The Flavors of Spring
Some fragmented thoughts on the tastes of a new season, a chef's sense of hospitality, Asian grocery stores, and food that's disgusting
Thursday, May 14
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Hello, dear reader!
Ramps and green garlic showed up at our local farmers’ market a few weeks ago, and they’ve recently been joined by asparagus and rhubarb. To me, these sing of spring.
I thought of a recipe I first made years ago, called simply “spring soup,” by the chef April Bloomfield. Abundant in spring vegetables and bright herbs, it’s flecked with egg, which reminds me a bit of the comforting egg-drop soups I had as a child. But unlike those thick, cornstarch-laden Chinese soups, this one is brothy and light—as if an early-May breeze had somehow been distilled into a warming dish.
“It’s a celebration of spring—spring in a bowl,” Bloomfield told me a few weeks ago when I called her to chat about food. (We first met when I invited her to do a panel at a Fast Company event in 2013.) “You’ve come through this long winter, which this year has been especially long, with COVID. Each year I have this anxiety that pops into my head. Is anything going to come back to life? Is this the time when trees aren’t going to grow buds? Is this the year we won’t see the daffodils or the crocuses?”
Food tells stories. It can express our hopes, address our anxieties, and channel our delights—and Bloomfield’s spring soup rejoices in the return of spring’s flavors. “You have all these green things in a bowl!” she said. The recipe calls for asparagus and green garlic, snap peas and shelled peas, basil and mint. “But really you can put whatever you want.”
Whatever? Really? “Well, I wouldn’t be so flexible at the beginning,” she said. A recipe tells a cook’s story–or at least one story about one dish from one cook’s perspective, and for the first run-through, it honors that story to attempt it as suggested. “If you don’t, how are you going to know what it’s meant to be like?” Bloomfield asked. “I always like to read the recipe, weigh everything out, and make it that way at least once before I start adapting.”
I told her that I don’t like peas.
“Peas are essential,” she said.
“I thought you said you can put whatever you want,” I said.
“Because it’s spring, Jeff!” she replied, faux-shaming me. “When you think of spring, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Peas!”
“Asparagus,” I replied.
Bloomfield confessed that she didn’t think she even tried asparagus until she was 18. Neither of us really knew how they grew until later in our lives. It wasn’t until I got to the Farminary, where some previous steward of the land had planted asparagus, that I saw its weird stalks piercing the soil’s surface in springtime.
I suspect my aversion to peas (the shelled kind, not snap peas or snow peas) has to do with my childhood. My mother didn’t like them, so she didn’t cook them, except when making Americanized fried rice for non-Chinese people; those frozen peas were grainy and odd, tasted to me as if I were eating sweetened sand.
Bloomfield, who grew up in England, has a happier early memory of peas. She’d go hiking in the countryside with her sister, “and we’d buy a bag of peas from a farmstand and just eat raw peas,” she said. “All good memories. It’s very English, being in the countryside, being around the amazing produce.”
Her bad food memory: honey. “I’ve never liked it. I had a terrible cold one day, and my mum gave me hot honey and lemon, and she said, ‘Drink this!’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ She said, ‘You can do it!’ I took a sip and projectile-vomited all over my mum,” she said. “It’s embarrassing. I do try it sometimes, but it’s a thing. Part of it is to do with nurture, but maybe there’s also something deep in our DNA that we do have these aversions to things.”
I’ve always appreciated Bloomfield’s lack of pretense when it comes to food. In her presence, in her kitchen, I’ve felt welcome to explore and to wonder about the origins of its goodness. While ridiculously tasty, her cooking isn’t fussy. In 2016, I spent time with her at Coombeshead Farm, the inn and restaurant she co-owns with the chef Tom Adams. (You can read my story, about food in Cornwall, in Travel+Leisure.) While we were there, Bloomfield offered me a food memory I’ll never forget—cherry tomatoes that she gently roasted for hours, with oil and garlic, until they were meltingly soft. With a generous sprinkling of sea salt, they were simple in the best possible way—somehow both savory with a hint of smoke and sweet in the way that the best tomatoes can be. “For me, hospitality means accessibility. It’s inviting, it’s comforting, and it’s familiar,” she said. “I don’t make anything weird or crazy or that your palate won’t understand, because it’s not really about the food. It’s about connecting to people—and food is the conduit.”
Another Bloomfield recipe I love: her smoked haddock chowder. It’s rich and creamy, but not gloopy like chowder can be—this is, after all, supposed to be soup, not gravy. It’s versatile; I haven’t found smoked haddock here, but smoked trout from Trader Joe’s works fine and I did a version with smoked bluefish the other week that was excellent, if you don’t mind the fattiness of that fish. And the beautiful smokiness of fish and bacon is balanced with a burst of acidity from lemon. “I’ve been making that chowder since I was 18 or 20, and it’s always going to be in my repertoire,” she said. “People are used to eating clam chowder. This is more decadent, because of the smoke and the cream, but it’s got an elegance to it if you get the acidity right.”
Bloomfield, who has authored two cookbooks, isn’t interested in teaching you about some obscure ingredient or in making food forbidding. But she does want you to think about your food. What does an ingredient do? What could it do? For instance, onion can provide balance. “Sometimes I’ll make a sandwich—say, a tomato and cheese sandwich—and I’ll put a slice of onion in. Give it a little squish, let it sit, and then take the onion off before you eat, so that you don’t get this really bad, strong onion flavor coming through,” she explained. “You get just enough to get you through the sandwich—a little brightness, a little perk.”
She encourages home cooks to think seasonally about food. In winter, she might top a burger with cheese and fried onion rings, but never tomato. “It will just be mediocre. Pick and choose when you’re going to eat stuff, because you want the best possible experience,” she said. “In the summer, tomatoes are perfectly ripe and have a little sweetness and a little sourness—it just really tastes like a tomato. Then, you use just the crispiest lettuce and a thin, thin slice of onion. And you put a slab of good cheese on top—I usually put it on just as it comes off the grill so that it melts as it’s resting. That can elevate a burger.”
Really, everything we were discussing was about perspective and purpose. There was a time in her career, Bloomfield told me, when she lost perspective. “I wanted to get everything right. I wanted to be good—actually, I wanted to be great. I didn’t allow myself to make mistakes,” she said. But that desire for perfection, that longing for greatness, distracted her from cooking for people. “Let’s slow down a minute. Everything today is so transient, so fast. How do we build better foundations? Where is our substance? I want to do meaningful things—and food is a catalyst.”
I suppose that’s what the best meals really are: a combination of good ingredients, good choices, and good company. To me, that’s what truly feeds people. That’s what truly nourishes.
April’s recipes for spring soup and smoked fish chowder are below. Check out her cookbooks: A Girl and Her Pig and A Girl and Her Greens.
What I’m Reading: One of the first things I did when I got to Grand Rapids was to learn where the Asian grocery stores were. This was partly practical: There are ingredients I can’t get at the farmers’ market or at Meijer. When I’m craving comfort food, I can pick up a package of fresh cheung fun, flecked with scallion and dried shrimp, which I steam in the microwave for breakfast and douse in soy sauce and sesame oil. And yu choy and snow-pea shoots are my favorite vegetables; both do beautifully simply stir-fried with lots of garlic and a sprinkling of salt. But it isn’t just about convenience. These outposts—their aisles stocked higgledy-piggledy with ramen noodles and dried mushrooms, sacks of rice and stacks of rice bowls—also tether me to my heritage. When we lived in Miami, we frequented a Chinese grocery run by a family at church and another, smaller one, where my mom bartered mangoes from our trees for greens and tofu. These stores were the only places where I’d hear Chinese spoken outside my own home. This week, the food writer Ligaya Mishan wrote a lovely appreciation of the Korean-owned H Mart, which is one of the greatest Asian supermarkets in all the land. I wish we had an H Mart closer to me; to get to one, I have to drive across the state.
And since we’re on the theme of food this week, Jiayang Fan’s New Yorker story on who gets to decide what food is disgusting is outstanding—a thought-provoking exploration that is full of surprises and challenges. Fan, a tremendous writer, explores the Disgusting Food Museum in Sweden, the complicated layers of cultural judgment when it comes to what and how we eat (and especially what and how we don’t eat), as well as the place of food in her childhood universe, in Chongqing, China: “To be fed was to be loved, and to live was to taste the world.”
Join me in holding the Holy Land and its peoples in prayer. My heart aches as I think of the ongoing violence and suffering.
One of my fondest travel memories: wandering the streets of the Old City of Jerusalem when I was 21 and stumbling into a shop that specialized in kanafeh, a Palestinian dessert with shredded pastry and cheese drenched in sweet syrup. I love kanafeh. I ended up there every single night of my visit. Every night, as I walked in the door, the Palestinian shopkeeper smiled and yelled, “Bruce Lee!” Somehow it registered differently than the same thing on the playground when I was a kid, maybe because he wouldn’t charge me for extra servings of kanafeh? “Bruce Lee come back!” he said with delight. “Bruce Lee love kanafeh!”
I’m off to the butcher and to the Asian grocery store. I need to get some steak, as well as tofu, Chinese greens, and mushrooms, because this weekend, we’ll be having friends over for dinner for the first time in months and months. Thank God for vaccines, for friendship, for food.
As always, I’m so glad we can stumble through all this together, and I’ll try to write again soon. May you feel well fed and well loved this week.
Yours,
Jeff
April Bloomfield’s Spring Egg Drop Soup
Serves 4
1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
1/2 pound carrots (about 2 medium), topped, tailed, peeled, and cut into 1/2 inch irregularly shaped pieces
2 cups chopped (1/2 inch) spring-onion bulbs (or onion if you can’t get spring onion bulbs)
3 medium spring garlic bulbs (or 1-2 garlic scapes or 2 cloves of regular garlic), thinly sliced
2 teaspoons plus a pinch of flaky sea salt (Maldon or similar)
4 cups chicken stock
1/2 pound asparagus, woody bottoms snapped off, cut on diagonal (1/2 inch pieces)
1/2 pound sugar snap peas, trimmed, strings removed, cut on diagonal (1/2 inch pieces)
2/3 cup shelled fresh peas
2 large eggs
2 T finely grated Parmesan cheese
A five-finger pinch of mint leaves, roughly chopped at the last minute
A five-finger pinch of basil leaves, roughly chopped at the last minute
1/2 a lemon
Heat the oil in a wide, heavy pot over medium heat until it shimmers. Add the carrots first, then the spring onion, garlic, and 2 t of the salt. Reduce heat, cover, and cook, stirring only after 5 minutes have passed and occasionally thereafter, until the onions are soft and creamy, but not colored (about 20-25 minutes).
Uncover, add all but 1 T of the chicken stock, increase heat to high, and bring the stock to a vigorous simmer. Add the asparagus and both kinds of peas, and cook just until they’re tender with a slight crunch (about 3 minutes).
Meanwhile, beat the eggs with the Parmesan, a pinch of salt, and the remaining tablespoon of chicken stock.
When the vegetables are ready, reduce the heat to low, stir in the herbs, then drizzle the egg mixture here and there over the soup. Have one very gentle stir, wait a minute or two until the egg sets, then take the pot off the heat. Season to taste with salt (be judicious, or else you will obscure the flavor of the vegetables), then squeeze in just enough lemon to add brightness, not acidity. Let the soup cool slightly before you dig in.
Adapted from A Girl and Her Greens: Hearty Meals from the Garden
April Bloomfield’s Smoked Haddock Chowder
Serves 4
2 cups heavy cream
2 cups whole milk
1/2 pound skin-on smoked haddock (or whitefish or trout)
1/4 cups extra virgin olive oil, plus a few slugs for finishing
4 ounces smoked bacon, diced into 1/2-inch pieces
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped into 3/4-inch pieces
2 medium stalks of celery, chopped into 3/4-inch pieces
1 large onion, chopped into 3/4-inch pieces
Salt and pepper
1 cup Yukon Gold potatoes, diced into 1/2-inch pieces
1/2 cup Yukon Gold potatoes, diced very finely
1 teaspoon red-pepper flake
Flaky sea salt (Maldon or similar)
A handful of flat-leaf parsley, roughly chopped
Half a lemon
Combine in the cream and milk in a pot and bring to a boil. Immediately remove from the heat, add the smoked fish, and let it steep.
Meanwhile, heat 1/4 c of olive oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat. When the oil barely begins to smoke, add the bacon and cook until some of the fat has rendered and the bacon has just a bit of color—about 2 minutes. Add the carrot, celery, carrots, and a bit of salt and pepper. Reduce the heat to low and cook for 20-25 minutes. Then add the potatoes to the pot. Cook for 10-15 minutes.
Strain the cream/milk mixture into the pot, reserving the smoked fish. Remove and discard any skin and bones from the smoked fish. Then flake the fish and add the pieces to the pot, along with the red-pepper flake. Stir well and cook until the potatoes are tender—about 10-15 minutes—stirring occasionally to make sure nothing burns.
Just before serving, throw in the chopped-up parsley, a few slugs of olive oil, and a good squeeze of lemon. Give the chowder a taste. Maybe you’d like another teaspoon of salt, a little more red-pepper flake, or a bit more lemon juice to add brightness.
Adapted from A Girl and Her Pig: Recipes and Stories
This was a very enjoyable read! The smells and sights of food are great joys in our daily life.
Jeff... love your writings and thoughts. Last time I commented, I noted that your posts bring me to tears. I'm still pondering what that is but this one did not! I do have a Kanafeh Konnection for you though! I hosted a friend from Iran and she was craving that dessert. She described it to me and I thought I had tried something similar, which I had purchased at Trader Joe's. Sure enough, I got it, baked it and brought it to her the next morning and she said it was as good as what she got at home. I love how food connects people in ways that words can be inadequate.