Fresh Direct

Dear Customer,

I was just in the process of formulating this humble greeting when my attention was grabbed by an  email from one Robert Hawkins, long-time chief of our Gourmet order pickers in Bicester. Addressed to all the directors, Robert sought to point out that Gourmet’s customers had of late been “eulogising” about the quality of produce hand-picked by him and his team. The use of this beautiful word proved to be a fine counterpoint to the volley of good-natured expletives which exemplify Robert’s style of communication. Also known to flirt with hyperbole, Robert compared his team to Barcelona and he himself as the Lionel Messi within it! All he was seeking, it seems, was some form of recognition so that he could, in his words, “walk past the boardroom with my head held high”.  I must voice two minor objections. Firstly I rather admire José Mourinho who as the boss of Real Madrid is currently entirely incompatible with Barcelona. Putting that aside we have the problem that, if you are to be compared with what is arguably the best team ever to play Association football then where do you find improvement, and should you succeed in doing so what metaphor could we possibly employ to describe your achievement? Let me just say here and now, Robert, on this the most public forum regularly available to me, that all of the peers who have thus far neglected to congratulate you on your splendid endeavours down the years have unanimously decided to debate at the next AGM whether you are henceforth to be referred to as Barca Bob or Messi Hawkins...

Meanwhile back on planet Earth or more specifically the northern hemisphere the pendulum continues to swing towards Spring having passed the Winter solstice, and then the so-called “psychological solstice” which corresponds to the arrival of the first paycheque after the festive season. This is my favourite time of the year, the time when I am most aware of the metronomic precision of nature as the days lengthen, and my love of horology – the design, maintenance and repair of clocks and watches – as well as my fascination with navigation and astronomy are all plugged into it. It seems incredible that almost three hundred years ago the British government offered a prize of £20,000 for the satisfactory resolution to the problem of the calculation of longitude, which would inspire in the decade to follow an extraordinary battle between the clock-maker John Harrison and Neville Maskelyne, the second Royal Astronomer, with chaps like Isaac Newton chipping in their tuppence-worth in the background. While Maskelyne toiled to compile an almanac containing the exact celestial coordinates of thousands of stars he was ultimately defeated by that great inconvenience of nature, the cloudy sky, and Harrison went on to claim the prize for designing and building a clock of excruciating complexity which showed the time in Greenwich as well as local time and had to be able to operate without fail on storm-tossed vessels. How I would have loved to meet those geniuses!

This Winter has been one of the mildest on record – the daffodils in my garden in Wales are nearly four inches tall already, and in the final week of January we had a report of fresh girolles being picked near the coast in Argyll - but no doubt Mother Nature still has one or two vicious tricks up her sleeve before Spring finally does arrive. One cruel upshot of the two previous brutal Winters has been the reluctance of many farmers to plant such crops as purple sprouting broccoli which gave them such a financial kicking during 2010 and 2011. Nevertheless, as the catering trade hopes for a shot in the arm from Valentine’s Day and then Easter we are already able to offer the first British “new” crops of the season, rhubarb from Yorkshire and sea kale from Tayside. By the time I write my next offering in this space we will be enjoying morels, wild leeks and wild garlic and, as chefs begin to wean themselves off the staple root vegetables of winter we will see an improvement in the vibrancy of rocket and other salad leaves and the flavour of southern European tomatoes. As the sun warms the soil towards the end of the month we will begin to enjoy pulses from the Mediterranean countries and savour the anticipation of Gariguette strawberries, Jersey Royal potatoes and English Asparagus which by then will be only a few weeks away. Good times.
 
Regards,

David Burns,
Managing Director.