2 hours ago
2
Opinion
October 7, 2025 — 5:00am
I’m in Rotterdam, and I’m here for the mussels. I’ve made a booking at the cosy, wood-lined Brasserie Kaat Mossel, and I’m slaveringly ready to order a big, glossy red steamer of gleaming dark shells from the Zeeland coast, steamed in white wine. Then disaster strikes.
“Sorry, mussel season finished two days ago,” says the waiter.
You. Are. Kidding. Me.
He explains the season starts mid-July and runs to mid-April. I’m too late. Then his face lights up. “But white asparagus season has just started.”
White asparagus is a rare and precious thing that grows in the dark, deprived of sunlight. The season is so short – generally from mid-April to June throughout Germany, Belgium, Amsterdam and across Europe – that it’s known as white gold. It costs about as much as gold, too, but I have to have it. The taste is earthy, nutty, and buttery, with a haunting hint of bitterness – or maybe that last bit was me, still distressed about missing out.
My Great Mussel Disaster of 2025 taught me, yet again, to throw myself into the treasures of the season while the season is still around. In a world in which we can eat avocado toast or steak frites in Dubai, Dresden or Delhi, the real joy is in seeking out those things that belong to a particular place or a particular time.
In summer, that means the ripe sweetness of sun-warmed figs in Sicily, chilled Charentais melons and bigarreau cherries in the south of France and grilled freshwater eel in Tokyo.
Head to Thailand in April and May for the juiciest, largest lychees you have ever tried to stuff into your mouth, and to the South Island of New Zealand for the intensely briny, meaty, creamy Bluff oysters. The season kicks off in May with the annual Bluff Oyster Festival (slogan: unsophisticated and proud of it!) and continues until the end of August at Fowlers Wild Bluff Oysters in Bluff, where the Fowler family have been shucking bluffies for four generations.
Being in the right place at the right time for this sort of precious produce is like gaining membership into a secret society. It can be hard for Australians to grasp. When you live on a continent large enough to grow summer’s sweetcorn and winter’s pumpkins at the same time, being in a small country that has just one climate can feel restrictive. It’s not.
Over centuries, these seasonal highlights have rooted themselves into the culture, the religion and the economy of the place. The changing from one season to the next is more than another page on the calendar; it’s the excuse for a party.
Take the excitement that surrounds calcots, the long, leek-like green onions that grow around Tarragona, west of Barcelona, from December to March. Entire villages throw parties, known as calcotadas, in the street where the calcots are grilled over grapevine cuttings, wrapped in newspaper to steam and dipped messily into romesco sauce.
And now hand over your wallet, for we have entered the rarefied world of truffles. If all you have had is a whiff of chemically enhanced “truffle oil”, you may not get it. But dig up a nubbly black lump on a truffle hunt in Istria, Piedmont or Perigord (key month: January); brush off the chocolatey soil and shave the black gold over home-made tagliatelle tossed in butter, and, oh yeah, you’ll get it.
We all love being able to go to a famous old bistro in Paris for an unchanging dish such as steak frites or have the same Hainan chicken rice year round at a Singapore hawker stall. But sometimes it’s the fleeting, impermanent dishes that are the most special, like catching a dream.
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