price of a takeaway coffee (and that’s a British takeaway coffee, which will set you back about £2 – not a Norwegian one, which incidentally would be closer to £5 or £6) was a real low point, and I was genuinely staggered to see Tesco advertising bags of sprouts for 14p just this Christmas. Considering I like to cook quite a lot of exotic dishes, few single ingredients have ever stood out as unnervingly expensive (I’d also be the first to acknowledge my privilege, as a comfortably middle-class southerner, in being able to say this: we also suffer from staggering social inequality and a horrific amount of the population having to depend on food banks, but if you haven’t realized by now that this entire blog is based on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, then please accept that and bear with me).

When you live in a country for most of your adult lifetime, you get used to what things cost. It becomes a ‘standard’ of sorts. Consequently, every single foray to the shops for groceries in Oslo over the past two and a half years has involved the same micro-rollercoaster of unpleasant emotions; usually a combination of astonishment and outrage. Bear in mind that I lived in Denmark for two years, so you’d think I’d have been gently initiated into the world of Scandinavian prices. Norway is famed for being one of the most expensive countries in the world: 44% more expensive than any other country in Europe (only Iceland is more expensive). You might imagine, then, that groceries tend to be around 44% more expensive than they would be in the UK, but it’s not that simple. Wandering through the aisles of a Norwegian supermarket feels like a Kafkaesque nightmare where all logic and reason has gone out of the window, and they’ve let some maniac in with a wad of shelf stickers who just makes up the prices according to his or her capricious whims.

Milk, bread, eggs – what you might call staples – are entirely reasonably priced compared with the UK, largely because they’re fairly cheap items to begin with, so adding that potential 44% on top doesn’t result in an outrage factor. Fine.

But would you like to buy a block of halloumi (or, as I think of it, ‘vegetarian bacon’, and it’s basically become my go-to since I mostly stopped eating meat)? That’ll set you back between £6 and £9. What about a small bag of flaked almonds, the kind you might strew liberally across the surface of a banana loaf before baking? £10. A tub of ice cream from one of the big brands? £8-12. White chocolate chips for baking? You can only buy one brand, an American one, and a packet will set you back something absolutely insane like £15. Even if you just buy a bar of plain white chocolate and chop it yourself, it’s still markedly more expensive than in the UK (and hard to find, too). A bottle of my favourite, grapefruit juice, is usually £4-5 unless on special offer. And, one of the most insane discoveries: a packet of gnocchi, the kind you can pick up for £1-2 in the UK, costs £9 in Oslo. Nine pounds, for what is essentially a packet of pasta.

About two months into my life in Norway, I wanted to bake the pumpkin cheesecake recipe that you can now find in my cookbook. Had I gone to the shop and filled my basket with the necessary items (namely, a tin of pumpkin puree and 3 tubs of cream cheese), it would have cost the equivalent of £22. I made it in the end, because it was for a recipe piece I’d been commissioned to do. It tasted even better, seasoned piquantly with my frustrated tears.

Recipes I’ve cooked habitually for years, or ingredients I’d normally pick up without a second thought, have become borderline inaccessible. Before the Scandisplainers (yes, this is a term I’ve coined) start parroting ‘Oh, but salaries are proportionally higher there’: well, yes, but it’s not so simple. Certain food items cost, sometimes, six times more than they might in the UK. I certainly don’t earn six times more than I would in the UK. Nor is this necessarily a question of affordability: I am grateful that I can afford to spend £22 on the ingredients for a cheesecake, in the sense that this would not bankrupt me or put me in financial jeopardy. It’s the principle, the arbitrary madness of it all. There are various factors behind the astounding markup on some of these food items, and a lot of it has to do with Norway being outside the EU, and with its infamous monopoly and protectionist culture:

Government officials have long tried to pinpoint the reasons for Norway’s famously high food prices [...] The protection for farmers and resulting high prices for milk or lamb meat despite overproduction, for example, isn’t the only factor. Officials also cite Norway’s powerful concentration of grocery retailers and wholesalers, which can reduce competition. Just a few companies dominate the grocery market and can more easily set higher prices for everything from imported cranberry juice to brie. Norway also has higher costs levels regarding what merchants, for example, must pay for commercial rent and their employees. All those factors remain under another investigation into food prices in Norway that was launched by the government last year. (‘Norway’s Food Now Priciest in Europe’)

Just in the past month, it was announced that a certain string of Norwegian supermarket chains are under investigation for price-fixing. I could go on, but I won’t bore you too much with the details; just enough to give the impression I’ve done some research, which I have, and that I’m not just whining (which I am, but isn’t that the point of an indulgent personal blog, and something that expats do particularly well?) So much of the Norwegian grocery store system seems designed to steer you away from all those nasty ‘exotic’ ingredients like halloumi and almonds, and towards supplies of farmed salmon, brown cheese, meat and potatoes. You’re priced out of variety, innovation, and experimentation. Your tastes are being shaped by corporations that seem to arbitrarily slap frankly insane prices on whatever they like that isn’t home-grown (and, given that only 3% of Norway is farmable land, what isn’t home-grown is…most things).

My life derives its joy, structure, purpose and meaning from food and experimentation – eating my way around the globe from the safety of my kitchen, particularly in the middle of a global pandemic – which means that my shopping list looks different almost every day. There’s always some new ingredient that I haven’t yet tried to buy in Norway, which means that there is always the potential for disappointment and fury when (/if – more on that below) I track it down and find that the price is so astronomically insane that dinner plans have to be rethought on the spot. It’s wearing, frustrating, and it just makes me want to throw something on the floor in the supermarket and start screaming. Not as much, though, as my second major bugbear: lack of choice.

I’ll pre-empt your potential objections: I’d be the first to say that too much choice is at the heart of so many of our problems these days, from global food waste to the ‘decision fatigue’ that psychologists are linking to modern mental health issues. We don’t need an entire yoghurt aisle in the supermarket (an example also used by David Wallace-Wells’ disturbing but necessary book on climate change, The Uninhabitable Earth). In fact, there is some speculation that the reason the standard Norwegian matpakke (packed lunch) is so horrible is because it prevents decision fatigue and leaves more scope for creativity. But, speaking from personal experience: when you’re used to being able to find all the ingredients for a single recipe under one roof (whether that be the sterile, fluorescent strip-lit ceiling of a major supermarket chain, or the colourful awning of a good local market, like the ones I’ve known in York, Oxford and Cambridge), moving to Norway is a perennial exercise in disappointment and frustration. There is so little choice. If you do even manage to find the item you’re looking for, there’s usually only one option. No ‘budget’ version, mid-range version and luxury version, as we are so accustomed to in the UK. Usually just one, and the price might be that of the ‘luxury’ version in the UK…without the matching quality. But more often than not, if you want to gather the ingredients for a single recipe, this will necessitate trips to at least two different shops. The supermarket, which has the basics of dairy, bread, meat, fish, etc. that you will often pay dearly for, and then one of the many innvanndringsbutikker (the name literally translates as ‘immigrant shop’ … Norwegians themselves have realized that they need a new name) that stock a decent selection of herbs, spices, and vaguely ‘exotic’ dry goods like rice, pasta, dried fruit, nuts, etc. They are the only shops that attempt to sell (some) fruit and vegetables without a metric ton of plastic around them. They are also a little cheaper (many of them get their goods from Sweden, where groceries are markedly less expensive, so they can afford to pass on some of the savings to customers).

In addition to having so few options, some things just don’t seem to exist in Norwegian grocery stores. Watercress, to pluck a random example from the air. Very common in bags for salad in the UK; non-existent in Oslo. In fact, many types of greens: cavolo nero, spring greens, both of which I love, are not sold here. I’ve grown them myself with good results, which makes it even more puzzling that you can’t buy them. I suspect there just isn’t demand: lack of choice potentially breeds lack of demand for more choice. Maybe there’s a Stockholm-syndrome-style explanation: you learn to love your lack of options. Oslo supermarket syndrome?  

I’ve been told by many Norwegians, and expats, that the situation is rapidly improving, and I’ve even witnessed it myself (paneer, for example, just recently graced the supermarket shelves, and there are now gluts of persimmons appearing in mainstream shops in the winter), and I should also mention that there is some compensation in the fact that Norway has excellent forageable food, but the bottom line is: this is not a country for someone with a voracious appetite for culinary experimentation. I’m tired of having to go on a detective hunt every time I turn the page in a recipe book and think ‘This looks nice’. I’m tired of having to haul my bike (yes OK it is electric, but I have so many intense locks to stop it getting stolen that just locking and unlocking it takes about half an hour each time) from one end of the city to another, simply to make one meal. I’m tired of having to make two shopping lists for different dinners, just in case Plan A is unfeasible due to either availability or price (or a combination of both). Sometimes both Plan A and Plan B have been no-goes: cue a minor meltdown in Aisle 4. No, I don’t want to rein in my cooking and just live off salmon and potatoes, or some vaguely fish-based product that comes in toothpaste-style tube. Especially this past year, cooking has been basically all I’ve had to transport me away from a country in which I have felt cripplingly lonely and isolated since day one.

This has also led to an almost obsessive-compulsive fear or hatred of wasting food. When food is so expensive, to waste even a smidgeon of it feels unconscionable (and, of course, given that food waste is linked to climate change, it really is literally unconscionable anyway). It is years since I decided what to cook based on what I felt looked nice in a recipe book, or on Instagram. My entire cooking is dominated by trying to use up whatever is in the fridge or freezer (I’ll often buy things in the reduced section of the supermarket, due to aforementioned insane prices). Sometimes I will get distracted at work by obsessively itemizing, from memory, the contents of my cupboards, fridge and freezer, so that I can feel some small sense of accomplishment at having made inroads into their contents. I write endless lists. They achieve nothing. At least I haven’t quite got to the stage of hoarding the water from cooking pasta or potatoes, as Nigella admits to in her latest book, but reading her admission was oddly comforting. It seems I’m not the only one.

Some of this is linked from a desire to avoid food waste; the rest, I think, is the result of having had to move house four times in the last four years (two of those moves international ones) and the slight residual trauma that accompanies the dual perils of renting and being an academic: I have no idea what part of the world I’ll end up in for my next job, and my landlord might suddenly decide to sell my flat out from under my feet, as happened two years ago. It leads to this strange mentality whereby an empty fridge and empty cupboards become the Holy Grail. Just how some productivity gurus fetishise the notion of ‘Inbox Zero’, I fetishise the concept of ‘Larder Zero’: my life in food is lived with the constant fear that I could be required to gather up and move my entire life with very little notice, and I wouldn’t want any edible food to be left behind.

So, there it is. Food stopped being fun a long time ago. I no longer feel I have the luxury of deciding what to cook based on a whim, or something that has caught my eye in a recipe book. I am a slave to Larder Zero, to the Norwegian supermarket monopolies, to the limits of my salary (for which I am very grateful, but I would also like to maybe consider buying a place to live one day, and just as millennials were advised by an Australian millionaire that they’d never afford property if they keep eating avocado toast, so I’ll never achieve my dream if I keep making £22 cheesecakes). 

This is personal experience. I am very aware that I am privileged enough to live in a country with an excellent social welfare system, earning a salary, and that lack of grocery availability is hardly the end of the world. But when your world is scaled down to the confines of a shopping list or the walls of a grocery store, particularly in the midst of a pandemic, tiny disappointments and price outrages are felt as sizeable ripples on the already storm-tossed lake of a stressed and lonely mind.

I’m hoping that reactivating this blog in 2021 might help me to remember why I grew to love cooking in the first place. Perhaps I’ll use it as a space to share some of my recipes, produced in the eternal quest for Larder Zero. Perhaps I’ll take advantage of a platform from which to vent furiously about lack of watercress or the price of marinated artichokes. Perhaps I will simply scream miserably into a void, and then go and make a cake. We shall see.

If for you, like me, (nearly) a whole summer of warm weather and sunshine means an excuse to be in the kitchen experimenting with ice cream flavours, then no doubt you’ll end up with lots of leftover egg whites. Don’t throw them away – freeze in small plastic bags, labelled with the number of whites, then simply defrost as needed for your recipes (or keep in the fridge for up to a week). I remember once reading Nigella Lawson saying she sometimes separates eggs directly over the sink so she doesn't have the stress of figuring out what to do with all the leftover whites. Nigella, this one is for you.

This is the easiest and most delicious way I know to use up leftover whites. Five minutes of hands-on whisking time, a quarter of an hour or so in the oven, and you have a tray full of plump, almond-scented little cakes, bursting with ripe summer fruit. They are fudgy and sweet like marzipan, with a welcome sourness from the fruit pieces. You can use any fruit here, really, although my favourites are rhubarb, berries and apricots.

Finish off these delightful little cakes by brushing them with a sweet, flavoursome syrup infused with Bird & Blend’s latest summer tea – Eton Mess. Simmering this fruity brew in sugar and water for a few minutes creates a gorgeous hot-pink syrup brimming with berry and cream flavours. It’s perfect brushed over the hot cakes, fresh from the oven, where it sinks into the crumb and leaves them gooey, sticky, and tasting like summer’s finest dessert. You could, of course, use any tea in the syrup. I particularly like how Eton Mess leaves the cakes with a nice pink tinge to the crumb, but many fruit teas would have the same effect, or you could use a vanilla black tea, or even an Earl Grey.  

Summer fruit and almond cakes with Eton Mess tea syrup (makes 12): 

• 150g egg whites (from 4-6 large eggs)
• 150g caster sugar
• 110g ground almonds
• Pinch of salt
• ½ tsp almond extract
• 60g plain flour
• 140g unsalted butter, melted and cooled slightly, plus extra for greasing the tin
• Summer fruit of your choice (I used 2 sticks of rhubarb, but you could also use berries or slices of peach/apricot – you’ll need around 3-4 small pieces per cake)

For the syrup:

• 50ml water
• 1 tbsp Eton Mess tea
• 2 tbsp caster sugar

Pre-heat the oven to 200C. Grease a 12-hole muffin tin well with butter. In a large bowl, whisk the egg whites lightly with a hand whisk until frothy. Whisk in the caster sugar. Add the almonds, salt, almond extract and flour, then whisk again until just combined. Slowly pour in the melted butter, whisking continuously, until you have a thick batter. 

Divide the batter between the holes of the tin, then top each cake with a few pieces of fruit. Bake for 8 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 160C and bake for another 5-10 minutes until the cakes are golden and a skewer inserted in the middle comes out clean.

Meanwhile, make the syrup. Put the tea, water and sugar in a small saucepan and bring slowly to the boil, stirring. Lower the heat and simmer for 5 minutes or so until syrupy and pink. Remove from the heat and strain into a small bowl or jug.

When the cakes are ready, brush them with the hot syrup while they are still in the tin. Leave to cool a little before removing to a wire rack. Leave to cool fully before eating.

I think I would consider lemon tart to be the most dangerous dessert. Not dangerous in the way of Japanese fugu or anything, I’m not claiming that it will kill you if incorrectly prepared, but dangerous in that capable-of-completely-abolishing-all-willpower sort of way. There’s something about the irresistible mix of buttery pastry, silky custard, and the snap of lemon that seems to prevent you reaching that overload threshold you get with other desserts. Because it has a welcome acidity from lemons, you can just keep on going without feeling yourself slip into a sugar coma. Until you do, of course, slip into a sugar coma, one that has crept up on you like some kind of saccharine ninja and left you defenceless.

It just occurred to me that my latest lemon tart experiment, in which I added matcha to the pastry crust, might be a way of combating that. After all, matcha is great for an energy boost, and contains a whole host of antioxidants, minerals and nutrients. It might just help pep you up after the sugar and pastry has done its work. Even if it doesn’t, it gives the pastry for this tart a pleasant light green colour which is beautiful against the lemon custard, and adds a very slight hint of herbal bitterness to the crumbly pastry that complements the lemon perfectly.

I made this using some very special Persian sweet lemons that I picked up in the farmer’s market – they have a squat shape, a very bright yellow colouration, quite a few seeds, and a wonderfully vivid taste that has a hint of bergamot. If you can find these, or Meyer lemons, you’re in for a treat, but normal lemons will work well too – just use enough to get the 80ml juice you need for the curd. You could also experiment with the matcha in the crust – Bird & Blend make a fantastic variety, and I think their Black Magic matcha with charcoal would make for a very dramatic-looking dessert!

Don’t be discouraged if the curd doesn’t thicken at first – be patient, it can take up to half an hour. Just remember to keep whisking and keep the heat gentle so you don’t end up with scrambled eggs. I like to serve this tart with a scoop of ice cream or crème fraiche, some fresh berries, and a sprig or two of a lemony herb – lemon verbena, lemon balm and lemon thyme all work well.

Just be careful. One slice is not enough.

Matcha lemon tart (serves 6. Or 1. Who knows)

For the pastry:

• 60g golden caster sugar
• 115g butter, at room temperature
• 1 heaped tsp matcha (I used Bird & Blend Super Matcha, but you can use any variety)
• Generous pinch of salt
• 150g plain flour
• 40g fine polenta

For the lemon curd:

• 3 large lemons, zest and juice (you will need 80ml juice)
• 5 large egg yolks
• 150g golden caster sugar
• 115g butter, cubed
• Icing sugar, to decorate
• Lemon verbena, lemon thyme or lemon balm leaves, to decorate

Pre-heat the oven to 170C.

First, make the pastry. In an electric mixer, or using a bowl and wooden spoon (this is a good workout!), cream the butter with the sugar, salt and matcha until light and fluffy. Add the flours and mix well to form a very crumbly dough. Press it evenly into an 8-inch tart tin with your fingers, working it up the sides and evenly over the base.

Bake for 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, put the egg yolks, sugar, lemon zest and juice in a heatproof mixing bowl and whisk to combine. Place the bowl over a pan of gently simmering water, so that the water doesn’t touch the bottom of the bowl. Whisk the lemon and sugar mixture constantly over the simmering water until it starts to thicken – this can take anything from 15 to 30 minutes. It should leave ribbons as you whisk and be very thick. When it has thickened sufficiently, whisk in the cubed butter and remove from the heat.

When the pastry case is done remove it from the oven. Pour in the lemon curd and bake for another 10 minutes until just set – it may still be slightly wobbly in the middle, but it will firm up as it cools. Let it cool completely before dusting with icing sugar, decorating with lemon verbena, lemon thyme or lemon balm leaves, and serving with fresh berries and a scoop of crème fraiche.

As food geeks, we all have a few ‘fun facts’ up our sleeve, right? Random snippets of foodie info that we use to pepper the conversations at parties or liven up a boring first date? Don’t tell me you’ve never reached for a bit of asparagus-related trivia to brighten up a dull moment, or quietened a room by pointing out that red Skittles are coloured with smushed-up insects. If you haven’t, I’m certainly never going to a party with you.

One of my favourites to trot out on such occasions is the fact that there are no naturally blue foods. There is a reason that Nestlé removed blue Smarties from circulation around 2006 after it replaced all its artificial colours with natural varieties. It took them two years to source a natural replacement, derived from a bacterium. ‘BUT, BLUEBERRIES’ is the inevitable response, for which I have an excellent counter-attack. Blueberries are not, really, blue. They are more of a dark purple colour. Have you ever eaten too many and looked at your tongue?

Last August I spent a happy week in Finland, bathing in the ferociously cold sea, admiring the old communist architecture, enjoying the legendary Finnish fear of social interaction and gorging myself on wild blueberries, fresh from the market. They left me with a happy soul and a vivid dark-purple tongue. I tried to take a photo of it to send to the man I had very recently started dating. In case you’re wondering, it’s really very difficult to take a selfie with your indigo tongue sticking out that is somehow both sexy and quirky, and moreover disguises the fact that you are in a closet-sized hostel toilet in Helsinki. I managed, readers, don’t fret, but it was a challenge.

Transporting approximately a kilo of these wild blueberries back on the plane to Denmark was also a challenge, and the inside of my handbag still bears the purple scars. It was worth it, though. I squirrelled them away in my freezer and have been slowly eking them out over a period of nine months or so. Much smaller and firmer than the mass-produced, inflated and often tasteless specimens we can buy year-round in supermarkets, this seasonal Scandinavian delicacy is tart and deeply flavoursome, swollen with tart purple (NOT BLUE) juice. It is a blueberry as a blueberry once was, before commercial mass production took over and we started to ship fat, watery varieties in from foreign climes.

The best way to enjoy the flavour of these beauties is simply as is, or in a simple compote made by simmering them with a little sugar and a tiny drop of water. I decided to go a step further and swirl this gorgeous vivid mass of juice and berries through a creamy lemon cheesecake. I found a bunch of squat, bright marigold yellow Persian lemons at the farmer’s market. Their flavour is delightfully fragrant; slightly sweet, with a hint of the bergamot. Their zest and juice is perfect rippled through a creamy, gelatine-set cheesecake mix. This is my go-to cheesecake recipe, and it gives wonderfully light results, a nice change from the heavier baked variety. Garnish with lemon balm or lemon verbena, or even lemon thyme: the herbal kick works wonderfully against the tart, fruit-rippled filling and also adds a pop of vivid green colour.

Special wild blueberries, special Persian lemons: a special springtime treat. And make sure to bore whomever you serve it to with some fun facts about the colour blue in nature (less than 10% of all flowering plants produce blue flowers, for example. You’re welcome).

Persian sweet lemon and wild blueberry cheesecake (serves 6): 

• 120g wild (or normal) blueberries
• 3 tsp caster sugar
• 1 tbsp arrowroot or cornflour
• 150g Digestive biscuits
• 50g butter, melted
• 180g icing sugar, plus extra for dusting
• 450g quark soft cheese (or cottage cheese blitzed to smooth in a blender)
• 200g cream cheese (full fat)
• Zest of 2 lemons
• 4 gelatine sheets
• Juice of 2 lemons
• Baby lemon balm or lemon verbena leaves, to decorate
• Strips of lemon zest, to decorate

First, make the blueberry compote. Put the berries in a saucepan with the sugar and bring to the boil. Turn down the heat and simmer for a few minutes until just burst and juicy. Add the arrowroot or cornflour (if using cornflour, mix with an equal amount of water to make a paste before adding it), stir thoroughly to thicken, then set aside to cool.

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease and line the bottom of a 20cm springform cake tin with greaseproof paper. Blitz the biscuits to fine crumbs in a food processor. Add the melted butter and blitz briefly to combine. Tip into the prepared tin, press down over the bottom of the tin with the back of a spoon to level, then bake for 10 minutes. Remove and leave to cool.

Whisk together the icing sugar, quark, cream cheese and lemon zest. Soak the gelatine sheets in cold water for a few minutes to soften. Place the lemon juice in a small saucepan and heat gently. Add the gelatine and whisk until dissolved. Whisk this into the cheese mixture, and beat thoroughly to combine. Swirl the blueberry compote through the cheese mixture, leaving bright streaks (don’t mix it completely). Pour into the cake tin, place in the fridge and chill for at least 6 hours.

Decorate with strips of lemon zest, a dusting of icing sugar and some baby lemon balm or lemon verbena leaves before serving.

I never thought I'd be one of those bloggers, the kind that post gimmicky heart-shaped or red velvet creations to mark the otherwise utterly meaningless fourteenth of February. To be honest, these were made a couple of weeks ago, and they just happen to be heart-shaped, because I thought they'd make more interesting photos than simple rounds. But ignore that if you're a hopeless romantic: these would also make a lovely gift for your Valentine. Or your colleagues, as in my case. Or your friends. Or your mum. Shortbread doesn't make distinctions. Shortbread is always loving. 

Dozy Girl has long been one of my favourite Bluebird teas. While I find chamomile on its own a little unpleasant, I am an absolute fiend for lavender and lemon verbena, which I grow on my balcony in the summer, and to which I turn, in their dried form, to soothe me through the winter. Bluebird’s blend of floral flavours is the perfect thing to help you unwind at the end of a long day, but I also wanted to use its flower power medley in the kitchen. I wanted something as gentle and delicate as the tea itself.

This is really two recipes in one. The first, made in seconds, is an utterly divine fragrant sugar, heady with lavender and rose, that can liven up all manner of dishes – try sprinkling over meringues, porridge, cookies or ice cream. You could, of course, use your favourite herbal tea if you don't have Dozy Girl, or a mixture of dried flowers like rose and lavender. The second takes this perfumed sweetness and combines it with the simplest of ingredients: butter and flour. The result is a beautifully crisp yet tender shortbread cookie, an understated delight with the subtle fragrance of lavender. I’ve made them in heart shapes, but you can be creative with cookie cutters if you like. The most important thing is to use quality butter, as that’s the predominant flavour here. The sugar can be stored almost indefinitely in a jar in the cupboard, but I doubt it will last very long.

For the Dozy Girl sugar:

• 100g caster sugar
• 4 tbsp Dozy Girl loose-leaf tea (or a mixture of chamomile tea, lavender and rose petals)

For the shortbread hearts (makes around 14):

• 115g soft butter
• 60g Dozy Girl/lavender sugar, plus extra for sprinkling
• A pinch of salt
• 130g plain flour
• 40g rice flour

For the sugar, simply place the sugar and tea in a food processor and blitz until combined and very fragrant.

Using an electric stand mixer or your own muscles and a wooden spoon, beat the butter in a large bowl until soft and creamy. Add the sugar and salt and beat well to combine. Sift in the flours, then mix to a soft dough.

Roll the dough out on a floured surface to 1cm thick. Using cookie cutters or a sharp knife, cut the dough into shapes (I made hearts, but you can make whatever you like). You can also just roll the dough into a log and cut into rounds. Arrange on a piece of baking parchment or a silicon non-stick sheet on a baking tray, then place in the fridge for 15 minutes to firm up.

Pre-heat the oven to 150C. Bake the biscuits for 30 minutes. Remove from the oven, leave to cool on the tray for a minute then sprinkle with a little extra sugar. Leave to cool completely before eating.

The season for pumpkins is over!, I hear you cry. Well, not if you're me, and you've spent the last two months steadily stockpiling massive gourds so that you now have a small collection on your balcony, enjoying a radiant sea view. In my head I refer to them as The Gourd Gang, and they're a mighty attractive bunch, some with delicate slate-blue skins, some knobbly and dark green. I'm pretty sure I've burned enough extra calories from lugging them around town in my bike panniers (at one point I was carrying three, which is basically like having a pregnant bike) to justify an extra large slice of this recipe, which remains my favourite ever sweet dish with pumpkin. (Contenders for the savoury title are a lasagne, a Thai coconut noodle soup, and Italian pumpkin ravioli with sage brown butter. In case you were wondering, which I'm sure you were). 

This is possibly my all-time favourite cheesecake, and I’ve made a fair few in my time. It combines the silky depth of pumpkin puree with warming autumn spices, sticky caramelised pecans, the butterscotch notes of maple syrup and, best of all, a crunchy biscuit base flavoured with Bluebird’s luscious warming Spiced Pumpkin Pie blend. You could use a chai tea, or another spiced tea, or omit the tea altogether, depending on whether you have a spice grinder or not (the tea needs to be finely ground). The texture is the absolute dream cheesecake texture - fudgy, rich and fluffy. 

You can use canned pumpkin puree, but it’s very easy to make your own – simply cut a medium pumpkin or squash into wedges, remove the seeds and fibres, and roast in an oven at 200C until completely tender. Scoop the flesh away from the skin, put it into a food processor (discard the skin) and blitz to a puree. Drain through a sieve lined with muslin for a couple of hours (or overnight) to get rid of excess water, then use in recipes or freeze to use later.

Spiced pumpkin pie and maple pecan cheesecake (serves 8):

• 100g Digestive biscuits
• 1 tbsp Bluebird Tea Co. Spiced Pumpkin Pie tea (optional)
• 50g butter, melted, plus a little extra to grease the tin
• 600g full-fat cream cheese
• 400g pumpkin puree (homemade or from a can)
• 130g light brown sugar
• Zest of 1 orange, very finely grated
• 1 tsp vanilla extract
• 3/4 tsp each of ground ginger, cinnamon and nutmeg
• 1/8 tsp ground cloves
• 2 eggs

For the topping:

• 100g pecan nuts
• 25g butter
• 3 tbsp maple syrup
• Icing sugar, to decorate

Pre-heat the oven to 180C. Grease a 20cm springform cake tin with butter and line the base with a circle of greaseproof paper. Grind the tea, if using, in a spice grinder or pestle and mortar to make a fine powder. Blitz the biscuits in a food processor to fine crumbs. Mix the biscuits with the melted butter and tea, then press into the bottom of the cake tin with the back of a spoon. Bake for 10 minutes, until golden and crisp. Remove from the oven. Turn the heat down to 160C.

Meanwhile, using an electric whisk, mix together the cream cheese and pumpkin puree. Add the sugar, zest, vanilla and spices, then finally add the eggs and beat to incorporate. Pour into the prepared tin.

Place an oven tray of water at the bottom of the oven, then put the cake into the oven (on a shelf, not in the tray of water!). Bake for about an hour, until it has mostly set but still wobbles a little in the middle. Remember that it will set more as it cools, so you don't want it to be completely solid.

Leave the cake to cool in the oven with the door ajar (this helps to stop it cracking), then take it out of the tin and put on a plate.

For the topping, heat the butter in a frying pan over a medium heat. Roughly chop the pecans, then add to the butter. Fry for a minute, then add the maple syrup. Fry for another couple of minutes, until the pecans are sticky and fragrant. Tip them over the top of the cake. Put the cake in the fridge and chill for at least 4 hours before serving. Dust with icing sugar to serve.

They are based on a Danish sweet treat, havregrynskugler, which essentially means ‘oat balls’. I first tried these at one of my favourite hyggelig cafes in Aarhus, a delightful little place attached to a deli and farm shop. For that reason, I assumed the oaty things they had out on the counter would be some kind of worthy, uber-healthy raw cake or similar, and finding myself in need of a snack with my cup of tea one day, I decided to try one. I was surprised by how utterly delicious it was, with the nutty, slightly sweet taste of oats that took me straight back to making flapjacks and oat biscuits as a child. I remember once trying to eat raw oats out of the jar, assuming that they were what made the flapjacks taste so good, so by that logic they should be delicious on their own. I was wrong. I am not a horse. My oats need to be doused in butter and sugar.

And, obviously, as soon as I looked up a recipe for havregrynskugler online, I discovered that the secret of my snack's tastiness was, of course, butter and sugar. No healthy raw 'energy ball' style rubbish here, just pure decadence that you can pretend is marginally good for you because oats. 

They are normally a mixture of soft butter, sugar, chocolate and rolled oats. They have the delicious, toasty oaty flavour of the British flapjack, but with added truffley goodness from the cocoa and butter. Here, I’ve given them a fabulous Christmas twist by adding Bluebird’s Christmas Cake tea to the mix. This beautiful blend has all your favourite festive ingredients: vanilla, almond, cinnamon, cloves, orange peel, even spruce needles. Blitzing it to a fine powder adds all those wonderful flavours to the oaty snowballs, giving a warming hint of sweetness and spice. It’s the perfect aromatic background against the cocoa, cranberries and coconut. These delightful little balls of joy are the ultimate festive treat: they are the essence of Christmas, with their snowy coconut coating and sweet chocolate and cranberry flavour, and they take five minutes to make – perfect for emergency guests, Christmas parties or a lovely homemade gift.

You could play around with the ingredients as you wish, too – try adding different dried fruits and nuts. You could also use coconut oil to make these vegan, and experiment with different teas in the mix too. There is no cooking required for these, and they come together in minutes, needing just a little time in the fridge before they’re ready to eat. The main thing is to keep it simple and watch your friends, colleagues and loved ones devour these little bundles of joy and come back for more.

Pairing them with a tea-themed advent calendar is entirely optional, but very much encouraged.

Christmas cake snowballs (makes around 20):

• 1 tbsp Bluebird Tea Co. Christmas Cake tea
• 100g soft butter
• 150g porridge oats
• 100g icing sugar
• 2 tbsp cacao powder
• 45g dried cranberries
• 4 tbsp desiccated coconut

Put the tea in a spice/coffee grinder and grind to a fine powder. You can also do this using a pestle and mortar, although the result will not be quite as fine.

Put all the ingredients, except the coconut but including the powdered tea, into a large bowl and mix well to combine. It helps to use a wooden spoon at first, and then your hands to squeeze the mixture together. Once it is well combined, roll into balls (about the size of a walnut) and roll in the desiccated coconut. Put on a tray and place in the fridge for at least two hours before eating.

A week or so ago, I was standing in our office kitchen at breakfast time waiting for the toaster to beep. This story requires you to be familiar with the concept of a Danish toaster, so we’ll get that vital detail out of the way first. The Danes, being the edgy, thinking-outside-the-box, design-conscious folk that they are, have quite literally turned the concept of the toaster on its head. They have horizontalised the toaster. Where us plebs in England drop our flaccid sliced Hovis into a fiery, gaping maw, where it sits clamped between metallic jaws and undergoes a thrilling gamble of a transformation that could either result in charcoal or warm dough, but never the sweet Goldilocks stage in between, and which requires you to either interrupt the whole process to check on its progress or to stick your face into the mouth of the beast and risk singed nasal hair, and which is really only appropriate for bread the precise thickness of a pre-sliced loaf or, at the very most, a crumpet – heaven forbid you should try and insert your wedge of artisanal sourdough or pain au chocolat into its tantalizingly precise orifice – the Danes have realized the many potential perils of this situation. (Not least, the possibility of dropping your house keys into the slot and causing a minor explosion, as my mother once managed to do in a feat of ineptitude that still astounds and perplexes me).

Danish toasters feature a heating element covered by a metal grille. The whole thing is a horizontal box shape, upon which you place your baked good of choice – rye bread, cinnamon bun, hotdog – before setting the desired duration, and waiting. Much like Danish social interaction, the whole process is entirely transparent and to the point. No pesky middle man, no irritatingly narrow slots for your bread to get stuck in, just pure unbridled heat and a flat, toasty surface. You wait, flip your bread and do the other side. It takes longer, but it also opens up multiple possibilities. You can make whole toasted sandwiches without risking the filling sliding out and puddling in the bottom of your toaster. You can crisp up the bottom of a day-old cinnamon bun. You can lie down on it for a low-budget sauna.

Forgive my digression. It’s really very important, because this whole story (I’m not sure I can really go so far as to call it that, but I’ve gone and said it, so bear with me) hinges on the fact that when my colleague walked into the kitchen as I was utilizing the ultra-efficient Nordic toaster of dreams, he could see exactly what I had set upon its sacred element. He looked me in the eye, and asked a simple but loaded question:

‘Is that bread, or cake?’

We shared the conspiratorial half-smile and knowing eye contact of a niche group of people: those who delight in making and consuming baked goods that expertly straddle the line between bread (sustenance, wholesome, salt-of-the-earth, enshrined in the Bible as a daily necessity) and cake (frivolous, entirely unnecessary to dietary requirements, decadent, with a hint of the French revolution).

I walk this tentative tightrope on a regular basis. I make my ‘breads’ with wholesome wholemeal flour and plenty of fruit, then add eggs and baking powder as a raising agent, and the space-time continuum teeters wildly at my maverick nature, plunging the very genres of baking into terrifying uncertainty. I eat them for breakfast, managing to feel both nourished and wicked at the same time. I call them cakes or breads depending on my mood; whether I’m feeling more like Jesus or Marie Antoinette.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell, so I call them ‘loaves’. It gives me space to contemplate that day’s levels of hedonism before I take my first bite.

Here’s a superlative example of the genre. Apple, crystallised ginger and dried fruit are soaked in strong spiced tea, keeping the loaf(/bread/cake) deliciously moist without the need for any butter or oil and giving the warm, cinnamon and ginger-laden scent of autumn. I use my favourite seasonal tea blend, Spiced Pumpkin Pie by Bluebird Tea, which is rich in smoky black tea leaves, cinnamon, ginger and cloves. Some nutty spelt flour, ground almonds and a little brown sugar make it sweet enough to enjoy as cake, but equally suitable for breakfast (I like mine with a dollop of honey-sweetened ricotta, or nut butter). Better still, you can soak the fruit overnight and whip this up in no time in the morning, so it bakes and fills your kitchen with the scent of cinnamon while you get on with other things – perfect for a weekend brunch.

Just make sure you share it with someone who understands the nuances of the friable bread/cake divide.

Spiced pumpkin pie tea loaf with apple and blueberry (makes 1 loaf):

• 2 tsp Bluebird Tea Co. spiced pumpkin pie tea
• 300ml just-boiled water
• 90g dried blueberries (or other dried fruit)
• 1 medium eating apple
• 50g crystallised ginger, finely chopped
• 200g plain, wholemeal or spelt flour
• 50g ground almonds
• 2 tsp baking powder
• Pinch of salt
• 1 egg
• 75g light brown sugar
• 1 tbsp demerara sugar
• 1 tbsp flaked almonds

Infuse the tea in the boiling water for 10 minutes (you want it to be strong!) before straining (keep the tea, discard the leaves).

Peel and core the apple, then chop into small dice around 1cm square. Soak the apple, blueberries and crystallised ginger in the tea for at least 8 hours, or overnight.

When ready to bake, pre-heat the oven to 170C. Grease and line a loaf tin with baking parchment. In a large bowl, mix together the flour, almonds, baking powder and salt. To the tea and fruit mixture, add the egg and sugar and stir together. Pour the fruit mixture into the flour mixture, and mix with a large spoon or spatula until evenly combined.

Pour the mixture into the loaf tin, then sprinkle with the demerara sugar and flaked almonds. Bake for 55 minutes, until the top of the loaf is crusty and golden, but still gives slightly in the middle when pressed. Leave to cool a little before slicing and serving. This freezes well and keeps for a few days – reheat in a (Danish, unless you have a death wish) toaster or warm oven.