Glut. G-L-U-T. Glut. If there’s a more horrible word in the English language I’ve yet to hear it. Makes me think of snot, of phlegm, of gunk. Glut. Do we have to use this word at all?
Apparently, yes, because it’s that time of year for gardeners, even rubbish ones like me, when gluts are all the rage. No proper garden type would ever call their glut a surplus, or a surfeit, or an overabundance, or a superfluity (thank you, laptop thesaurus function) when it comes to excess fruit and veg. It’s always a glut.
Right now we’re wallowing in a glut of courgettes, ploughing through a glut of tomatoes and battling a glut of runner beans. The glut of gooseberries was overwhelming this year, although the rhubarb glut was glorious and had the birds not scoffed our glut of redcurrants before we remembered about putting up netting, we would’ve had to deal with that glut, too. Truly, this year, we have had a glut of gluts.
So rampant is our courgette glut that if we turn our backs for five minutes they inflate like airbags, becoming gluts of marrows and there’s only so many times you can bake watery, endlessly-disappointing marrow dishes before family members, however grateful to be fed they may be, grow wan-faced and begin pleading for mercy and macaroni cheese. Even my local farm shop, I noticed, was giving away its marrow glut for free.
Nature thumbs her nose at us
Annoyingly, we rarely get gluts of the things we enjoy the most: raspberries, tiny new potatoes, peas, carrots that actually smell of carrots rather than the supermarket ones that smell of swimming pools. Strawberries! You never hear about gluts of strawberries because when can you ever have too many of those? Oh, and apples – last year’s apple glut coincided joyously with my husband finally perfecting his home-made cider and so this year, tongues hanging out for a glut, we watch in real-time dismay as Mother Nature thumbs her nose and the apple trees enjoy a year off.
So. I’ve picked as much as I can lift from the veg patch and now I’m in the kitchen, with black fingernails, facing down my gluts. The kitchen table is a Harvest Festival of knobbly, glutty veg. The odd beastie crests, scuttles and falls on the floor. I roll up my sleeves. What to cook first? Now obviously, before reaching this stage, I’ve tried to foist as much glut as possible onto others but you’d be amazed how many people turn down proffered bags of kindly-meant glut and I understand that; they haven’t invested the time and optimism in growing the stuff that I have, nor do they share my swivel-eyed desperation to use it all up and nor do they care to disrupt their dinner plans. Glut-wise, I’m on my own.
Everything boils down to soup
So, soup, then. Everything ultimately boils down to soup in this house. I grew up in a home that always had a pan of amazing soup on the go – red, green, or lentil-ly terracotta. But today it’s hard work getting tasty results from fundamentally tasteless veg. Still, make soup I do, flinging in garlic, stilton, herbs – anything to make the result taste of more than mere pureed green-ness. Then into the freezer it goes, solidifying into khaki Tupperware breeze blocks in perilous, icy stacks. This is end-stage glut: the glut of soup.
Meanwhile, outside in the garden, having done our best, we can quietly watch the last of the glut develop toenail-textured strings, weather-blown gaps and distended slashes, before decaying and enriching the earth so we can do it all again next year.
Make chutney, you say? Yes, I’ve made chutney with gluts. Glutney. Oftentimes has my kitchen been heavy with the head-splitting tang of vinegar, mustard seeds and ginger as gluts simmer down into pickles, ideally for spooning into crystal dishes and being placed on tables for perfect, Kodak-moment gammon banquets on Boxing Day or those adorable al fresco Ploughman’s lunches on flower-strewn patios where everyone wears white linen and laughs a lot. Never really happens. Oftentimes more do I scoop mould-topped jars into the bin after too many cases of watching people sneakily reaching for the Branston.
Courgetti, tarts, curries, risottos, salads – to be fair, there are lots of delicious options for glut-use and mine have found their way very tastily into lots of them. A crumble of goats’ cheese, a toasted pine nut, a glug of olive oil, a splash of balsamic can elevate gluts to glory and we’re blessed to have the space to grow them all. Meanwhile, outside in the garden, having done our best, we can quietly watch the last of the glut develop toenail-textured strings, weather-blown gaps and distended slashes, before decaying and enriching the earth so we can do it all again next year.
Erica Munro is a novelist, playwright, screenwriter and freelance editor
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