Eating in the garden started early this year, with the finest spring weather I can remember. The smell of neighbours’ delicious marinades, of thyme, garlic and rosemary, wafted over the gardens even while the tulips were still in flower. They usually wait at least until the wisteria is over.
I tend to cook outside less often than I eat there, relishing the seasoning effect of a summer breeze on my salads, or that of the sunshine on a basil-scented tomato. The warmth intensifies the flavours almost as much as salt and pepper. Anyone who has ever eaten a slice of watermelon on the beach will know the effect the warm, salt air has the sweetness of the cool, scarlet-fleshed fruit.
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I can blow hot and cold about outdoor cooking. While I relish the smell of courgettes on the grill, each charred edge infused with mint or even a little garlic from the garden, I don’t want my clove pinks to have to go into battle with the fumes of a burning sausage.
There is the sort of cooking that flatters the existing smell of a summer garden (think of grilled aubergines with lemon-thyme and mint) and there are those that do it no favours at all (pizza for instance). Far be it from me to cramp anyone’s culinary style, but it is worth considering how your close neighbours will feel about the smell of your kimchi beef burgers before you fire up the grill.
The most wonderful food I have eaten outdoors was that which had been cooked over charcoal in a Japanese hibachi. The size of a window box, these domestic grills hold the charcoal in the base, while the food browns on a metal grill balanced on top.
I am not a fan of the disposable foil grill simply because they do so much damage.
Made of clay and steel, these aesthetically pleasing set-ups harness a lot of heat, so need to be sited on something well and truly heatproof. Many a lawn must bear scars of a misplaced hibachi. Being mostly rectangular or square rather than round, round, they are easier to store than something that resembles an industrial version of the Savoy Grill’s silver-plated beef trolley. It is all very well to talk of turning food lovingly over a charcoal
flame, but the real question is what to do with your outdoor cooking equipment once the garden chairs have been stored for the winter. Few things look sadder than a firepit full of winter rain and, let’s not beat around the bush, most garden barbecues are pretty ugly. Do they really have to be fire-engine red? Well, no, actually. I have recently spotted a few quite aesthetically pleasing numbers in which to cook your lunch that won’t look too out of place among the fiery red crocosmias.
I am not a fan of the disposable foil grill simply because they do so much damage. Until they were banned by my local council, the grass in the park bore their scars all summer. Not to mention the piles of discarded foil trays left scattered over the space on a Sunday evening.
My own kitchen is so close to the garden, its location almost negates the need to cook outdoors, but that would be to sap the primal need to turn food over an open fire that lurks deep down, to remove the thyme-scented smoke that emanates from the food and destroys in a dash the fun of occasionally grilling en plein air.
Rarely have I enjoyed cooking more than when I have left the kitchen for the garden
I mention grilling because it lends itself so well to outdoor cooking, but a sturdy frying pan is as useful, if not more so. Several years ago I filmed a television series where each week I turned up on someone’s allotment with a camping stove and a frying pan.
No one told me what bounty awaited me, and arriving at the assorted gardens I genuinely had to think on my feet. Few programmes have tested me so much, but it was huge fun, and made me, and I hope others, think about the joy to be had cooking a vegetable or fruit that had been growing only a few minutes before.
One moment you are a courgette clinging to the stem, the next you are sautéed in olive oil with a little of your neighbour’s supply of garlic, scattered with basil and marigold petals from the pots outside the nearest allotment shed.
Rarely have I enjoyed cooking more than when I have left the kitchen for the garden. We all know how sweetcorn and asparagus taste best cooked within hours of picking, but cooking in the garden applies that principle to peas, beans, cucumbers and pretty much anything you can pick, dig or cut. Freshness is all.
I have no wish to over-romanticise it, but I find something deeply pleasing about tossing a salad whose ingredients I have just picked without even taking them into the kitchen. Grab a handful of marigolds, a nasturtium leaf or two and any edible salad leaf the snails may have left you.
You’ll need a bowl of iced water in which to rinse the radishes, a chopping board and sharpish knife for your just-picked cucumber and tomatoes, basil and lovage – oh, and a bottle of your favourite olive oil
– and you will make the simplest, freshest salad imaginable. Crumble in a little ricotta and you have lunch even without heating the coals. Pass it round while you still have the scent of herbs on your hands. Lunch from the garden, in the garden.
