Ways to Welcome Spring

It's time to cast off the long winter.

Winter is a time for luxuriant heaviness: rich food, a lot of sleep, cosying up at home, conserving energy, resting.

Spring then offers us a stark contrast: it’s the time for reawakening, building up our fitness again, lighter meals, cleansing herbs, and getting our systems pumping in preparation for high energy summer.

Here are my favourite ways to wake up the body after the long dark months, as well as some springtime folk rituals from Europe.

Eat lighter meals

Whilst winter necessitates rib-sticking dishes, these are much too heavy for spring, and you may already be feeling a change: a desire for fresher produce and lighter meals.

Spring is the season for fresh milk, young cheeses, little peeks of intrepid new vegetables, more butter and slightly less animal fats, omelettes and scrambles and any other excuse to crack open an egg with its shining sun-like yolk, the very first tender lettuces of the year, leafy wild herbs, and sour & bitter tastes to awaken a sluggish digestion.

There’s good reason why you may be feeling an urge to eat more milk and eggs, after a winter of possibly eschewing both (I certainly do, and did). Up until very recently in human history, eggs and milk were seasonal products, and spring was the time for both!

Chickens produce more eggs when they have more light, which previously only came from longer sunnier days. The invention of electricity meant we could suddenly trick them into laying every day of the year, in enclosed barns under artificial lighting; but the bulk of egg-laying naturally happens in spring and summer.

Milk was mostly available during springtime calving season, and also when cows had access to fresh lush summer grass: for the rest of the year, when the pastures were barren and your cow’s womb was empty for too long, you had to make do with aged cheeses stored away for less abundant times.

Roast dinners drenched in fat, darkly unctuous stews simmered for hours, pungent aged cheeses, and meat all day every day are OUT; tender little vegetables, boiled potatoes, young fresh soft cheeses, poached eggs, pickles, and milky puddings are IN!