May's Fleeting Produce Teaches Us What Cooking Has Always Known

The first green almonds arrived at my local market yesterday morning, and by noon they were gone.

This is May's gift and May's curse. The month when produce doesn't politely wait for you to get around to it. When fava beans appear for three weeks and then disappear until next year. When the asparagus that tastes like spring itself will, by June, taste like tired asparagus shipped from somewhere else.

I've been thinking about this as I watch home cooks increasingly turn to recipes that 'actually work'—a phrase I keep seeing everywhere, as if cooking were a matter of engineering rather than conversation. There's a growing obsession with precision, with guarantees, with dishes that can be executed flawlessly in January or August with the same supermarket ingredients.

But May laughs at this.

My grandmother in Tbilisi never measured anything. Not because she was careless, but because the eggplants in July weren't the same as the eggplants in September. The herbs from her garden tasted nothing like the herbs from the market. Every time she made lobio, it was slightly different—not worse or better, just alive to the moment.

This is what's being lost in our quest for recipes that scale, that standardize, that promise the same result every time. We're teaching people to cook as if produce were a manufactured input rather than a living thing that changes by the week.

The spring vegetables peaking right now—the tender peas, the last of the bitter greens, the young garlic—they don't care about your meal plan. They won't wait. And any recipe written to accommodate them year-round is lying to you, substituting something shelf-stable and sad for the thing that made the dish worth making in the first place.

I'm not arguing against written recipes. I've published them myself. But I am arguing against the fantasy that cooking can be reduced to a predictable formula, that if you just follow the steps precisely enough, you'll get the same transcendent result as someone cooking with entirely different ingredients in an entirely different season.

This month, I've been making a simple dish my aunt taught me: fresh favas, barely cooked, with young mint and sheep's milk cheese. There is no recipe, really. The proportions depend entirely on how sweet the favas are, how strong the mint, how salty the cheese. In July, this dish doesn't exist. The favas are too starchy, the mint too aggressive. You could follow the same steps and create something that looks similar but tastes like a memory of a meal rather than a meal itself.

The best cooking has always understood this. Traditional cuisines aren't built on precision—they're built on attention. On tasting as you go. On knowing that the tomatoes this week might need more salt or less sugar than the tomatoes last week. On accepting that you're not trying to reproduce an ideal Platonic form of a dish, but rather to honor what's actually in front of you.

This is why I left the restaurant kitchen, ultimately. The obsession with consistency, with delivering the exact same experience night after night, felt like fighting against everything that makes food alive. I'd rather write about the dishes that can only be made right now, with these ingredients, in this moment.

May is teaching this lesson whether we want to learn it or not. The produce is peaking, which means it's also disappearing. The strawberries that taste like strawberries will soon be replaced by strawberries that taste like red water. The spring onions will give way to storage onions. The season is doing the heavy lifting, as they say, but only if you show up while the season is still here.

I think about the confidence required to cook this way—not the confidence of someone who has mastered a technique, but the confidence of someone who trusts their own palate more than a printed page. It's the confidence my grandmother had, and my aunt, and every cook who learned to pay attention before they learned to measure.

There's a particular kind of loss happening as we optimize cooking into something that can be done the same way anywhere, anytime. We're gaining reliability but losing seasonality. Gaining precision but losing improvisation. Gaining recipes that work but losing the knowledge of when to ignore them.

The irony is that this makes us less confident, not more. We become dependent on instructions rather than on our senses. We panic when we can't find the exact ingredient specified. We don't trust ourselves to know when something tastes right.

May won't let you cook that way. May demands that you taste, adjust, accept that next week's version will be different. May insists that you either show up for what's actually here or settle for something that merely looks like food.

What if we stopped trying to make cooking predictable and instead learned to make it responsive?