3 Garden-to-Table Recipes from The Great Dixter Cookbook

“For me, soup is not just a winter dish,” says Bertelsen. “I love to eat it all year round, and I particularly enjoy cold soup during the summer.” As the weather begins to turn warm, make this herbal chilled soup with your haul of fresh spring peas.

Tips for the gardener: “Peas are just as good frozen as fresh, as long as you pick them while they’re young and freeze them quickly. They are good dried, too, and used later on in the year for soups and stews.” Don’t forget, “you can pinch out the pea shoots and add them to salads. These really do taste like essence of pea, and they look beautiful.”

Bertelsen admits, “Working out what goes best with roast lamb is one of those pleasurable dilemmas I love to ponder while working in the garden.” Here, he pairs it with seasonal broad (fava) beans in a buttery mint sauce.

Tips for the gardener: With broad beans, “you will know when the time is right to harvest them by opening up a pod and looking inside. Once the beans are the size of your thumbnail, they are ready to eat.” Also, notes Bertelsen: “Don’t throw the broad bean tops away, as they are a real delicacy.”

As a gardener, Bertelsen says that early spring rhubarb is “such a treat, coming as it does at a time of year when there is precious little else around and we are starting to crave fresh flavours.” This simple tart—packed with juicy, caramelized rhubarb—is practically begging for a scoop of vanilla ice cream. 

Tips for the gardener: “As long as your rhubarb is well cared for and watered, you can carry on eating the stems into high summer, otherwise you might find that they have become rather tough.” To enjoy rhubarb even longer, “you can extend the rhubarb season by forcing it at the beginning in late winter so that the stems appear a few weeks earlier than they otherwise would.”

The Great Dixter Cookbook: Recipes from an English Garden by Aaron Bertelsen, Phaidon, 2017. $39.95, phaidon.com.