A Long and Messy Business. Rowley Leigh

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      March

      For some reason these dishes that have washed up on

      the shores of March all have rather basic ingredients.

      I admit wild sea bass is a luxury these days – farmed

      sea bass is ubiquitous despite its extraordinary lack of

      flavour – but here the wild fish is given the most honest

      and least fancy of treatments. For the rest, you can buy

      most of this this stuff just about anywhere.

      One of the joys of writing for the Financial Times is

      the range of ingredients with which I can work. There

      is an understanding that our readers are a sophisticated

      bunch and have the access and the means to buy the

      rarefied and expensive, if they want them. By the same

      token, I can choose the humblest of ingredients if I so

      wish. Some of the more plutocratic readers positively

      pine for simplicity after being forced to dine out in

      fancy restaurants and at corporate dinners.

      Even simplicity has its price. For one thing, if you are

      going to make minestrone, it will taste better when

      made with the freshest and most beautiful vegetables.

      For another, the cook has nowhere to hide. The

      acquacotta is so ridiculously simple, a poached egg

      in a little vegetable stew, that you might read the

      recipe three times and still wonder what it is about.

      This is cooking stripped of artifice: it is about making

      something out of very little, out of the first few bits of

      stuff from the kitchen garden, out of a few leftovers

      from your veg box – the one that gives you a cabbage, a

      parsnip, a couple of purple carrots and six broad beans

      – and coming up with something fresh and nutritious.

      Just try it for a light lunch or a Sunday supper.

      Faites simple. That was Escoffier’s dictum: every

      chef claims it as their lodestar and most disregard it

      totally. And you can see why. People don’t always

      want simplicity: they crave novelty and ‘originality’

      and that usually means chucking an extra ingredient

      or three into the mix.

      Life is a Minestrone

      La Minestra

      It used to puzzle me what the Italians did with their

      vegetables. In most of Italy – perhaps not in the poorest

      regions – every town boasts a market in which at any time

      of the year one can find the most magnificent array of

      fresh produce. Since the growing season extends to at least

      ten months of the year, they are always pretty well served.

      And yet, when you go to most restaurants, vegetables are

      conspicuous only by their absence.

      There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that

      restaurants don’t think it is their business to give you

      vegetables which are for the home; they consider it their

      job to give you antipasti, primi and then to follow with

      a good chunk of protein. Secondly, they are not into

      contorni, or vegetables as an adjunct to protein. ‘Meat and

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