What to Eat: Food that’s good for your health, pocket and plate. Joanna Blythman
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Spring onions, softened in unsalted butter and puréed, make a mellow, easy-going accompaniment to white fish.
• To make an Irish champ, simmer floury potatoes in milk until soft, then mash them with thinly sliced spring onions and unsalted butter. This recipe also works well in early spring with leaves of wild green garlic instead of, or as well as, spring onions.
• If you stumble on a prolific source of wild garlic leaves, use them to make a garlic pesto, substituting the garlic leaves for basil.
• Vary a standard potato gratin by including a layer of sweated spring onions or leeks and grating Cheddar on top to form a crust.
• The sweetness of shallots works especially well when it is cut with the acid taste of vinegar, as in shallot red wine vinegar to splash on oysters.
• Whole shallots are an essential ingredient in a proper coq au vin.
Are onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions good for me?
Onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions all belong to the allium family of plants, which is thought to have many health virtues. It is no coincidence that in many cooking traditions a bowl of onion or garlic soup is often recommended for anyone who is feeling poorly. Each family member has its own make-up but, taken as a group, these vegetables are good sources of vitamin C, which supports the immune system and is protective against many diseases, several B vitamins, which help give you energy and support brain function, and beneficial minerals such as potassium, manganese, chromium and copper.
In addition, onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions contain a number of phytochemicals, natural plant compounds, which research suggests bestow many health advantages. The quercitin in onions, for instance, may slow down cell damage. Alliums contain natural sulphur compounds, which some research suggests may protect against infections, assist blood flow, help lower blood pressure and ease conditions such as bronchitis and asthma. These phytochemicals are present in all members of the allium family, but onions and garlic have the most. Some research suggests that the more freshly pungent the bulb, the more active these compounds are. So boutique varieties of onions and garlic bred to be mild may be missing the point.
How are onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions grown?
Allium crops are field-grown. Most of the garlic we consume is imported, usually from France and Spain or from the southern hemisphere, although some very fine garlic is commercially cultivated on the Isle of Wight and in Aberdeenshire. Onions, leeks and shallots all grow well in these shores. French growers, particularly the Bretons, seem to have cornered the market in elongated types of shallots, grown in the traditional way from sets of bulbs, rather than seed. Shallots grown from seed tend to be rounder and frequently come from Holland. Spring onions are often imported from abroad, from countries such as Spain, Mexico, Egypt and Thailand.
Are onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions green choices?
A surprising number of onions are imported from countries as various as Italy, Holland, New Zealand and Chile, which seems a little bit crazy, given that both the UK and Ireland can grow onions very successfully. Imports reach their peak in spring and early summer when the native crop is thinnest on the ground but they are often on our shelves at other times of the year when stored home-produced onions are still perfectly firm.
Supermarkets have encouraged the idea that rather than eating up the stored crop, customers want new season onions, even if this means transporting them from the other side of the world and charging considerably more for them. This is another example of supermarkets’ global sourcing, carried out in the name of the consumer, who, one suspects, isn’t really that bothered. In practical terms, there is never any need to buy imported onions. Visually, stored onions may not look as attractive and they won’t be quite as firm as fresh imports: you may need to peel off an extra layer. But unlike garlic, the flavour will still be good, and it is a lot more environmentally aware to eat onions grown closer to home. Think twice before you eat imported spring onions in winter or, for that matter, baby leeks. They will very likely have been chilled and air-freighted, which leaves a heavy carbon ‘foodprint’. Choose spring onions that have been grown here, not flown here.
A DEGREE OF CULINARY SOPHISTICATION
Garlic is the one member of the allium family that barely featured in the native cookery of these isles. Then, in the 1960s, we embraced it enthusiastically as one of those exciting foreign ingredients whose availability signalled a break from the plain tastes and austerity of the war years. To eat garlic displayed a degree of culinary sophistication. Undaunted by lack of experience or knowledge about how best to use garlic, we set about making this vegetable our own, armed with the latest kitchen kit, a garlic crusher, an implement forever destined to become rank and rusty with stale, adhering garlic.
Garlic bread – a baguette spread with butter mixed with salt and crushed garlic cloves – became a modern British classic without any clear European precedent, something to be served, perhaps, as an accompaniment to an Italian lasagne. It bore a resemblance to the French parsley butter that is served with snails, but the meatiness of snails is more of a match for garlic butter than bread. There were echoes of several European recipes such as the Catalan pa am tomaqùet or the Italian bruschetta al pomodoro, which sometimes, not always, call for the bread to be rubbed lightly with a cut clove of fresh garlic. But in such treatments, the garlic presence is infinitely more restrained than in the now traditional British garlic bread. Garlic bread epitomized the British ability to take ingredients and techniques from other culinary repertoires and reassemble them in a mongrel, hybrid form.
Nowadays, garlic baguettes are a staple of the supermarket chiller cabinet, a symbol of how the food industry has traduced and debased many ingredients and culinary traditions to invent popular lines of highly profitable, ‘value-added’ convenience food. What you have in the typical pre-prepared, pappy garlic baguette is a pile of refined white flour with dubious ‘flour improvers’ and additives that has been spread with extremely salty butter laced with anonymous dried green herbs and dollops of factory-prepared garlic pulp with a taste and odour that will pollute your breath until it eventually works its way through every pore in your skin. Do we really understand garlic? Looking at the supermarket baguette, perhaps not.
Where and when should I buy onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions?
UK- and Ireland-grown onions and shallots are available year round, sometimes from stored supplies. They are at their freshest and newest in summer. Leeks are harvested from August until March. Spring onions are at their best, not surprisingly, in spring and early summer. The European and home-grown garlic crop comes on to the market from late May and stored bulbs are available until early spring. After Christmas, the new crop of southern-hemisphere garlic comes on to the market.
Will onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and spring onions break the bank?
Onions, garlic, shallots, leeks and sping onions are all extremely affordable. Wild green garlic leaves grow abundantly in woods in early spring and announce their presence with a distinctive aroma. Follow your nose and pick them for free.
Tresses of onions imported from specialist onion growers in France cost more than the standard equivalent, but they do tend to have a superior eating quality. They are characteristically pink, or slightly mauve-tinged, exceptionally juicy and soften down to a delicious mush. If you are making a dish where the onions need to be really melting, such as an onion jam or a French onion tart, then these onions are worth the expense.
Peas, broad beans, mangetouts and sugarsnaps
By way of native vegetable delights, it’s hard to trump summery garden peas, fresh from the pod, or rival their crunchy green sweetness. New broad beans, which crop in the UK in late spring and summer, are a great pleasure too, offering that green pea flavour all wrapped up in a velvety, floury texture.
To get the best from fresh seasonal peas and broad beans, you have to taste them before their sugar starts turning to starch. Look out for pea pods that are smooth, vibrantly green and plump. Avoid those that are puckered and fading towards khaki, or that look matt or webbed. These will be rather elderly specimens, which means that the peas