In the Kitchen with chef Johnny Stanford

Johnny Stanford at Tern in Worthing

Chef Johnny Stanford from Tern in Worthing cuts through the jargon and explains what restaurant kitchens are really talking about.

Seasonality is a word we use abundantly when we talk about food. It’s on restaurant menus, in supermarkets and in the way we talk about produce, but what does it actually mean?

The simple answer is that it changes depending on when you ask the question. Seasonality isn’t as predictable as it once was, and it doesn’t always fit neatly into a month-by-month calendar. Weather, growing conditions and where you are all play a part. Really, eating seasonally is about paying attention to what’s happening around us right now, and late August is one of my favourite times to do that.

We’re at a crossover point. There’s still an abundance of summer produce around, sometimes more of it than growers know what to do with, while the first signs of the harvest season are beginning to arrive. The last of one season meets the beginning of another.

In a restaurant kitchen, those gluts give us opportunities. When something arrives in abundance, we preserve it, pickle it, ferment it or infuse it. Partly because it gives us interesting things to work with later in the year, but fundamentally because it makes sense: use something when it’s plentiful, delicious and relatively inexpensive.

That’s a principle that works just as well at home. Keep an eye on what suddenly becomes cheap at the greengrocer or supermarket. A punnet of very ripe berries doesn’t need to look immaculate if you’re going to cook it down with a little sugar. That can become a compote for breakfast, a quick jam, or the base of a late-summer Eton mess.

And that’s where this particular moment gets interesting. Use those abundant summer berries for the base, then add a handful of whatever is just beginning to appear locally, blackberries perhaps, or the first damsons, and you’ve got the crossover between two seasons in one bowl.

You don’t need to make everything yourself, either. Restaurant cooking and home cooking are different things. Buy the meringues if you want to, even better if you can pick some up from a good local bakery, and concentrate your effort on the bit where it makes a difference.

That’s really what eating seasonally means: not following rules, but noticing what’s abundant, what’s arriving and what’s disappearing, then making the most of it while it’s here.

Tern restaurant and cocktail bar, 39 Warwick Street, Worthing BN11 3DQ