If you live in a hot, tropical climate, you are rarely short of ingredients. Audacious, bright, ridiculously named fruit and vegetables, dock-slapping fresh fish and sweet, fragrant herbs waft, swing and swim past you every day.

Yet while staying in a ‘nice’ hotel in St Lucia, every night my partner and I would be forced to play: guess when the cauliflower will inexplicably arrive. A game I haven’t taken seriously since I was five years old — an age when to eat cauliflower meant certain death (as with mushrooms, or anything not from the crisp family).

For four long nights, whether we were having seafood paella, red snapper or just steak and chips, there it was, waiting for us, bland, unseasoned and lurking in our order’s midst.

The reason I mention this — on a hot April’s day when we should be thinking about ice lollies rather than flowery brassicas that should be gone from a seasonal table at least until Halloween — it seems that cauliflowers are trying to make a comeback.

It came as no surprise to anyone when discerning shoppers stopped buying them. Nor the nauseatingly predictable response of various celebrities in jumping to their defence and protesting that they’d die without them… well, so long as they were smothered in cream/cumin/gruyere cheese. The cauliflowers, that is.

And so, Heston’s contrary nature notwithstanding, I gladly assumed we’d finally got rid it.

That is, until chef Simon Rimmer mentioned over lunch today that while eating at a top restaurant in Bergen, Norway, a waiter had proudly presented him with a small dish of cauliflower curds. Apparently, Norwegians struggle to grow them. And so were pretty chuffed to be able to present him with a Norwegian version of what they must have assumed was a beloved British dish.

At least when we’d sent them off to India in the 1800s, our Commonwealth cousins sent them back deep-fried and covered in spice.

But to have them repeat with no other innovation that to have been grown in an even colder climate that our own, Mr Rimmer wasn’t best pleased. It seems the cauliflower is determined to stay and is infiltrating restaurants that should know better all over the world with insistent demands to be heard.

Should we listen? Well I’ve got until Halloween to make up my mind.