Every March there is a week when the banks of the Dodder above Bohernabreena go green before anything else has woken up. The alders are still bare and the river is brown and cold, but under the trees, all the way along from the old stone footbridge, the ground is covered in wild garlic. You smell it before you see it.
I pick it the way I was taught: a few leaves from each clump, never the roots, and only where there is so much that nobody would notice. A carrier bag of leaves weighs almost nothing and takes about twenty minutes to fill. Then I come home and make something that I will be grateful for six months later.
Green ice cubes
The wild garlic season lasts about six weeks and my freezer drawer is the size of a shoebox, so I do not freeze the leaves. I freeze a paste.
- 150 g wild garlic leaves, washed and dried
- 50 g toasted hazelnuts or sunflower seeds
- 40 g hard cheese, Irish cheddar or parmesan, finely grated
- 150 ml rapeseed oil, plus a little more
- a good pinch of salt and the juice of half a lemon
Blitz everything except the cheese into a rough paste. If you have no food processor, chop the leaves very finely with a big knife and pound the nuts in a mortar or under the base of a heavy pan. Stir in the cheese. Spoon it into an ice cube tray, pour a thin film of oil over the top of each cube to stop it darkening, and freeze. Once they are solid, tip them into a bag. One tray makes about fourteen cubes.
Some people will tell you to freeze it without the cheese and add it later. I have done both, and I could not tell the difference in September.
The September supper
This is what I make on a night when I come home late, tired and with no plan. It takes as long as the pasta takes to boil.
For one, generously:
- 100 g dried pasta, something short like penne or casarecce
- 2 frozen wild garlic cubes
- a handful of green beans or the end of a head of broccoli
- a small lump of butter
- more grated cheese and black pepper
Put the cubes in the bowl you are going to eat from, so they start to thaw. Boil the pasta in well salted water. Four minutes before it is done, drop the green vegetables into the same pot. Drain everything, keeping back a small cup of the cooking water. Tip the pasta and greens into the bowl with the cubes and the butter, add a splash of the water and toss it until the paste has melted into a loose green sauce that clings. Cheese, pepper, a fork.
Why I bother
It is not really about saving money, though a jar of pesto in the shop costs more than my whole tray. It is that in the darkest part of the year a bowl of this tastes of a particular morning by a particular river, with the light coming through bare branches. The freezer is the closest thing I have to a diary. Next spring, I will be back under those alders with a bag.