Three cornered leeks, a hoppy ale, a chef called Tim, It's Immaterial

Abundance: Wednesday 10 January 2024

I love New Year’s Day with its windscreen wiping of what’s been. I want to be out early, walking, ideally by the sea, returning to eat too much in excellent company, a good hoppy ale by the fire while collecting strands of bath thoughts and mini-revelations into a rope of aims and resolutions for the year ahead.

I managed most of that but somehow it’s the 10^th and the last part evades me. The plans I used to make in the days between unwrapping and the turn of the year get pushed back a little more every year. 

My intentions for 2024 feel like a sneeze that orbits as a faint tickle without quite landing. It feels similar to being on the home straight of writing a book, where there’s no telling when it’ll be finished: it genuinely might be in 15 minutes or the week after next.

Despite decades of experience, New Year’s Day still feels - as I wrote in A Year at Otter Farm - like ‘I’ve pedalled over winter’s hill and that it’ll be a freewheel into spring. Of course it isn’t - January will seem two optimistic weeks long and February like a month and a half of icy winds - but at least for the early part of January, I’m happy.’

I’m glad of the ongoing early January self-deception: it gives me the energy to drive into the year.

This morning, while the positivity is still here, I planned a day of scribbling in the hope of resolving, planning and envisaging; a pile of notes and wrapping paper jottings being transferred to a single page, in the hope they’d form a personal and professional recipe for the year if I pushed them around the page’s plate long enough.

Instead, drawn by the sun and too long not seeing my mum - and despite a sense of urgency about deadlines to meet before scribbling - I pushed everything to one side and took the long way round to meet her for excellent coffee and, yes, morning cake. 

Along the river and in great swathes around the leafless trees, lush gonks of what look from a distance like flowerless daffodils: it is three cornered leek¹. Way ahead of the wild garlic, it makes its optimistic way into the new year light, the first wild harvest of the season.

It is easy to distinguish from other seemingly similar plants: in profile, the leaves form a shallow V, the flower stems a three-pronged star, and the scent is a mild yet very present leekiness with a touch of distance garlic.

An old friend and brilliant chef Tim Maddams introduced me to three cornered leek one cold winter 8 years ago.

The river path is bounded by one of those diamond wired fences of the sort that made the sides of the football cage at every school in the 80s; I leant over it and cut a couple of handfuls of three cornered leeks² that were beyond the peeing range of all but perhaps the tallest and most generously blessed of the neighbourhood hounds. I popped them in my bag, the cut ends saved from too much evaporation by a solo poo bag lurking in my coat pocket.

Coffee with my mum may have had her wondering - but not asking - what the peculiar oniony scent was.

I made plans for the three cornered leeks on the way home - adjika perhaps, pesto at a push, maybe an oil to go with that leek and potato soup I plan on making - but in the end, after a little soaking to wash off any undesirables, I did the simple, obvious and most pleasurable thing: I softened them in butter before slowly slowly scrambling what was meant to be three but - courtesy of the last being a double yolker - became four eggs. A good deal of salt, a heavy peppering and a tweak of chilli flakes and the work of a few minutes became the best lunch. My wife ate it with excellent rye bread toast.

Simplicity. It also reminded me of Tim the chef, a man who showed up when times were not great, and who lives with boldness, courage and originality. He griddled - hard like he hated them - the later season stems, flowers, bulbs and all, made a lively romesco sauce to go with, and it lit up an extraordinary meal he made for twenty or so. I’ll go back later in the year to harvest more when the six-petaled, green-striped white flowers are hanging, and ferment some, and griddle plenty to eat with Tim’s romesco.

I’ve just written down a few of the words that leapt off this page:

simplicity
see mum
cook for people you love
be outside when the sunshines
take the long way round
boldness and courage
cake

I have a feeling crystallising those resolutions might come sooner than expected.

1. aka Snowbell, Allium triquetrum

2. three cornered like might not be the most common plant in the world, but where it established it does so with enthusiasm so you can harvest with reasonable certainty that you are not likely to make a dent in its existence. Here in the UK, it is an offence to plant the bulbs in the wild.