Remembering How to Cook with Plants

By Delia Stirling, Founder of Grove & Meadow

This week, I am beginning a plant-based cookery course in London with Bettina's Kitchen and am reminded of something that feels both simple and surprisingly easy to forget...plants are only boring when we have forgotten how to cook them.

At Grove & Meadow, as we explore greater crop diversity on our farm in Tigoni and work alongside smallholder farmers to improve soil health, I keep returning to the same thought: if we are asking the land to offer us more, we must also learn how to receive more from it. Not just in what we grow, but in how we prepare, combine, and enjoy it.

Plant-based food is often framed too narrowly, as though it belongs only to vegans or to a world of restraint and substitution. But historically, that is far from true. Our ancestors ate with far greater diversity, guided by seasonality, preservation, and the natural rhythms of the land. Their food included bitter leaves, sour ferments, fresh herbs, roots, seeds, pulses, and grains.  Flavours and textures that brought both complexity and nourishment to the table.

One of the most memorable insights from today came from a Danish woman who explained that cheese was traditionally eaten with fermented vegetables to support digestion. I found that detail quietly profound. It speaks to an older understanding of food not as isolated ingredients, but as a relationship of balance: richness lifted by acidity, heaviness met with sharpness, pleasure paired with wisdom.

That idea has stayed with me.

Because much of what makes plant-based cooking so satisfying is not novelty, but attention. It is the willingness to roast slowly, to pickle, to char, to ferment, to season thoughtfully, and to allow time to do its work. Often, flavour and nutrition do not shout; they need drawing out. But when they are, the result is food with real depth, character, and vitality.

This feels especially relevant to the work we are building through the Living Food Campus. If we want to champion biodiversity in the field and restore health to our soils, then we must also rebuild confidence and creativity in the kitchen. We must remind ourselves that plants are not an afterthought, nor a compromise, but one of the most expressive and rewarding parts of the human diet.

I will be returning to Tigoni carrying not just new techniques, but a renewed sense of possibility  and a desire to share more of it. Because perhaps the real work is not convincing people to eat plants, but helping them remember how deeply pleasurable, intelligent, and alive plant-based food can be.