Seasonal shopping

Today, I ask for forgiveness. Yes, please forgive me if I forced you to eat strawberries that tasted like rock-hard and watery cucumbers in winter just for the sake of being fashionable. In the early days of our restaurant life, under the influence of Nouvelle Cuisine magazines, I foolishly believed that New Year’s Eve celebrations would be bland without exotic fruit flown from the other face of the Earth. Mr Hunter of fruit and veg merchants, Heckles and Hunter in Bertha Street, would scour North East markets to pick, at a premium, of course, the best produce he could find me. Stuff that had travelled all the way from the antipodes and beyond, to be served on special occasions such as New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day. In those 80s pioneering days, even some of the finest supermarkets struggled to stock out-of-season produce. The best households in the country made special trips to Harrods or Fortnum and Mason for their speciality hampers. All I had to do was give H&H a few weeks’ warning to get my Kenyan mange-touts or Belgian strawberries delivered to the restaurant door right on time to thrill our regular diners. The fact that each winter strawberry cost more than an entire punnet in season and tasted nothing like those delicious English ones at Wimbledon was a mere detail. The menu dictated!
Coming back to Algeria to see Papa for a few days, lovely memories of seasonal produce flooding back.
Although as a kid, I had very little understanding of this concept, I somehow knew, even from a very early age, that the best grapes ripened in late August-early September when the vine in our farmyard sagged under the weight of bunches of honey-coloured and nectar-tasting fruit. Early Spring brought with it a marvellous bounty of green vegetables, my favourite being fennel.
This time, travelling from Algiers, the country’s capital to my hometown was like ambling through a supermarket’s vegetable aisle. Every few miles, one comes across a cart parked by the roadside, showcasing fresh produce from the vicinity, from artichokes to oranges, fennel to broad beans, lemons to freshly pressed olive oil.
Speaking of olive oil, I was astounded on my arrival in the UK to find that, unlike the extensive choice available in supermarkets nowadays, one could only find it in chemists in tiny bottles.
Unlike Spain where the hills between Granada and Córdoba are covered with olive trees, distilleries abound in Andalusia, and olive oil is exported worldwide, Algerian production is mostly for local consumption.
A few family growers have lately diversified into other olive oil products, such as soaps and even exfoliating creams using ground up olive stones.
Visiting local markets, I have noticed that no other produce than seasonal is available on the stalls. Every morning, housewives tend to scour each one for the best vegetables to use for that day’s meals. One morning last week, I joined the hustle and bustle and went shopping for some salad vegetables for my sister. I watched the shrewd housewives haggle with the stallholders over a few pennies. I bought a few heads of fennel, four or five gnarled tomatoes and thought of the misshapen vegetables that have started appearing in UK supermarkets lately. In these open-air markets, there are rarely two vegetables that look the same, but the taste is out of this world. I have often moaned about supermarket tomatoes back home, hard as bullets which often rot before they will go soft.
I bought a few cucumbers, the kind whose bitter skin needs peeling but that taste of raw gherkins. When I proudly presented my sister with my purchases, she asked how much I had paid for them. I told her. She smiled: “You’ve been diddled! Leave the shopping to the housewives next time.”
I saw very little of Algeria, having left it over 42 years ago. During this last visit, I enjoyed a few road trips with my sister, her husband, my nephews and my two childhood friends. We travelled 600 km East from the capital, Algiers to my hometown near the Tunisian border and back. I took lots of photos of the countryside to show the family back in the UK.