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https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-counts-as-fresh-food-11652500861

To celebrate the spring in Rome, they sometimes eat a vegetable stew called vignarola. Like the summer succotash of the American South or the ratatouille of France, vignarola is a vegetable stew that, in its ideal form, is radiant with freshness. It is made from artichokes, tiny fresh fava beans and freshly shelled peas, all braised together with spring onions and white wine with fresh mint added at the end. Vignarola is a mellow mixture of all things green and new. It would once have marked the start of the new season after the hungry gap of late winter. But in an era when frozen peas are available all year round, the dish’s dazzling spring freshness no longer means as much.

The great miracle of our modern food system has been to supply us with the freshness of spring all year round—or at least with an approximation of it. We can buy juicy fragrant herbs in the depths of winter and spring chickens in the fall. When I find myself getting twinges of nostalgia for the food of the past, I remember how grim it must have been to survive for half the year on little but salt pork, bread and molasses (as described in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s books for children). Before refrigeration and modern methods of agriculture, even butter and eggs were seasonal foods. Nineteenth-century American cookbooks included unappetizing recipes for keeping eggs “perfectly good” by coating them in a thick layer of grease or submerging them in saltwater. Somehow, these don’t sound perfectly good—or at least not as good as living in a time when fresh eggs are available year-round.

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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. Distribution and use of this material are governed by our Subscriber Agreement and by copyright law. For non-personal use or to order multiple copies, please contact Dow Jones Reprints at 1-800-843-0008 or visit www.djreprints.com.