Paul Merrett - The Allotment Chef - Home-grown Recipes and Seasonal Stories

Two other people who had a profound effect on my culinary development were my grandparents, Dick and Marjorie (two solid grandparent names, I feel). They had a lovely cottage surrounded by a large garden, in which my sister and I would spend many happy hours. Grandpa was retired and spent nearly all his time pruning shrubs, nurturing flowers or tending to the wide variety of produce he grew each year. They were entirely self-sufficient when it came to fruit and vegetables and lived strictly by the seasons. I never once knew my granny to buy anything other than the odd bit of exotica from the greengrocer (oranges, bananas or sometimes grapefruit). Otherwise every herb, salad item, soft fruit, apple, walnut, fig and a vast array of vegetables went from Grandpa’s garden down to Grandma’s kitchen. It was here that Granny, a 1930s domestic science teacher, came into her own.

I reckon Marje spent most of her life in her kitchen. She was always pickling or baking or preserving. She knew every trick in the book about utilising a harvest, and I can still taste her simple and very English cooking now when I close my eyes. Looking back as an adult with children of my own, I can appreciate how lucky I was to have known this way of life and, above all, how living by the seasons, with all that one can grow, is the ideal way to live.

I realise that their efforts were not unique. Growing vegetables was an essential part of life in those days. The post-war years were full of memories of food shortages and rationing. People were careful about waste and made the most of the seasons. Ironically, when considering this, rather than looking back and feeling sorry for a generation for whom a pineapple was a major treat, I start to feel envious of a generation who went blackberry picking when they fancied a pudding!

Seasonal eating was not a lifestyle aspiration for my grandparents; it was a natural law that governed what ended up on the dinner table. As I cruise the aisles of our local supermarket happily buying green beans from Kenya and asparagus from Peru, it dawns on me that, despite cooking professionally for 20 years, I have rather missed or forgotten the wider issues concerning food. My obsession with winning a Michelin star had all but cancelled out any thought of food miles, animal welfare, seasonal cookery or the real joy of picking something and then very simply cooking it. I realise that I should worry far more than I ever have done about where my family’s food is coming from and how it is grown.

Photograph by Paul Merrett

While acknowledging all this as the right way forwards for our family, I would not dare to suggest that I am at the forefront of change. I have sat at many a dinner party listening to people from all walks of life ‘bang on’ about food miles and globalisation, and my standard response has been to consider them the ‘brown rice and sandals’ types, and to turn the conversation to what I considered more ‘foody’ matters, such as current restaurant trends and the latest cookbooks. There is no doubt, however, that food issues are a hot topic and I have to accept that I have some ground to make up; probably the very reason for my belated conversion is that I have spent so much time in the pampered world of fine dining.

Of course, the easy option would be to buy a few books and feast on a few culinary sound bites. There are many very good books dedicated to all aspects of the great food debate and a quick check of the average politician’s fingernails will probably reveal that their new-found food policy came from a book rather than a muddy field. Well, I want my family’s love of food to be a genuine, muddy, hands-on experience – one that we will remember all our lives.

My own family lives a very busy, urban life. Our small city garden is kept as low maintenance as possible. We have a shed for our bikes, a bit of decking and a few shrubs. It’s a lovely place to sit on a summer’s evening, but we have never considered growing anything that might contribute to a meal. In fact, because of our hectic schedules, the garden is mostly ‘laid to AstroTurf’. Our real lawn had started to resemble the penalty area at Griffin Park, the home of our beloved local football team, Brentford FC, from being used for footy training by Richie and his mates. With a good deal of guilt, we replaced it with shiny plastic grass. It now looks, from a distance, like a putting green at Wentworth, and the best we could do there, food-wise, is a bowl of plastic fruit.

The more I think about it, however, the more convinced I am that my grandparent’s generation enjoyed a relationship with food that I witnessed as a child but have conveniently forgotten as an adult. Having discussed much of this with MJ, and she agreed that we might all benefit from a bit of home-grown produce, and adds that, as a family, we aren’t particularly well placed on the ‘those doing their bit to save the planet’ list. We decide we will not only try to grow our own fruit and vegetables, but also start to live a more ethical existence all round. This meeting of minds is encouraging, particularly as MJ has, up to now, been the sort of person who jumps in the car and drives 300 metres to the nearest shop.

MJ suggests we start by growing a few carrots, tomatoes and beans so that our fussy children can start to understand where their vegetables come from, how natural they are and, thus, why they are so healthy. Great point, I agree, but I indicate our lack of green space. Where will we grow them?

What we need is an allotment. We talk this through and become excited at the prospect of sowing cabbages, plucking apples from our own trees and digging up armfuls of new potatoes, marking each harvest with seasonal eating. An allotment will allow me to recreate those dishes of my childhood as well as to create some new ones of my own.

It will not just be about fancy finished dishes, however. Seasonal cookery will mean dealing with an excess of produce at times, so we will also make the most of preserving, jamming, freezing and batch-cooking our bounty, as my granny did. This way we can enjoy raspberries in December or green beans in January. We will cook our food as it finds us. We are two working parents with all the commitments that go with a busy life but, rather than buy out-of-season, vitamin-deficient vegetables from the supermarket, we shall get a cheap, local allotment and grow the real version ourselves.

Photograph by Mary-Jane Curtis

Anyone who has taken the life-changing decision to get an allotment will know that, in the last ten years, demand for allotments has escalated beyond belief. Gone are the days when allotments were the exclusive domain of old men, in oversized trousers held up with twine, growing vast amounts of root vegetables. Allotments are in demand from all areas of society: very trendy media types, posh people, very poor people, the arty farty set … and old men in oversized trousers held up with twine. They all want a patch of land to call their own. Perhaps, if someone can find a way of making serious money out of allotments, it won’t be long before supermarkets are knocked down and replaced with more plots of land and rickety sheds.

MJ and I both feel that, with an allotment, the kids will enjoy watching things grow and, as a result, will be more adventurous at mealtimes; we will all spend time together with a common purpose; and we can turn our backs on the devil of the day – the supermarket. This will not be because we are doing something amazing, just the opposite. We are a very normal family, with all the normal hassles of life, and we are just trying to get back in touch with one of life’s most enjoyable and important aspects, food.