"Come gather 'round, people, wherever you roam, and admit that the waters around you have grown."
Bob Dylan (1964)
Dear Seafoodies
Was Mr Dylan warning us about something nearly 50 years ago that we have only come to accept comparatively recently? Or was he in fact not singing about an impending and long-lasting denial of climate change and rising sea levels? Whilst climate change is now unquestionably impossible to ignore, I was surprised recently to see how its effects can be manifested through a simple endeavour of enjoying a seasonal food-pairing.
For me, the month of May has for many years been one of the culinary highlights of the year, for the simple reason that it is the month in which occurs the intersection of the short seasons of two of my favourite ingredients: cuttlefish and wild garlic. This year, the wild garlic started appearing in early March due, of course, to the warm winter. But I needn't have been concerned that the wild garlic would run out before the cuttlefish appeared. Oh no! The first cuttlefish appeared in mid-March due to the warmer sea. A simple calculation tells you that an ingredient from the land and an ingredient from the sea conspired to announce a season-shift of 4-6 weeks, which is approximately 10% of a year!
Wild garlic is, of course, predominantly foraged, and the lockdown from coronavirus made it particularly difficult to source this year. Thankfully my very good friend at Rose Ash Foods (who supplies an excellent olive oil that I have used in some of my Mediterranean and Middle-Eastern dishes - see for example: Sayadieh, Fishafels and Ladolemono), happens to have a neighbouring woodland in which the stuff is prolific. As a bit of lockdown distraction we experimented with him sending me some in a Jiffy bag. Our little experiment would have worked near-perfectly were it not for the parcel having become tangled in the lockdown-hit postal system. The garlic did arrive some 10 days later but, by that time only about one third was usable, and used it most certainly was.
On the cuttlefish side, sadly the picture is a little bleak. This article alerts to the concern that cuttlefish are being fished to the point of extinction, a concern corroborated by the fact the the Marine Conservation Society have put cuttlefish on their endangered list. The explanation is that efficient trawlers way out at sea are increasingly capturing immature cuttlefish who would otherwise be heading inshore to lay their eggs. Thankfully the Marine Conservation Society have recognised the inshore cuttlefish fisheries off the Dorset coast as sustainable, not least because traps containing any eggs are returned to the seabed in order that the eggs may hatch. So we, as customers of the market stall, can enjoy cuttlefish in the knowledge that they are fished sustainably, but has this just become another familiar story?
Anyway, cuttlefish are extremely versatile in a culinary sense. They, like squid, can be cooked briefly over a very high heat or slowly over a low heat, but no other combination of time and temperature if disappointment is to be avoided. They can be stewed in liquid and cooked in their own ink and they respond to herbs as well as they do aromatic and pungent spices.
You may possibly have spotted that I think cuttlefish and wild garlic are a superb marriage if not only for the romance of their sharing of a relatively short season. The following are two fine examples. The first, Cuttlefish a la Plancha with Wild Garlic, is a take on a Spanish tapas dish where the cuttlefish is cooked rapidly on a hot griddle, and the second does what it says on the tin, Cuttlefish Braised with Wild Garlic, but here the dish is finished with the cuttlefish ink.
