Cold comforts

"I have never encountered a parsnip on a foreign plate"

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EVERY good gardener knows that one of the chief joys of growing vegetables is seasonality. Those of us who, spurn ing greenery flown in from thousands of miles away, wait for the crops to ripen in due season and continue to experience that once-universal phenomenon of alternating glut and dearth, all or nothing at all, that marks the vegetable- lover’s year. Now that the days are short and the temperatures low, the options from the kitchen garden are relatively few, astonishingly so compared with autumn’s bounty, but there are treasures nonetheless in prospect.