Nigel Slater’s recipes for new potatoes with asparagus, and for potato and thyme tarts

With asparagus or in a tart, new potatoes bring the nutty, sweet taste of early summer

The new potatoes are here – tiny, kidney-shaped and with soft, flaky skins. Lightly scraped and steamed, their creamy yellow flesh has a sweet nuttiness that is the essence of early summer. I toss them, still warm from the steamer, in a vivid dressing of fresh herbs and olive oil with a kick of green chilli. The trick is to dress them lightly so you get the best of both dressing and potato. You can add other seasonal treats, too: asparagus tips, carefully steamed purple sprouting (tossed very gently as it is inclined to break up) and early samphire, whose saltiness will bring out the best in the new potatoes. (Seaweed is often used as fertiliser for the Jersey variety.)

Those little potatoes ended up in a tart, too. Steamed, sliced and teamed with mozzarella and crème fraîche, they made an appearance with a salad of curls of spring carrot and radish, a hint of mustard and mint in the dressing. The first batch we ate warm from the oven, the next were stuffed into old toffee tins as sustenance for an outing, and travelled well enough, despite their fragile crust.

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