Winter is grey and cold and pale and tired. Seasonal vegetables aren’t vibrant or exciting, they’re sensible, like cabbage or parsnips. They require buckets of butter and oil or blankets of pastry and mattresses of mashed carbs to taste good, unlike a juicy summer tomato that requires nothing but a dash of olive oil and a sprinkling of salt to shine. Winter has a subdued and practical palette, in contrast to the playful freshness of summer. I know I’m being overly dramatic, I love winter and all it has to offer (duh, it’s soup season), but the fact remains that winter is relentlessly dark and gloomy.
While the joys of 21st-century living mean that we now have access to papayas in December and strawberries in January, is it truly sensible to indulge in something that costs millions of pounds of fuel to end up on my plate in Central Europe all the way from Peru? Probably not. HOWEVER, I’m here to tell you it’s not all bleak, and we have ways to not just survive, but THRIVE, in winter: thanks to canned (tinned, innit) summer foods!!!
DID YOU KNOW we have Napoleon to thank for this? In the XIX century, Napoleon was on a Russian campaign when famine threatened his troops. To find a more effective way to keep his troops fed, he offered a sum of 12,000 francs to anyone who could devise a better method to preserve food on long journeys (at the time, food was preserved by drying, smoking, or pickling). The winner ended up being Nicolás Appert, who in 1803 found a way to preserve food by heat in hermetically sealed containers. A confectioner and chef in Paris, he was inspired by wine in corked bottles. It went a bit like this: he placed food inside glass jars reinforced with wire and then corked and sealed the jar with wax. The jars were wrapped in canvas and boiled until Appert deemed the food sufficiently cooked. This was obviously seen as a revolutionary invention during a time with limited refrigeration. “In each bottle, and at small expense, is a glorious sweetness that recalls the month of May in the depths of winter,” wrote Alexandre Grimod de la Reynière.
This Week’s Recipe
In the realm of comfort foods, few dishes can rival good old tomato soup. How to make a comfort food even more… comfortable? Make it using almost only shelf-stable ingredients, most likely already in your house - no slushy, cold, trip to the store required. This makes it the perfect Sunday soup, btw. Pyjamas on, door locked, just you and your soup.
While this soup may not require much in the way of fresh produce, it is slightly more high maintenance on the stirring front. The flavour comes from the order of events and the layers of flavour. The secret ingredient = time (last week’s recipe, on the other hand, did require fresh vegetables, but no stirring. You can’t have it all! I’m sorry!)