Including, of course, what are known as the dining-out classes. That is, the public for which the restaurant columns - useful guides and information bearers as well as, at times, taste leaders - give their guidance. You read some odd things, but none so odd and as an exhilaratingly new-method (to this reader anyway) as a French way of dealing with vegetables. It amounts to never letting some of them grow much beyond the seedling stage - and eating this in lieu. But to come back. Robin Lane Fox, well known in The Financial Times, writes there of one of the most extraordinary and famous vegetable gardens in England.
It concerns a fabulous place known as Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons run by the celebrated Raymond Blanc "the prince of all French chefs in Britain". And some of its great secrets are to be found in the acre-and-a-half of vegetable garden run by Anne Marie Owens with seven of a staff. Not only are there no chemicals allowed in it, but the care and working of the soil must be unique in its barber-like detail, while what is grown, as we will see, is unique. Or should that be what is allowed to grow only a fraction? Writes Robin Lane Fox: "Whenever anyone forswears modern chemical improvements, I become immediately suspicious. Every vegetable and bit of fruit in my garden is crying out for genetic modification. As soon as I stop spraying, the blackcurrant bushes develop red pustules. The slugs and pigeons murder the young lettuce. This year, the few broad beans have been crawling with blackfly."
At Le Manoir, Ms Owens claims that these troubles are eliminated by the highest standards of clean, natural cultivation. Young crops are protected under fleece (our italics). Snails, she believes, are kept down by toads and non-culinary frogs in the ponds. But the biggest difference is that the vegetables are picked far, far earlier than any English gardener could imagine. Turnips are picked when still tiny. Pea pods don't come into the picture because the plants are pulled out before the pods form. So you just eat the top of the plant which, it seems, cooked, tastes of pea. This is referred to in the article as "the local French habit".
And the writer says that, to his amazement, they taste "as wonderfully flavoured as the young contents of the good old English pod". Same with broad beans. This unique establishment is at Great Milton, Oxfordshire. Whew!