Kitchen diary: wild garlic

I have been thinking about the wood at the bottom of the garden at my childhood home. Once past the hazel trees and their emerging leaves you were in a dark, damp glade filled with bluebells and wild garlic. To this 11-year-old, it felt like being underwater. A sight to be admired, wallowed in but left untouched. I don’t think I ate garlic – leaf or clove – until I had left home.

There are bluebells out in my garden now, unplanted and very welcome, but access to wild garlic would make me even happier. (The brief excitement as the telltale smell wafted up during a recent walk near my house turned out to belong to a patch of three-cornered leek – edible but too close to dog-walking territory.)

The wide, soft leaves of wild garlic, also known as ramsons, are best left in peace, their white flowers and emerald leaves as beautiful as a clump of lily of the valley. (Digging up the bulbs is illegal.)

Luckily, they turn up in farmer’s markets and some delis during April and May. As sure a sign of spring as a primrose, the leaves will keep for a few days wrapped in paper in a storage box in the fridge. But keep the lid on, unless you want the milk to smell of garlic too.

A few leaves go a long way. Garlic-leaf mayonnaise was a success, made by finely chopping the raw leaves and stirring them into some decent shop-bought mayonnaise with a squirt of lemon juice. We ate it alongside cold trout. The onion notes soften when the leaves are cooked. Those tossed for a minute or two in a little butter or olive oil in a shallow pan can be chopped and stirred into mashed potato or soft polenta, or as I did, into the filling for a mozzarella tart.

There were some tempting bunches of radishes to be had, too, long red ones with snowy white tips and tufts of green leaves. Their subtle heat worked nicely with the first of the early peas that arrived from Italy. The peas barely saw boiling water, just a minute or so, then cooled and tossed with an equal weight of radishes and a fat handful of parsley leaves. I dressed them with a mixture of olive oil and lemon. (I use twice as much oil as lemon juice and a little salt.) The crispest of spring salads, made even more so by giving the radishes half an hour or so in really cold water, preferably with ice cubes. Not only will their texture perk up, they will be more refreshing, too.

The blossom has been exceptional this year and the greengage and crab apple trees in the garden have been chock-full of bees. The real prize is the Doyenné du Comice pear tree I planted when I first moved in, tying its supple stems to wires against the garden wall. The late spring last year meant no fruit in the autumn, but this year its snowy blossom has been awash with every bee in the neighbourhood. I have high hopes of a pear and almond tart this year.