Market Life issue 48

Market Life

No. 48

The Borough Market magazine boroughmarket.org.uk

281003 772397

Food magazine of the year

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ISSN 2397-2815

Clare Finney explores the nascent revival of heritage grains Harold McGee on science, creativity and industrialisation Recipes inspired by the produce of Northern Ireland

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TOM BRADLEY

Snapshot Oysters being shucked at Furness Fish Markets by a true man of the sea—and a captain, no less

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Welcome to Market Life

Market Life can be picked up free of charge from The Borough Market Store. It is also handed out at London Bridge station.

No. 48

£3.80 where sold

pp8 Pork belly grain bowl with kimchi and roast kalettes

Limited produce market Monday-Tuesday: 10am-5pm Full produce market Wednesday-Thursday: 10am-5pm Friday: 10am-6pm Saturday: 8am-5pm Easter opening Check the website for details

The Borough Market Kitchen Monday-Thursday: 10am-5pm Friday: 10am-6pm Saturday: 10am-5pm

pp18 Razor clams with dulse, guanciale and cider

Beef shin and barley broth with treacle farls and spring onion butter Crusted mutton chops with braised black chickpeas and parsley root Crispy polenta and creamed leeks with purple sprouting broccoli and Corleggy Baked Irish whiskey custard, honeycomb crumble wafers and candied apple pp30 Cauliflower gnocchi with sage butter and hazelnuts

Borough Market Online click & collect Monday-Friday: 12pm-9pm Saturday: 12pm-6pm goodsixty.co.uk/borough-market Borough Market 8 Southwark Street London SE1 1TL Underground London Bridge Train London Bridge Join the conversation: Twitter @boroughmarket Instagram @boroughmarket facebook.com/boroughmarket

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For an entire millennium, Borough Market has managed to sustain itself through war, famine, social upheaval and the headlong rush of technological change. Sometimes it has survived by the skin of its teeth, but survive it has. This incredible longevity has imbued the Market with a deep commitment to sustainability—of the Market itself and of the natural resources upon which it relies—as well as a strong sense that answers can be found by looking both backwards and forwards, at both tradition and innovation, learning from the lessons of the past while also seeking out new ideas that can help shape the future.

This willingness to look both ways is of vital importance when it comes to finding sustainable models of food production and consumption: a trader selling nut-based vegan cheeses will have a vision that differs from that of a farmer committed to the traditional small-scale production of pasture-fed beef, even though both share the same concerns about the long-term viability of cheap, industriallyproduced meat and dairy and both present valid solutions.

The Market’s policy is to be accepting of this multiplicity of approaches and provide a broad church in which different responses to societal and environmental changes can be explored. This year, as the recent re-zoning of the Market to promote the sale of fresh produce enters its next phase, an influx of new produce traders will be arriving, some highly innovative, some with a strong sense of heritage, some with a little of both. All will be expected to demonstrate with absolute clarity the steps they will take to minimise the impact of their work, whatever those steps might be.

In this issue of Market Life, that melding of old ways and new perspectives is very much in evidence. In our lead feature, we discover how some of the Market’s chefs, bakers and pasta makers have started to explore the culinary and ecological potential of heritage grains—ancient cereals whose growing revival is being driven by concerns about the sustainability of modern wheat production. Our big interview is with Harold McGee, an American writer fascinated by the history of food and how the application of modern science can help us to better understand it. And for our recipe feature, Paula McIntyre makes use of some of Northern Ireland’s most traditional ingredients, but her approach is one that isn’t hemmed in by insularity or nostalgia. Taking from the past, but not being stifled by it, in the true Borough Market style.

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NEWS & EVENTS

IN SEASON

Borough Market Online The official platform for buying a wide range of Market produce online has expanded its deliveries to cover a 2.5 mile radius of Borough Market.

Purchases can also be picked up from a hub within the Market, which stays open until 9pm on weekdays and 6pm on Saturdays.

Picture Britain Exhibition Free to view in the Market Hall (20th February—7th March), this exhibition of powerful portraits by photographer Jillian Edelstein is designed to make us rethink the way we see people caught in the riptide of poverty. Northern Ireland Showcase To mark St Patrick’s Day, this annual regional showcase will see Northern Irish producers bringing their sustainably produced products to the Market Hall (18th—21st March).

Paula McIntyre, whose recipes can be found within these pages, will be in the Demo Kitchen. Cookbook Club On 14th and 18th March, the Borough Market Cookbook Club will be gathering in the Cookhouse to explore vegan Indian recipes from Romy Gill’s debut book Zaika. The club is free to join—visit the Borough Market website for details.

Purple sprouting broccoli A welcome arrival after the fallow months of deep winter.

Serve with hollandaise or whizz up into pesto.

Tardivo An Italian heirloom radicchio with long, deep purple, bittertasting leaves. A perfect side to Vacherin mont d’Or and potatoes.

Marinda tomato The notably firm flesh of this ridged winter tomato from Sicily offers a welcome blend of umami and acidity.

Piccolo parsnips Smaller and sweeter than the fully matured version, these are best simply roasted whole in butter.

Kalettes The lovechild of kale and brussels sprouts, these pretty purple frills cook in mere minutes, steamed, sautéed or stir fried.

Monkfish Don’t be put off by its huge flattened head: this fish yields robust and meaty white flesh that holds its own against strong flavours.

Cyprus potatoes These new season spuds have a distinctly earthy yet buttery taste and firm, golden flesh.Excellent all-rounders.

Red gurnard An under-utilised, highly economical and very tasty fish. Use the head and frame to add depth to stocks and fish stews.

Bergamots A fragrant citrus fruit hailing from Calabria, Italy. Use the zest and juice in custards and syrups; the flesh for orange jam.

Alpine bresaola Silverside of beef, marinated in spices, gently smoked over beach wood and airdried for three months.

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On the cover This puntarelle from Elsey & Bent is a prominent member of the beautiful, bitter family of chicories. In Rome, it is traditionally served as a salad, dressed with a simple vinaigrette of anchovies, white wine vinegar and olive oil.

FIVE LONDON PRODUCTS

Batch No 1 gin East London Liquor Company Vegan cheese Palace Culture Chocolate truffles So Chocolicious Lemon and blueberry cake Luminary Bakery Natural pot set yoghurt Kappacasein

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Batch No 1 gin One of three original gins to emerge from East London Liquor Company’s Bow Wharf distillery, Batch No 1 remains a firm favourite. Made with 100 per cent British wheat, it’s on the drier side thanks to the inclusion of Darjeeling tea, but perfectly balanced with spices (coriander seeds, cassia bark, angelica root), fresh grapefruit peel, juniper and cubeb berries. The ideal base for a dry martini.

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Piccolo parsnips Ted’s Veg Cyprus potatoes Elsey & Bent Alpine bresaola Alpine Deli Goose eggs Wild Beef Kefir Oliveology Tomme du Jura The French Comté Forced rhubarb and orange jam Rosebud Preserves

Goose eggs This supersized egg traditionally arrives on Valentine’s Day. Double the size of a hen’s egg with a rich and creamy yolk.

Kefir A gently tangy fermented goat’s milk drink, made at an organic dairy in Drama, a mountainous region in northern Greece.

Roe deer A native deer that’s bang in season, this ‘clean’ tasting but incredibly lean meat requires cooking with plenty of fat.

Tomme du Jura An unpasteurised, washed rind cow’s milk cheese from the Jura mountains, matured for three months.

Dorset lamb A British breed that is able to lamb all year round, meaning this delicate, tender meat is here in time for Easter roasts.

Forced rhubarb and orange jam Sweet with dessert orange and tart with rhubarb, this chunky preserve is good on roast duck or scones.

Lemon and blueberry cake Luminary Bakery is a social enterprise in Hackney that aims to help vulnerable women find employment and renewed confidence through baking. Their blueberry and lemon cake is one of our favourites: moist lemon sponge dotted with blueberries, topped and sandwiched with lemon buttercream, finished off with dollops of blueberry jam and lemon curd, then sprinkled with lemon crumble topping.

Natural pot set yoghurt Bill Oglethorpe of Kappacasein applies his considerable aptitude for lactic acid fermentation to a wide range of dairy products, sold alongside his famous cheeses in Three Crown Square. His natural yoghurt is made in Bermondsey using fresh, raw organic milk from Commonwork Farm in Kent, which is ‘pre-ripened’ with his own starter, before chilling and curdling. The result is tart and tangy with a touch of sweetness.

2345 Semi-soft cashew ‘goaty style’ vegan cheese If anyone could be trusted to make good vegan cheese, it would surely be an Italian cheesemaker with a surname that sings of the dairy. Mirko Parmigiani developed his range of nut-based cheeses in Crystal Palace while on a mission to please his lactose intolerant son.

The soft, ‘goaty style’ version gets its creaminess from the addition of organic coconut milk.

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Chocolate truffles Hayleigh Bazelya makes her spectacular truffles in Wimbledon, and while the chocolate itself comes from further afield, it is no less traceable, sourced from Ghanaian farms that are part of the Cocoa Horizons project, which helps build self-sustaining farming communities, improve the livelihoods of cocoa farmers, and protect children and the environment.

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IN PRAISE OF CASCABEL CHILLIES FROM SPICE MOUNTAIN Words: Mark Riddaway Image: Viel Richardson

There are people—many, many people; mostly male, but by no means all—who treat the chilli as they would a dragon to be slain, an army to be vanquished, a world to be conquered. They pile it high then march to war, grimly working through the pain and sweat in search of admiration, endorphins and, ultimately, victory: Look on my ghost chilli sauce, ye Mighty, and despair! All my life, they’ve been there, causing me significant bafflement and slight concern that maybe I’m just not manly enough to see the point.

I remember my dad sending his chicken madras back to the kitchen in our local curry house, insisting that it wasn’t anywhere near hot enough, and the entire brigade of cooks coming out to watch him eat their aggressively enhanced version, which he then had no choice but to finish. Later, I lived with a friend whose signature dish was the ‘no-shirter’—a meat dish of indeterminate ethnic origin, which he ate with a towel around his neck and his shirt removed (I once caught a waft of pepper spray at a demonstration that had turned a little moody, and the flavour notes were almost identical). I’ve watched other friends egg each other on to eat food so hot that emergency evacuation has been required—and not of the premises. Every time, 6

I’ve just eaten my medium-spiced lamb karahi or chicken burrito, sighing quietly.

The thing is that while I do like chilli—I use it all the time—I happen to like other flavours too.

These dried cascabel chillies from Spice Mountain are right up my street. Four out of 10 on the heat scale. Smoky and distinctly nutty, with the kind of toasty heat you’d get from sitting close to a glowing fireplace, rather than from fighting a dragon. They’re perfect in a chilli or a gentle salsa or anything with beans in— black turtle beans in particular.

Their job is to play a bit of gentle percussion that keeps everything else ticking along, rather than smashing out a drum solo. And if you’re so inclined, you could, I suppose, buy several bags and eat them all at once with your shirt off. Whatever floats your boat.

A DISH DISSECTED LAKSA

Sue Quinn breaks down the making of a south-east Asian staple Illustration: Ed Smith

The origin of laksa is a bit slippery to pin down, just like the noodles that nourish this fragrant southeast Asian soup.

Some etymologists believe the word laksa originates from an ancient Persian word for noodles, ‘laksha’—a remnant of the centuries old trade links between the Middle East and islands of the Pacific. But the dish is claimed by Malaysia and Singapore as their own and slurped from Thailand to Indonesia and beyond.

Variations are abundant, but united in a single common purpose: to fill the belly and comfort the soul.

A bowl of laksa comes brimming with treasures.

Noodles intertwine with poultry, vegetables, seafood and/or eggs in an aromatic broth. Ingredients and seasonings vary, thanks to the Peranakan people, descendants of early Chinese migrants, who settled throughout the Malay archipelago and inscribed onto the dish the regional signatures of their new homelands.

On the island of Penang, for example, asam laksa resonates with sour Thai flavours like tamarind, while in Singapore the dish is sweet and rich with coconut milk and salty with dried shrimp. In Johor,

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WHAT IT TAKES SAUSAGES Tim Wilson of Ginger Pig on the art of making British sausages Interview: Viel Richardson

meanwhile, laksa is more akin to curry.

This diversity offers a pleasing latitude to chefs.

“I don’t ever use the word authentic; I just say it’s my family recipe,” explains Salina Campbell, founder of Borough Market’s Joli food stall, which serves up hundreds of bowls of vibrant Singapore laksa each week. Salina says fresh ingredients—not dried—are key. “We use fresh turmeric, fresh galangal, and fresh baby shallots—so much more expensive than dried, but worth it—which I cook from fresh. I also grind the chillies myself,” she says. “I use my greatgrandmother’s recipe. She was a food trader at one of the first food markets in Penang.”

The secret to the vibrant flavour of Salina’s laksa?

She attributes it in part to cooking her paste—made with shallots, galangal, lemon grass, tamarind, dried shrimp, star anise, mint, pandan leaves, chilli, candlenuts (for nutty richness) and olive oil (for health, she says)—in a clay pot. “The flavour is better than cooking it in a metal pan.”

No surprise that laksa is among the richest, most delicious and comforting of all the bowl foods.

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Components Paste The all-important paste defines the flavour of laksa. A heady amalgam of dried spices, fresh herbs and other aromatics (which vary according to the region and style of laksa being prepared) are pounded to a paste, traditionally with a pestle and mortar.

Soup or gravy This is made by frying off the paste (essential to avoid the taste of raw spices in the finished dish) and adding liquid—coconut milk and/or chicken or seafood broth.

In some regions, pieces of chicken are cooked in the soup itself.

Noodles These are cooked separately and added when the laksa is assembled: thick rice ribbons, delicate vermicelli, wheaten spaghetti or, if you’re lucky, more than one variety.

Add-ons Appropriate additions are deliciously varied. Prawns, tofu and laksa leaves are commonly included. Other morsels added to the bowl might comprise boiled eggs, shrimp balls, fish cakes, cuttlefish, black pudding, mackerel and mint, topped off with a sprinkling of fried shallots.

Where did you discover a love of making sausages?

When I was a child, I was given The Complete Book of SelfSufficiency by John Seymour, and in there was a basic recipe for pork sausages. That was the first recipe I knew. From then on, something about the idea of making sausages appealed. It’s the simplicity, I think. English sausages are just pork, pork fat, herbs if you want them, and some form of breadcrumb. You need bread to absorb the fat and retain the flavours—if you just put pork into a skin, as soon as you cooked it all, the fat would run out. With the breadcrumbs, you have to get the best quality you can, as is true of every element if you want a great sausage.

How many different types of sausage do you make?

At any one time, I would say we have about 20 sausages available.

Personally I would sell around 12, but if you have people who love making sausages they are not happy to keep making the same recipes all the time. My sausage makers keep dreaming up new ideas. Some can be very strange ideas, like: “It’s Wimbledon, why don’t we make a strawberry based sausage?” I generally let them experiment, and accept that out of every five recipes one will be a blazing success and two will be unmitigated disasters.

What is the key to making good sausages?

You need the right people. I have a guy in there at the moment who just loves making sausages.

Not just the mechanics of it, but thinking of the recipes, trying new things. If you give the finest pork in the world, the best breadcrumbs and wonderful herbs to someone not in love with making sausages, it won’t work. Likewise, you can’t give someone who loves making sausages bad ingredients, because that won’t work either.

What is the starting point?

High quality, fresh meat. Pork arriving on Tuesday should be used up and sold by Saturday. It should arrive with the bone in and be prepared by the butcher.

It is important that all the meat you are going to use is there—you don’t want to mix fresh pork with meat from an older delivery. You cut it into strips and remove the skin, leaving the fat, because good sausages need that fat.

How do you create the flavourings?

This is often the trickiest part of the whole process, because you need consistency. For example, sage in April is very different from sage in December; fresh herbs are very different from dried herbs. After coming up with a recipe, the real skill lies in scaling the recipe up. It is not simply a case of using more of everything, because ingredients behave differently in large volumes, so the proportions may have to change to get the same flavour profile. It takes experience and skill to get it right.

How do you go about combining it all?

My way of making sausages is dropping the unseasoned meat through a mincer to get a nice course texture. Then you mix in the herb blends, add the breadcrumbs, and then run it through the mincer again on a lighter setting. This combines everything thoroughly without the texture becoming too fine.

What happens next?

The sausage meat is now ready for the casings. I tend to use English hog skins, and for small sausages like chipolatas I use lambs’ intestines.

Does the amount of filling you pack into a sausage matter?

It definitely does. I want a sausage that is well packed. You have to get this just right, though, because if you overstuff the skins they burst when you are making the links. A well-packed sausage cooks more evenly, looks much more appetising and tastes better.

Personally, I have no issue with sausages bursting while cooking.

What is the best recipe you’ve come up with?

A few year ago I created what I called the ‘winter sausage’: belly of pork, bread rusk, garlic, juniper berries and grated orange rind. It is lovely with mash on a winter’s day.

I still do make them, but only very occasionally and only in winter—this is definitely not a summer sausage.

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Top to bottom: classic mild kimchi from Eaten Alive; smoky pink kraut from Eaten Alive; chilli and lime achar from Temptings

DRESS TO IMPRESS Ed Smith on the Market ingredients that, with minimum effort and maximum effect, can embellish a finished dish. This time: pickles Image: Regula Ysewijn

Britain has long been a nation of pickles and picklers: of plum or apple chutney, of piccalilli and onion relish, of Opies walnuts and the ever dependable Branston. Moreover, through the 2010s we were repeatedly told that lacto-fermentation is now A Thing here, which surely means that for some it actually is? (well, at least in the keenest of foodie and lifestyle circles).

A hit of tart and sour with our food is well established, then. Yet I’d wager a crock of sour cabbage that the vast majority of Brits harness barely 50 per cent of a pickle’s potential, because we tend to deploy ours only in the context of a cold meal. Pickles go on the table when there’s a ploughman’s-style spread, they’re spooned next to pork pies and slices of ham, and they’re a key part of the best cheese sandwiches. But hot British food? Other than Lancashire hotpot with pickled cabbage, I can hardly think of an example.

Which is in stark contrast to many other countries, where pickled or fermented vegetables are key condiments—or even ingredients—in their cuisine, whether the dish is served hot or cold.

In German and eastern European cooking, finely shredded then fermented cabbage (sauerkraut) is everpresent. It might be warmed with onions and apples and served next to wurst or kielbasa, but is frequently even more integral.

Look, for example, at the Polish dish bigos, which is a hearty and inherently warming hunter’s stew involving slow-cooked meats (venison, pork or boar) and smoked sausage—but mostly it’s braised sauerkraut. We should also admire dumplings such as Polish pierogi and Siberian pelmeni, whose fillings might include a smattering of sour cabbage alongside ground pork or mushrooms. More decadently, friend of the Market Alissa Timoshkina notes in her book 8

Pork belly grain bowl with kimchi and roast kalettes Serves 4

This dish takes some very British ingredients—rare breed pork, Lincolnshire-grown kalettes from Ted’s Veg, pearl barley and cover crop lentils—but moves beyond a classic broth or stew treatment to something a little more exotic, thanks to the white cabbage kimchi from Eaten Alive. When kalettes are out of season, use purple sprouting broccoli, normal broccoli or kale instead, though the cooking times will differ.

— 4 cloves of garlic, peeled — 1 onion, quartered — Thumb size piece of ginger, sliced — 1 carrot, peeled and cut into 4 — Handful of other aromatics if you have them: thyme, parsley stalks, leek or fennel trim — 1kg rare breed pork belly (ribless), cut into 4 2-3cm thick strips (ask the butcher to do this) — 200g pearl barley — 100g lentils — 500g kalettes — 2 tbsp olive oil or cold-pressed rapeseed oil — 1 jar of white kimchi (or other ferment) — Put the garlic, onion, ginger, carrot and any other aromatics you have into a large saucepan or casserole. Place the pork belly strips on top and cover with cold water, with a couple of centimetres clearance from pork to surface (probably 1.5-2 litres). Bring almost to the boil, then simmer very,

Salt & Time: Recipes from a Russian Kitchen, that a classic winter dish in her homeland would be goose or duck stuffed with braised sauerkraut and slow-cooked.

No doubt such dishes evolved because fermentation was essential to ensure vegetables were available all year round.

But in our age of refrigeration and rapid freight travel, they appeal (to me at least) because of the marriage of sour with savoury; it’s a combination that ensures a plate of food will be layered and stimulating from the first bite to the last, vital if food is to be about joy as well as fuel.

It has been suggested that central and eastern Europe’s fermenting culture stems from Asia, via the Mongol empire.

Certainly by opening our tastebuds to places even further east, we can learn more about the potential of matching sour

foods to warm savoury ones.

In the southern part of the Asian continent, Indian pickles (achar) provide a vivid and enlivening counterpoint to rich and spiced foods. On a Saturday, you can do no better than visit Mrs Sandhu’s Temptings stall at the Market and try and buy her pickles and chutneys. They are a perfect match, obviously, for spiced dishes, but I think they make plainer meals fly too: a simple lamb chop, fillet of white fish, poached chicken, pretty much any vegetable that can be roasted or creamed. On that note, see also the burst of flavour that hot food trader Mei Mei’s acar brings to a Malaysian poached chicken rice dish.

This brings me to the point of the piece, which is that while ‘authenticity’ is an appealing concept, there is also room, I think, for the fusion of ideas, techniques and flavours, purely on the basis that it can result in great tasting food. One very

Pickles Eaten Alive Temptings

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very gently, with lid just ajar, for around 90 mins until the pork is succulent and wobbly. Discard the vegetables.

— Wash the pearl barley and lentils, then place into a separate saucepan. Add most of the pork stock, leaving the pork belly sitting in just a few ladles’ worth, and cook at a gentle simmer for 30-40 mins, until both barley and pulse are plump and tender.

— After 15-20 mins, heat the oven to 220C. Wash the kalettes and trim any particularly woody bases. Transfer to a baking tray or roasting tin big enough to hold them in one layer, drizzle the oil over the top, toss and then spread them out. Place in the middle of the oven and roast for 12-15 mins, shuffling the tin after 8 mins or so. Their frilly edges should be turning golden and crisp, but not so brown that they’re dry. Remove and season generously with flaky salt.

— Strain the barley and lentils using a colander or sieve held over the pork, so that the hot stock heats the meat a little.

— Serve by dividing the barley and lentils between four pasta or noodle bowls. Add the kalettes, pork belly and a big quantity of kimchi or sauerkraut, then add a couple of ladles of the pork and barley stock to each bowl —it’s neither a broth nor a gravy, but a happy place in between.

simple way of doing that would be to take ferments and pickles and use them, in the spirit of the global cuisines they derive from, to enliven British dishes and cooked ingredients. And you don’t need to do the pickling and fermenting yourself; superb sour condiments can be found around the Market.

Your first stop should be at the stall of London-based fermentation company Eaten Alive. Their kimchis suit Koreanstyle dishes of course—kimchi fried rice, seafood stews—and the pink smoked sauerkraut matches a German sausage marvellously. But beyond the obvious, try using them to add oomph to meat and two veg meals (bavette or onglet and chips, for example), whenever you have a fried egg or omelette, or (in particular) see how their incredible layered flavours quickly enhance broths and grain dishes, such as in the pork belly and grains recipe right here.

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A VIEW FROM THE STALLS Ten insights into life at Borough Market from Phil Juma of Juma Kitchen Image: Adrian Pope

1. There is a definite mix in my family, with Iraqi, English and Irish in my background.

Food was always a big part of growing up. I was always passionate about it, but definitely from the perspective of eating rather than making. I was not sat on my grandmother’s knee, soaking in her culinary knowledge.

2. The food that was cooked by my father, aunties and rest of the family was nowhere to be found outside our homes. I worked in the Square Mile before doing this, and when I took leftover dolma and biryani to work, my workmates loved it. I knew that the cuisine was incredible, but to get that kind of recognition from people who were so new to it was exciting. At the time, London was going through a street food explosion and while I was out there enjoying the food, the thought that Iraqi food must have a place here was always at the back of my mind. I decided to do something about it and hosted my first supper club in 2012.

3. It was my father, who was born in Mosul, northern Iraq, who taught me to cook Iraqi food.

He gave me the family recipes for dolma, stuffed onions, stuffed vine leaves and stuffed vegetables.

When I tried them and they turned out really well, something just clicked. From that point on, I drove my dad mad pestering him for knowledge and recipes. He is a real “Stay out of the kitchen when I’m cooking!” cook and can have a short fuse, so having me constantly in the kitchen asking questions drove him crazy. But I needed to know. He came to realise that he could either give in or keep on shouting. He taught me the spice blends and the cooking techniques—the baharat blend I use is unique to our family.

from Iraq and they instantly know what you are talking about. The challenge is to introduce this to people who do not know about the cuisine. I get a lot of joy and pride from explaining the dishes to new people.

6. If you say to an Iraqi someone is Maslawi, they will say, “Okay, they know how to cook.” Mosul is known within the country as a place where the food is excellent, using very delicate and intricate spicing.

7. If I were to describe the flavours of this cuisine, I would say: “Think Turkish or Persian but with Indian spices.” We use things like black pepper, cloves, rose, cardamom, cinnamon, cumin, coriander.

These are familiar spices, but it is the way they are combined and the techniques we use that give the food its unique style.

8. Juma is quite meat-heavy, as is the custom with this food. Beef is predominant and lamb is very popular, but on the stall we have innovation as well as tradition, so I designed a mushroom kubba. It has turned out to be wonderful—even the meat lovers are asking for it sometimes.

9. Making kubba is a labour of love. Everything is handmade. There is a lot of craftsmanship and technique involved, and I want to honour that.

I tell all my staff about the amount of respect we must give to each one as we make them.

10. Getting the phone call to say that I had been accepted here in the Borough Market Kitchen was wonderful. I’ll never forget that moment. It was very emotional. It is a validation not just of me but of Iraq as a country. It is a beautiful thing to watch people walk away after trying our food and to see, in a very real sense, the beginnings of a connection with the Iraqi people.

4. Kubba is a real staple of Maslawi food—the food of my father’s region. It can best be described as like a filled dumpling or a croquette. They come in a variety of tastes and textures and can be boiled, fried or baked.

5. I chose kubba to be a theme of my first venture because it is such an undeniably Iraqi food.

You mention kubba to someone

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HEAVEN’S SCENT

hazelnut pavlova, my favourite childhood dessert, and one whose recipe I pilfered for my first book, A Lot On Her Plate. The lychees’ sweet, juicy flesh works beautifully chopped and folded through clouds of whipped cream, sweetened slightly with lychee syrup, the crunchy meringue flecked with nuggets of toasty roasted hazelnuts. This is definitely a dessert to make with fresh lychees from the Market, and grab a passionfruit while you’re at it—the sharpness of the seeds spilling over the top of the creamy pavlova is a delight. I also love Nigel Slater’s refreshing, pleasingly simple lychee sorbet, which involves making a sugar syrup with fresh lychees and then mixing it with lime juice. In a similar vein, try suspending fresh lychees in a loose, delicate jelly made with lychee syrup infused with kaffir lime leaves and lime zest—beautiful with some whipped double cream or thick, creamy coconut yoghurt.

Rosie Birkett on how the translucent, alluringly perfumed flesh of the lychee brings sunshine to the dark days of winter Image: Regula Ysewijn

In the midst of British winter, there’s something especially cheering about a haul of fresh lychees. At this time of year, you can find them at markets and greengrocers across the country, snuggling together in their boxes, their rusty, pangolin-esque shells blushing out at you invitingly.

Lychees, which, like ackee, are members of the soapberry family, are native to the Guangdong and Fujian provinces of southern China, where records of their cultivation date back more than 2100 years. China is still the largest producer of the fruit, closely followed by India, southeast Asia and South Africa, which is where most of the UK’s lychees come from at this time of year. Their translucent, alluringly perfumed flesh won the hearts of the wealthy and powerful, and they became a delicacy of the Chinese imperial court, a favourite fruit of emperors and their concubines. Such was the demand for lychees that the court arranged for them to be couriered by horse at great expense from the orchards of the south to the palace in Xi’an, Shaanxi province, covering hundreds of miles in rapid time before the fruit spoiled.

It’s not hard to understand why.

There’s an exquisite pleasure in cracking into the thin shell with a thumbnail, peeling it back to reveal the wantonly plump, fragrant flesh within. I was so excited to find a box of particularly good looking specimens at the greengrocer on a recent winter’s stroll that I unapologetically made my way through a bag of them as I walked home, their sweet, sticky juices spilling down my chin as I squinted in the low winter sunshine, dreaming of warmer climes. Spitting out the pips might not have been particularly ladylike, but who cares when you’re enjoying a tropical treat in the cold?

The lychee’s short season and tendency to spoil quickly meant that in China they were often preserved, either unpeeled in a salted brine, or dried and soaked in alcohol—like a very early version of the lychee martini, my drink of choice around 2011. This cocktail’s potent charms once helped me overcome a dodgy date and an agonising case of plantar fasciitis, induced after a long day standing at my street food stall at Brixton market in the wrong shoes (Topshop brogues). Thanks to several lychee martinis, I managed to make it through the date, which dragged on far too long, and the lonesome walk home. It’s fair to say that the only good chemistry on that date happened in my martini glass. Around this same time I took to making lychee martinis for dinners in my shared flat, pleased by the relative ease of shaking together lychee syrup, vodka and a dash of white vermouth and freezing lychees to make chic ice cubes, utterly sure I was impressing my guests with my sophistication. Were the lychees from a tin? Absolutely. Did it matter one jot?

Absolutely not. Were we squiffy on them? Always.

In fact, while I might now coo over the superior aroma, delicacy and texture of fresh lychees in their shells, my lifelong appreciation for this fair fruit was built on the tinned lychees of my childhood. I’ll always remember the Halloween party where my mum filled up a large glass bowl with terrifying but delicious floating ‘eyeballs’ made from lychees, into which she’d pushed seedless black grapes. To this day, I have a habit of stuffing grapes inside lychees if the two happen to appear together in a bowl of fruit salad.

When it wasn’t Halloween, lychees meant one thing—mum’s outrageously delicious lychee and

Lychees Elsey & Bent Paul Wheeler Fresh Supplies Stark’s Fruiterers Turnips

There’s no doubt that the fruit lends itself best to dessert, but I do also quite like the idea of combining its sweetness and juiciness with rich, fatty meat, such as slow cooked, spiced lamb shoulder or duck. Ken Hom and Gordon Ramsay offer different takes on a Thai curry of duck with lychees, both making a spiced sauce with coconut milk, shrimp paste, soy sauce and various other aromatics. It sounds delicious, though I can see how some of the nuances of the fruit’s flavour could get slightly lost in the cooking.

The lychee’s balance of sweetness and sourness make it particularly well suited to a salad, be it sweet or savoury. As well as making for a very special fruit salad with papaya, passionfruit and pineapple, they add an interesting, juicy dimension to a hot green mango salad with chilli and king prawns or marinated tofu.

There’s also an intriguing traditional Thai recipe called ‘sohm choon’— a dish of lychees in a fragrant syrup infused with pandan, jasmine flowers and bitter orange peel, topped with julienned green mango and young ginger, with toasted peanuts, fried shallots, shaved ice and sometimes roasted coconut. The heritage of this dish nods to the culinary influence of Chinese immigrants who came to Thailand in the 18th century, before lychees were cultivated there. They began importing earthenware pots of brined lychees, which were often in varying states of fermentation when they arrived. The Thai chefs who worked in the noble kitchens used their skill to offset the sourness of the fermented lychees by soaking them in aromatic syrups flavoured with bitter orange peels, ginger and shallots.

And speaking of fermented lychees, there’s a rather good sounding fermented lychee soda on the internet that uses a ginger bug starter to kickstart lactic fermentation. Perhaps this could replace the lychee martini in my affections—if mixed with a good slug of vodka of course…

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AGAINST THE GRAIN Most of the flour produced in the UK is currently made through the industrial milling of modern, high-yielding, pesticide-hungry wheat varieties. But some of Borough Market’s traders and chefs are convinced that a nascent revival of the heritage grains that predominated before the 1950s could change our view of this most elemental of ingredients Words: Clare Finney Images: Orlando Gili, Maureen M Evans

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Alex Hely-Hutchinson and Henrietta Inman, Stoney Street by 26 Grains

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I

It’s been a long time since I was excited about flour. In fact, scrap that—it’s a long time since I even thought about flour, my baking skills being largely nonexistent. It’s just there in the cupboard—or at least I assume it to be there, until the moment I do actually need it, whereupon I discover it’s either run out or it’s self-raising when I need plain. The last time I was in any way excited about flour was in the pantry of my grandma’s hotel kitchen where as a (very easily entertained) child I loved opening up catering-sized sacks of the stuff, unleashing a puff of white smoke, then digging, patting and stirring the contents with a large metal spoon.

This Proustian moment has been triggered by the four large tubs of flour I can see sitting below the counter of Borough Market’s newest restaurant, Stoney Street by 26 Grains, where I’m interviewing head chef Henrietta Inman. I’ve changed in the intervening years—so, thankfully, have food hygiene standards—and this time the flour’s lure lies not in its potential as a plaything, but as a nutritious food. The flour is also different: rough, nutty, tawny mixtures of einkorn, spelt and Øland, the ‘heritage’ grains that pre-date the development of the high-yielding wheat varieties which dominate today’s markets, and a world away from the silky, smooth refined white wheat my grandma used in her cakes and pastries.

“They called it the Green Revolution— though that was the opposite of what it was,” Henrietta explains in the calm of the restaurant, post-lunch. The development in the 1950s and sixties of this hybridised wheat and the modern farming methods necessary to sustain it saw the distribution of seeds, synthetic fertilisers and pesticides to farmers all around the world. “It created a monoculture. It was good in that it fed people, but it was bad because it wasn’t feeding the soil.” In fact, these new methods depleted the soil of nutrients, and the surrounding land of biodiversity. “Then there was the Chorleywood baking process, which sped up breadmaking by adding fats and yeast and chemicals, and was adopted by industrial bakeries, and white flour and white bread just became the norm.”

Much has been written about the malignancies of modern wheat: its degrading impact on the environment and on human health, white flour being essentially nutritionally barren (and industrially produced wholemeal flour being little better). The subject could— does—fill books – but the main issues are with how wheat is grown and processed.

Giovanni Carleschi, who sells handmade dried pasta at Borough Market at his stall Pastificio Carleschi, speaks passionately of the difference between steel roll-milled and stoneground flour: the former being an “industrial process, during which the grain is separated and only the starchy endosperm part is ground”, while the latter “mills the entire grain, including the germ and bran, and these contain proteins, minerals, vitamins and fibres.”

“There are many nutrients in a grain of wheat, but only when it’s been milled in its

Pasta from Pastificio Carleschi

They called it the Green Revolution— though that was the opposite of what it was. It created a monoculture. It was good in that it fed people, but it was bad because it wasn’t feeding the soil Henrietta Inman, Stoney Street by 26 Grains

entirety—which is why my pasta is a different colour,” he continues. “It’s made with stoneground flour.” Rough to the touch and light tan in colour, Giovanni’s pasta, like Stoney Street’s flours, will never be white or smooth.

Giovanni uses organic grain, from British growers who have jumped aboard the heritage wheat wagon because “if you are growing organically, it’s a much better choice,” he says. Spelt, emmer and einkorn— all species of the group of heritage wheats known collectively as ‘farro’—have a husk around the grain which makes them more resistant to insects and diseases. Ironically this husk, which needs to be removed before grinding, is one of the main reasons the wheat was marginalised in favour of its high yield descendant. Removing it in a thresher was considered more of a faff than meeting modern wheat’s endless and expensive demands for pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilisers and genetic tinkering.

“It is essentially the agricultural equivalent of a needy child,” the head baker and pastry chef of acclaimed bakery and restaurant Flor, Anna Higham, puts it bluntly. From the basement the heady scents of her team’s heritage grain-based bread and pastries

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Anna Higham, Flor Left: Giovanni Carleschi, Pastificio Carleschi

tbc

wafts toward us: an aromatic endorsement of her case against modern wheat. “It’s developed to be reliant on nitrogen, which then needs all these chemicals, which requires money—whereas heritage wheats have naturally developed systems: they’re tall enough to suppress weeds, they have resilience to disease, and they have a deep root structure.” Only a month or so prior to my visit, she had visited one of the organic farms in Shropshire from which she sources some of Flor’s grain, and found the farms surrounding it completely flooded. “The soil had eroded in the rain, and the fields were so waterlogged, the farmers couldn’t harvest.”

The farm she was visiting, however, was spared—not by the grace of God, but by the grassy borders which surrounded its fields, and the strong soil structure endowed by the deep, sturdy roots of heritage wheat.

Like Henrietta, Anna’s training and experience as a pastry chef was, up until recently, highly classical. The techniques were French, the recipes French, and the flour a blank canvas for other ingredients.

Henrietta’s conversion came when she moved back to her childhood home in Suffolk, discovered locally-grown

stoneground varieties of grain, and started to experiment; Anna’s epiphany took place while working a stage in a bakery called Saloon in Washington DC this time last year. “Their bread was made from 100 per cent heritage grain, sourced from nearby and freshly milled on site. I remember opening a bag of flour and thinking: this smells delicious. That was a big turning point.”

Though like any chef worth her salt she had long prized sourcing and seasonality in fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy, her stint at Saloon was “the first time I extended that way of thinking to flour”. Anna returned to Flor full of enthusiasm, relayed her experience to executive chef James Lowe, and immediately started to look at ways to showcase grain as that leading lady as opposed to the stage.

The merits of this quickly become obvious. “If you think about the way restaurants sell meat now, it’s normal to expect organic and free range, and for the server to know which farm it’s from. People are prepared to pay for that. It has value,” Anna continues. Our understanding of that value allows farmers who work hard to produce premium livestock the opportunity to profit from their high standards, rather

We need to change the way we talk about flour. It’s always been talked of as a commodity, but we need to value it as an ingredient.

We need farmers to produce a more sustainable product, and the way to do that is to pay them properly Anna Higham, Flor

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CEREAL WINNERS FIVE PRODUCTS MADE WITH TRADITIONAL GRAINS

Creten dakos Oliveology Cretan dakos—barley rusks—are bread made from barley flour and baked twice.

Being filling, nutritious and long-lasting, dakos were perfect for an island of sailors, shepherds and plenty of others who hadn’t the time, space or money to bake fresh bread regularly. These barley rusks lend themselves to “soups, snacks, stews—basically anywhere you’d use bread or a crostini,” says Oliveology’s chef Lida Papamatthaiaki. There’s even a salad dedicated to them, confusingly also called dakos, in which the rusks are topped with tomatoes, feta and capers. The dakos at Oliveology are baked using olive wood, in the traditional Agios Nektarios bakery in Chania.

100 per cent spelt bread Olivier’s Bakery Olivier Favrel’s 100 per cent spelt bread is a seeded tin loaf, and packed with flavour, says his sister Lucy. Although sourdough is too hard to make with 100 per cent spelt, “this flour has so much taste, it is like sourdough,” she enthuses, “and the seeds on top get toasted in the oven to make the loaf even more nutty.” For all its flavour, this bread is extraordinarily versatile: jams, cheeses, meats all pair perfectly, or just turn it into toast and slather it with butter.

cuisine characterised by strong meats and cheeses and smoked fish. “I like the shape and size, and the fact it doesn’t go stale for at least a week,” says Jurate at Karaway Bakery, here the rye loaves are made with a natural rye starter rather than added yeast.

100 per cent rye sourdough Bread Ahead “There are two types of customer for this,” says Matt Jones, founder of Bread Ahead: “The people who choose this for health reasons, because it’s easily digestible, and those who choose it for flavour.” The latter “love the bitter sweetness of it, and the way it pairs with fish and cheese.” Like all of Bread Ahead’s sourdoughs, fermenting, proving and baking this bread is a two-day process—“but it’s worth it.” Matt’s preferred serving suggestion is toasted, slathered in butter and topped with chopped shallot and anchovies: “a classic French thing”. Bread Ahead hopes to expand its range of heritage grains this year.

100 per cent Russian rye bread Karaway Bakery Made to a Russian-Lithuanian recipe, this rye loaf is typical of the breads of that part of the world: hard on the outside, soft and moist on the inside, the treacly, tangy combination of rye and caraway lends itself perfectly to a

Spelt risotto Turnips Turnips started out making smoothies, pizzas and mushroom risotto to use up produce that “doesn’t look as nice or has gone over slightly, that’s still good to eat but we can’t sell on the stall or to restaurants,” says Juno, who works at the stall. In this risotto, made with spelt from Sharpham Park down in Somerset, a rich, hearty range of Turnip’s sought-after wild mushrooms are cooked slowly in a large pan, before being added to the spelt risotto: a recipe devised by new executive chef Pip Sandrey.

than joining a race to the bottom; her dream—and that of Henrietta, Giovanni and those like them—is that the same benefits be reaped by arable farmers choosing to sow heritage grains. “We need to change the way we talk about flour. It’s always been talked of as a commodity, but we need to value it as an ingredient. We need farmers to produce a more sustainable, premium product, and the way to do that is to pay them properly for it.” That these grains will have a better taste, are better for us, and will benefit the environment are all happy offshoots of the virtuous circle that is more farmers growing heritage grains and being rewarded for their efforts with hard-earned wages rather than subsidies.

The means, however, have taken longer to emerge. On his phone, Giovanni shows me a photo of some disastrous pasta made last week: fibrous and bitty, caught up in the extruder. He’s been refining his techniques for seven years, and even now can end up with a straight-to-compost number on occasion. “Unlike industrially produced flour, stoneground wheat is a living product, so there are many variables affecting the outcome. But we’re always experimenting.

We’re always improving.” This spirit of

experimentation also imbues Flor’s bakery, where Anna spends hours figuring out the proportions for her ‘bakers loaf’—a dailychanging bread which showcases a different grain each day—as well as her sourdough loaves and pastries: the combination of heritage grains and fermentation proving a potent force that can be as hard to predict as it is to understand.

“You have to work out how far you can push the fermentation. Some can go really far, some you think will go, then the loaf collapses because the wheats are a bit delicate. It’s very much about knowing the personality of the grain really,” she says, in easily the strangest and sweetest description of a cereal I’ve heard so far. Over at Stoney Street, Henrietta has just made a pastry case with seeds and rye flour, and is testing it out on 26 Grains founder Alex Hely-Hutchinson and me.

“You should taste how much more depth it has going on in comparison to regular pastry tarts,” she observes. It is perfect—better than perfect, in fact, because it’s got a nutty, buttery flavour as well as an interesting texture—but this success has not come easy, she continues. “It is very difficult to get the balance right. One of the reasons we tend to do puff and shortcrust pastry here is that they

are slightly more forgiving of different types of grain than French patisserie, which does demand fine white flour.”

Nonetheless, Henrietta’s proficiency with heritage grains is impressive. “She makes it look effortless,” says Alex, of dishes like apple, quince and pear hazelnut frangipane tart, einkorn soda bread and Øland wheat milk crèpes with compote. Henrietta is in turn impressed by Anna at Flor combining fermentation and heritage wheat. “The bread we make here is soda bread, so unlike Anna we’re not kneading and proving. That’s very challenging,” she says admiringly.

Meanwhile, Anna, Henrietta and Alex alike are impressed by Giovanni and his pasta, which proves a fine way of preserving what is otherwise a perishable substance (freshly stoneground flour being susceptible to bacteria in a way the arid, industrially produced stuff never could be) and which has a flavour no one raised on 60p bags of penne could imagine plain, dried pasta having.

The word ‘flavour’ comes back again and again. These grain gurus are thrilled to be supporting local farmers and grains native to northern Europe. They’re evangelical about the environmental gains of their grains—Alex and Henrietta in particular taking care to source from farmers adopting mixed farming methods— and about resisting vast, damaging monocultures. Yet it is the taste they bring to the table which our discussions keep returning to, and which, after all, is what wins their customers round. “We’re looking to our grains to bring loads of flavours to dishes,” concludes Alex simply. “You can have a great croissant, with beautiful lamination, but you never taste the dough; the dough tastes of butter,” says Anna. “Whereas in our croissants at Flor, you do taste the dough.

You taste the grain.”

I ask—only half joking—if grains will one day have tasting notes, like a wine list, and she smiles. “Funny you should say that: I attended a grain tasting in September in the south-west, where millers and bakers got together and made tin loaves out of all the different types of grain a farmer was growing.

We tasted them all side by side, for him to figure out what people liked, and what he should grow more of, but it’s really hard to have tasting notes in bread. We don’t have the vocabulary like we do in beer and wine.”

This is probably, she explains, because back in the day the wheat that grew locally was all you knew. “You farmed what grew, and that’s what ‘wheat’ tasted like. There was no language of flavour.” That doesn’t mean it’s not possible, says Henrietta, who feels confident that by cooking the flour into a piece of pastry, she could do tasting notes for all the different grains, written—with the names of their farmers—on the blackboard in their dining room.

For millennia, the concept of wheat has been replete with stories and symbolism: most ancient civilisations had at least one grain god, and that’s before we get to bread and all its religious significance. As I leave Stoney Street and take one last lingering look at those boxes of heritage grains, I feel another wave of nostalgia, but this time tinged with relief and sadness: sadness that we ever lost sight of the wonder in a grain of wheat; and relief that we may be rediscovering it again.

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TUCK OF THE IRISH Chef and Slow Food director Paula McIntyre shows off some of the beautiful but underappreciated produce of Northern Ireland Images: Kim Lightbody We’re certainly not short of incredible ingredients in Northern Ireland, but they’re not appreciated nearly as much as they should be. The Armagh bramley apple is as good a cooking apple as you’ll find anywhere.

The carrots that grow in our reclaimed sandy soil are, I think, the best I’ve ever had, as sweet as honey. Pollan, a delicious freshwater whitefish, is unique to this island, but we export 95 per cent of the catch. We have beautiful leeks, so versatile and tasty, but despite them being among the few local vegetables you can get at this time of year, they’re criminally underused. If you went into Northern Ireland’s restaurants right now, a lot of them would probably have asparagus on the menu, flown in from who knows where, but not leeks—and that really makes me cross. We should be celebrating them.

Dulse, a type of seaweed, has long been derided as peasant food. But it’s such a great flavour enhancer and it’s so good for you. I like to make a flavoured butter for potatoes—cook some spuds and just toss them up in dulse butter, it seasons them beautifully. Dulse is also great with seafood, including razor clams, another local gem.

They were the first shellfish I ever saw: I remember going to the beach to collect shells and picking up all these razor clams, not knowing they were alive. It was a bit of a shock on the way home when they started moving. We didn’t eat them—my mum made me throw them out.

There is a sense, though, that the tide is turning. At last, some of our chefs, producers and retailers have started falling in love with these foods again. It helps that over the past decade or so, we’ve seen an influx of tourism

into Northern Ireland, a place that very few people used to visit, for obvious reasons.

When the tourists started arriving, they didn’t want to be eating our chilli con carne, they wanted things of the place. And there’s nothing quite so of the place as razor clams and dulse, both of which are completely wild—you can’t cultivate either.

In Italy, a country whose culinary culture I absolutely love, they embrace their traditional peasant cuisine: ‘cucina povera’, they call it. What I would really like is for us to embrace a cucina povera of our own: one that demonstrates a respect for native ingredients and an unfussy approach to showing them off. But while I love that Italian reverence for culinary heritage, I don’t adopt their stance of “This is the way we make this, and there is no other way”. I think it’s by borrowing things from elsewhere that culinary culture expands and develops. Sometimes the most exciting food in the world comes from places where lots of cultures sit side by side—it’s this that makes London one of the most thrilling food cities in the world. Meeting people from other cultures and other generations to see what they’re doing is what keeps me alive as a chef. That’s why in these recipes you will find some ingredients that don’t have an Irish heritage but that happen to work beautifully: the incredible Slow Food Presidia passata from Bianca Mora (at any time, I tend to have about 12 bottles of this tucked away in my cupboard), the black chickpeas from De Calabria. In one of the dishes, I’ve combined dulse and razor clams—those two defining ingredients of Northern Ireland—but I’ve also thrown in some guanciale. Just because I love guanciale.

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Razor clams with dulse, guanciale and cider

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Beef shin and barley broth with treacle farls and whipped spring onion butter

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Razor clams with dulse, guanciale and cider Serves 4 (as a starter)

Beef shin and barley broth with treacle farls and whipped spring onion butter Serves 4

— 12 razor clams — 4 rashers of guanciale — 1 shallot, finely chopped — 150ml dry cider — 2 tbsp double cream — 75g butter — 1 tbsp fresh dulse seaweed, chopped — Micro celery, to garnish

I was brought up on this broth. You’d be playing in the snow in a skirt and some wee socks, and there was probably a leak in your shoe, and you’d come home with hypothermia. This soup probably saved my life—it was like a culinary defibrillator.

— Remove the meat from the razor clams— it should come away with the gentlest of prompting—and trim them so you only have the white flesh. Keep the shells for the presentation of the finished dish.

— Cook the guanciale in a dry frying pan until crisp. Drain on kitchen paper then chop. Add the shallot to the hot rendered fat. Cook until golden, then add the cider. Bring to the boil and add the clams. Cover with a lid and cook for 1 min.

— Remove the clam meat and chop. Boil the remaining juices to reduce by half, then add the cream. Whisk in the butter a little at a time, until incorporated. Check the seasoning, then mix in the clam meat.

— Spoon the clam meat into the shells. Dot the guanciale and dulse on top and garnish with micro celery.

Alternative Nori or wakame could be used here instead of the dulse. Pancetta would be a good substitute for the guanciale.

For the broth: — 750g bone-in shin of beef — 2 medium onions, peeled and chopped — 100g pearl barley, soaked for 2 hours — 2 sticks of celery, chopped (plus a handful of the dark leaves) — 1 carrot, peeled and chopped — 1 small leek, washed and chopped — A handful of chopped parsley For the whipped butter and buttermilk: — 500ml double cream — Whole milk — 1 tsp cider vinegar — 4 spring onions, finely chopped For the farls: — 225g plain flour — 1½ tsp baking soda — ½ tsp salt — 100g wholemeal flour — 25g porridge oats — 1 tbsp treacle — 325ml buttermilk — Heat 1 tbsp olive oil in a saucepan until smoking hot. Season the beef shin with sea salt and seal on both sides for 2 mins. Add the onions and cover with cold water. Bring to a simmer and cook for 30 mins. Drain the barley and add to the pan. Simmer for 45 mins, then add the chopped celery sticks and carrot. Cook for 30 mins, then add the leek and cook for 20 mins.

— Remove the beef. Let it rest for 10 mins, then shred with a fork and add it back to the broth.

Add more water if required. Finely chop the leaves of the celery and add to the broth with the parsley. Check the seasoning.

— To make the butter, place the cream in a bowl, add a pinch of salt and whisk with an electric beater until the mixture forms thick yellow curd—as you do so, try to cover the bowl with a tea towel, as it splashes a bit when the butter separates from the liquid (the buttermilk). When the mixture has formed a good clump of butter, lift it from the buttermilk and place in a sieve over a bowl.

— Poor the buttermilk into a measuring jug, together with any drained liquid from the butter, then add enough whole milk to bring it up to 325ml. Add the cider vinegar and stir well.

— Place the drained butter in a bowl and whisk until pale. Add the spring onions and whisk for a further 1 min.

— To make the farls, mix the plain flour, baking soda, salt, wholemeal flour and oats in a bowl.

Make a well in the centre. Whisk the treacle with the buttermilk and pour into the well. Mix to a soft dough.

— Turn onto a floured surface and knead gently into a ball. Flatten to a 2cm-thick round and cut into four farls. Leave for 10 mins. Heat a heavy-based frying pan over a medium heat.

Add the farls to the pan with a gap between them. Cook for 4 mins each side then stack on their sides to cook through. Cool on a wire rack for a few minutes. Split the farls in half, spread over the butter and serve alongside the broth.

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Crusted mutton chops with braised black chickpeas and parsley root Serves 4

Crispy polenta and creamed leeks with purple sprouting broccoli and Corleggy Serves 4

Baked Irish whiskey custard, honeycomb crumble wafers and candied apple Serves 6

I’m so glad mutton’s having a resurgence— when an animal gets older, it develops more flavour, and sometimes you want a bit of oomph from your meat, a bit of personality.

I love this combination of tender meat and crunchy crumbs, with the lovely yeasty tang of sourdough and the nuttiness of brown butter.

I love polenta in every shape or form. It’s one of my favourite ingredients. What most people don’t realise is that polenta— cornmeal—has a particular place in Irish culinary history. During the potato famine, we were sent shipments of cornmeal by Native Americans in solidarity for our plight.

We have a farl called an ‘Indian farl’ and a bread called ‘Indian bread’, both of which stem from that gift. My granny can remember eating cornmeal gruel. I tried to get her to like polenta, but her memories of cornmeal were so bad that she wouldn’t try it.

For the crumble topping: — 50g plain flour — 40g butter, room temperature — 50g caster sugar

— For the braised black chickpeas: — 75g pancetta, diced — 1 onion, finely chopped — 1 stick of celery, diced — 1 clove of garlic, minced — 250g black chickpeas, soaked overnight — 250ml passata — 750ml vegetable stock — 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar For the parsley root: — 4 medium parsley roots — A few sprigs of thyme — 1 lemon — 50g smoked almonds, chopped — A handful of lovage, chopped — 50ml olive oil For the mutton chops: — 2 medium onions — 1 sprig of rosemary — 8 mutton loin chops — 75g butter, chopped — 75g sourdough breadcrumbs — 2 tbsp finely chopped fresh rosemary — 1 tbsp finely chopped parsley — Heat the oven to 180C. Cook the pancetta in a large casserole pot until crisp and golden.

Remove from the pot and set aside. Add 1 tbsp olive oil to the rendered fat with the onion, celery and garlic. Cook gently until soft. Drain the chickpeas and add to the pot with the passata and stock. Cover with a lid and place in the oven. Bake for 2 hours or until the chickpeas are soft. Add the balsamic and check the seasoning.

— Peel the parsley roots. Cut into 3cm pieces and place in a pan of water. Season the water with salt and add the thyme sprigs. To prevent the roots from discolouring, halve the lemon and squeeze out the juice from one of the halfs into the pan, then add the lemon shell.

Cook until the parsley root is tender—about 20 mins. Drain and dry on kitchen paper.

— Squeeze the remaining lemon juice into a bowl and add the almonds, lovage and oil.

Season to taste and toss in the parsley root.

— Now prepare the chops. Peel and cut the onions into quarters. Place on a sheet of foil and drizzle over 2 tbsp olive oil. Season with salt and add the rosemary sprig. Wrap in the foil and place in the oven at 180C for about 30 mins, or until soft.

Blend to a puree, then check the seasoning.

— Season the chops with salt and place in a frying pan, fat-side down. Cook gently until the fat is crisp and has rendered. Seal the chops off and then transfer to a roasting tin. Cook for about 10 mins at 180C, then remove and leave to rest.

— Heat the butter in a pan until the foam starts to subside and the mixture turns brown and smells nutty. Add the crumbs and finely chopped rosemary and cook until crispy. Add the parsley.

— When the chops are rested, spread some of the onion puree onto the top and press on the crumbs. Serve with the parsley root and chickpeas.

— For the polenta and creamed leeks: — 250g polenta — 100g grated parmesan — 25g butter — 1 large leek, split in half, washed and chopped — 25ml double cream — A handful of chopped parsley For the purple sprouting broccoli: — 1kg purple sprouting broccoli, woody bottoms trimmed — 75ml olive oil — 2 shallots, peeled and finely sliced — 1 garlic clove, minced — 25ml balsamic vinegar — ½ tsp Dijon mustard — 50g Corleggy cheese — Bring 1 litre of water to the boil. Add ½ tsp salt, then slowly add the polenta, whisking all the time. Lower the heat and cook for about 40 mins or until smooth and coming away from the side of the pan. Mix in the parmesan well.

— Heat the butter in a pan and add the leek.

Season with salt and cook until soft. Add the cream and cook for a further 2 mins. Add the parsley and check the seasoning.

— Brush a 1Ib loaf tin with oil. Place half the polenta in the bottom of the loaf tin. Add the leeks and then top with the remaining polenta.

Smooth off the top and chill for 2 hours. Remove from the tin. Cut into eight slices. Heat 2 tbsp olive oil in a non-stick pan until very hot and add half the polenta slices. Cook until golden and crisp on all sides. Keep warm in the oven while you repeat with the remaining polenta.

— Blanch the broccoli in boiling salted water for 3 mins then drain well and toss in 2 tbsp of the olive oil. Heat a grill pan until smoking hot and add the broccoli. Cook for 1 min, add the shallots, turn the broccoli and cook for 1 min more. Whisk the garlic, vinegar and mustard together. Whisk in the rest of the oil and then check the seasoning. Place the broccoli on a platter and spoon over the dressing. Grate the cheese and scatter on top. Serve alongside the polenta slices.

Alternative A good parmesan could be used instead of the Corleggy, as could Bermondsey Hard Pressed from Kappacassein. When purple sprouting broccoli is out of season, cavalo nero would work—just blanch for a minute, dry, toss in oil and grill. Grilled treviso or radicchio would also work.

For the honeycomb: — 100g caster sugar — 1 tbsp liquid glucose — 1 tbsp honey — 1 dessertspoon baking soda For the baked whiskey custard: — 500ml double cream — 50g butter — 4 tbsp Irish whiskey — 1 tsp vanilla extract — 9 egg yolks — 75g caster sugar For the cider candied apples: — 150g caster sugar — 200ml semi-sweet cider — 2 large cooking apples, peeled, cored and chopped Equipment: — 6 x 250ml metal moulds — First, butter the moulds. Heat the oven to 180C and line a baking tray with parchment paper.

— Rub the flour, butter and sugar to coarse crumbs. Spoon onto the tray and bake for 15 mins, until golden and crisp. When cool, crumble with your fingers to separate.

— For the honeycomb, place the sugar, glucose, honey and 2 tbsp water in a pan and cook to a golden amber liquid. Add the baking soda— carefully, as it will fizz up—and pour onto the parchment paper. Allow to cool completely.

Either whizz to a powder in a food processor or bash in a bag with a rolling pin.

— Take a sheet of parchment and sprinkle half of the honeycomb powder evenly over the top. Cook in the preheated oven for 2 mins then sprinkle half of the crumble on top. Return to the oven for 1 min, or until it bubbles up slightly. Remove from the oven and cool. Break into shards. Repeat with the remaining honeycomb and crumble.

— Now make the custard. Set the oven to 150C. Boil the cream for 1 min. Add the butter, whiskey and vanilla and remove from the heat. Whisk the egg yolks with the sugar, pour over the hot cream mixture and stir. Pour into the moulds and bake for about 12-15 mins or until just set on top but still a bit wobbly. Cool and then chill. Remove from the moulds.

— For the candied apples, sprinkle the sugar in a large frying pan over a high heat. Cook to a golden liquid caramel. Add the cider and cook to a thick syrup. Add the apples and cook for about 5 mins or until soft.

— To assemble, place the custard on a plate, top with some of the apple and place a shard of the honeycomb on top. Serve immediately.

Alternative I’ve made this using calvados or pear brandy instead of the whiskey. Pear works well in place of the apple, but with perry instead of cider.

Forced rhubarb, gently poached in a sugar syrup with cardamom and orange juice is also good.

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Crusted mutton chops with braised black chickpeas and parsley root

Crispy polenta and creamed leeks with purple sprouting broccoli and Corleggy

Baked Irish whiskey custard, honeycomb crumble wafers and candied apple

Razor clams Furness Fish Markets Shellseekers Fish & Game Mutton chops Northfield Farm Black chickpeas De Calabria Passata Bianca Mora Polenta From Field and Flower

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YOUNG CHEFS SHOULD

LEARN ABOUT

THE SCIENCE

OF COOKING.

BUT THEY ALSO NEED TO LEARN TO COOK.

Pioneering food science writer Harold McGee on curious cooks, horrifying novelties and why there are no easy solutions to the problems caused by food production Interview: Ellie Costigan Portrait: Anna Warnow 25 Market Life 48 / boroughmarket.org.uk

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H

Harold McGee is a highly influential American author who writes mainly about the science of food and cooking.

His seminal book, On Food and Cooking—a hefty, encyclopaedic compendium of “the science and lore of the kitchen” for the everyday cook—was first published in 1984. A significantly expanded and revised version, which was published in 2004, influenced a move towards a form of high end cookery grounded in food science, championed by the likes of Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller. Harold wrote a column, A Curious Cook, in the New York Times for five years.

He is now a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

When did you first develop a fascination with the science of food?

It was in the mid-1970s. At the time I was a graduate student in literature, writing a dissertation on John Keats and also teaching at the university, but it was clear already then that a teaching career was probably not going to materialise. I think it’s perpetually the case that more people want to teach literature than there are classes to teach. I tried for a few years to get a full time job and didn’t, so began to cast around for other possibilities. I had been, as an undergraduate, a science major and my mentors in literature said, “You know, that really distinguishes you, you ought to do something with that,” and so I began to think about it.

I had a friend who was a biochemist who, for fun, taught a one-off afternoon course on the thermodynamics of crystal formation, as applied to fudge making. It was a huge success. Everyone was able to eat their experiments and something about that resonated with me. I had other friends who enjoyed getting together to cook and eat food and drink inexpensive wine. At one of those dinners, a friend of mine had his wine glass knocked over. The tablecloth was white and someone said, “Throw salt on the stain. That’ll take care of it.” I thought, that’s interesting, I wonder why that is? The same friend who had his wine glass knocked over asked the group why it is that human beings have a limited tolerance for beans, why after a certain point they begin to give you… uncomfortable feelings. I thought, I wonder if there’s an answer to that question? I went to the science and agriculture section of the library and that’s where I discovered food science.

I spent hours there. I found the answer to his question, and that’s what gave me the idea that writing about the science of food and cooking—not for professionals, but for people who are just interested—would be a project that I could do that no one else seemed to have done at the time. That’s what sparked On Food and Cooking.

Did you do much practical testing in the kitchen while writing the book?

I felt obliged to test out everything that I could test. Food science has for its whole history been involved mainly with industry, not with cooking, so many of the books ignored a lot of issues that are important to cooks. I had to extrapolate from the food science literature and try to interpret it to make sense of what happens in the kitchen. For those areas especially, I would spend time in the kitchen, making sure that I wasn’t leading myself astray. But that’s the part I really enjoy: there’s a piece to this story that’s missing, where am I going to find it? This, of course, was long before the internet, so it would also mean burrowing in old journals and following bibliographic leads to try to come up with the missing link—I love that stuff. The actual setting it down and making it clear, that’s not so much fun.

The second edition of On Food and Cooking, published 20 years later, is markedly different.

Why is that?

The first edition came out in 1984 and it really was written just for enthusiasts. Then, after a decade or so of it being

on the market, it was clear it was being used in culinary schools, because nothing quite like it existed—there were plenty of textbooks on food science for food scientists, but nothing for cooks. When I saw that, I began to think about the second edition in a much more formal and structured way: what is it that a professional in the kitchen should know about his or her materials and methods? And so the second edition came out very differently.

Had the appetite for this sort of book changed?

It was received completely differently. In the late seventies, early eighties, when I was writing On Food and Cooking the first time around, food was not a ‘thing’ in the States. There were no specialty coffee shops, olive oil was unknown in the American kitchen. We had our barbecue and wonderful American traditions and people enjoyed eating food, but it was not a very outward-looking approach. Then, somehow or other—I think it was a mixture of getting far enough away from the end of the second world war and, certainly in England, the end of rationing, as well as the arrival of jet aeroplanes, travel, tourism and television—all these things combined to make people see that food was way more interesting than they’d realised. Young Americans became interested in having restaurants. But they were not content to do a 10-year apprenticeship, starting with prepping potatoes. In the 1990s, I started to hear from young American cooks who had ambitions and would ask difficult questions of the mainly European-trained chefs, who would tell them, “Don’t ask questions, just do it,” or would make things up for the sake of coming up with an answer. So these young chefs would write to me with their questions. They were really the ones—these young, ambitious, impatient American chefs—who helped give my book some visibility.

You developed relationships with some very highprofile chefs. How did that come about?

Heston Blumenthal read the book and his mind was blown by the fact that classic French techniques such

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Harold McGee at the Oxford Symposium on Food & Cookery

I think what’s happened in food has happened with human culture in general: we’ve been going full steam ahead and not noticing what we’re leaving in our wake.

Now, we’re finally waking up to the consequences

as ‘sealing in the juices’ of meat, for example, were not grounded in truth. The first contact I had from him was a long email about cooking beans. He had tried something 10 different ways but was uncertain about the results.

It was clear from that initial email that his mind was firing on all cylinders, all the time.

There are two ways to get to a very high level of proficiency in cooking. One is just doing it a zillion times and in the course of doing that, you get so much practical experience. You do it a little bit differently each time, get a different result, and register what changed. You begin to understand things, but on a very different level to if you understand what something is made from and why it behaves a certain way in a particular circumstance.

Once you have that understanding, you can then predict how an ingredient might behave if you treat it in a way you haven’t tried before, which might give you an interesting result.

This scientific approach to cooking was, as a movement, labelled ‘molecular gastronomy’.

You have publicly taken umbrage with that label.

What is it that you believe is misleading?

Cooks have always embraced many different approaches depending on the materials and resources available to them and what they were trying to do: feed people, impress people, amuse people. There have always been those elements, cross-culturally. While I was writing these books, there was this avant-garde movement in Spain which all of a sudden, in the space of a decade, burst into prominence on the international scene. The leader of that, Ferran Adrià, would come up with new menus constantly, always innovating, never wanting to repeat himself. A lot of his dishes at that time looked like science experiments and he talked openly about the use of food science. He was using ingredients and tools that had previously been used in industry but would have been heretical in a high-end kitchen. Food science of a certain kind, in the service of innovation,

became important in the restaurant. But to do that well, you really have to understand things in tremendous detail. The thing that Heston, Ferran, Thomas Keller and I were concerned about—and were compelled to make a public statement about—was that while young chefs should learn about the science of cooking, they also need to learn to cook. The term ‘molecular gastronomy’ became associated with an experimental approach to cooking, but missed the point that good cooking in restaurants requires a depth of practical knowledge and know-how. That foundation is really important, because if you only focus on novelty—which became the exciting, cool thing to do—and you don’t have that foundation, you’re going to make a lot of novelties that are horrific and give the whole field a bad name. That sort of approach doesn’t make a real contribution to the culture of the kitchen.

Industrialisation and globalisation have triggered enormous changes to the way we produce and consume food. What has been the impact of that?

I think what’s happened in food has happened with human culture in general: we’ve been going full steam ahead and not noticing what we’re leaving in our wake.

Now, we’re finally waking up to the consequences. For example, we can’t dismiss concerns about the influence of animal agriculture on the climate by saying people are just trying to scare us. This is a real issue and one that needs to be addressed.

The founder of Impossible Foods, which makes plantbased meat substitutes, has said that his mission was to put animal agriculture out of business totally. But I love meat and I respect the farmers in Scotland and France and many other places where animal agriculture has been an integral part of human culture, forever, so when I hear him say that, it bothers me. It seems to be so cold and unwilling to confront historical reality. On the other hand, I think what he’s doing is great because it gives us one more option to deal with a huge problem. We’re going to need dozens of approaches to begin to address these issues. It’s important that smart people, whether they work in Silicon Valley or anywhere else, are thinking about it and doing what they can. People should start out by recognising that they don’t have The Answer—capital T, capital A—and that the more people who are seriously engaged with the issue, the better.

Do you think the way that we now produce food has had an impact on food quality as well as the environment?

I think it’s difficult to generalise, because the effects are different on different things in different places. Rachel Laudan is a historian who happens to write about food.

She wrote a book called Cuisine and Empire and she’s the closest thing we have to a voice of reason on these issues. Her book is about the history of cooking, from the earliest days to now, and the point she makes is that before industrialisation, food production meant a terrifically hard life for anyone involved. I think she makes a very compelling case that the industrialisation of food has been a boon for people who have lived in the last century or two, for that very reason—that it frees them from spending hours a day over a grindstone making flour. It’s very easy to say that the quality of food has declined, that the variety that we can enjoy has declined and that there are all these negatives, but there’s a huge counterargument about the quality of life, which has improved.

What will the future of food look like?

I’m not a prophet, so I really don’t know—except to say that it’s probably going to become yet more diverse and yet more self-conscious, and those are mostly good things. What strikes me is the fact that there are now dozens of people who were previously never involved in food who are looking at these problems and seeing what they can do to make a difference.

They’re applying their skills to food, which I think is unprecedented. And that’s exciting.

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EDIBLE HISTORIES

OLIVE OIL

From a Roman hill to a Victorian pharmacy, via chaste boys and drowned mice, Mark Riddaway tells the story of olive oil

Looming over the Testaccio district of Rome, a traditionally working class neighbourhood that today hosts some of the city’s best restaurants, is what looks, from a distance, like a fairly mundane hill. This, though, is no ordinary landform. Known as Monte Testaccio, it is contrived not from earth and stones but from the remains of more than 50 million amphorae—vast ceramic vessels that between them once contained around 6 billion litres of olive oil.

Completed around 250AD but dating back several centuries, this extraordinary hill’s construction was a systematic operation typical of the Roman state—the oil-filled amphorae brought from around the empire to the nearby Horrea Galbae warehouses to be emptied of their unctuous cargo, before being smashed into manageable pieces and layered up in a series of terraces. Most were globular 70-litre vessels of a style unique to Hispania Baetica, the Roman province in what is now Andalusia, southern Spain; millions more have been traced back to Byzacena (roughly Tunisia) and Tripolitania (Libya).

Monte Testaccio attests to both Rome’s bottomless appetite for olive oil and the huge quantities that were by then being produced on all sides of the Mediterranean.

Olives had been cultivated in that corner of the world for thousands of years. The region around Syria and Palestine is often cited as the most likely starting point,

probably in the Early Bronze Age, although it is quite possible that other centres of cultivation developed independently around the same time. Cultivation led to olive fruits becoming ever more laden with oil, which would find its way into lamps, cosmetics and medicines as well as cooking pots, making it a hugely valuable resource. Through settlement and trade, the Phoenicians and later the Greeks became the main engines of the olive tree’s gradual diffusion—between them they helped establish its presence in north Africa, the Aegean islands, the Iberian Peninsula, Italy and Provence.

In The Natural History (77AD), Pliny the Elder described 15 varieties of olive from around the empire, distinguishing between those that were good for the table and those that were good for oil. His suggestion of where the best oils came from was fairly predictable: “In the production of this blessing … Italy holds the highest rank among all countries.” Like many of his countrymen, he praised the oil of Venafro, in the central Italian region of Molise, for its qualities as both a beauty product and a food: “It is our unguents which have brought this oil into such great esteem, the peculiar odour of it adapting itself so well to the full development of their qualities; at the same time its delicate flavour equally enlists the palate in its behalf.” Marcus Terentius Varro, writing a century or so

earlier, included the Venafro’s oil in a list of his homeland’s great foods: “What spelt shall I compare to the Campanian, what wheat to the Apulian, what wine to the Falernian, what oil to the Venafran?”

Oil from Liburnia, now part of Croatia, was also highly valued, as can be inferred from an ancient piece of dupery. In the Apicius cookbook, compiled in the 1st century AD, a suggestion was made for how inferior Spanish oil could be passed off as the primo Liburnian stuff through the addition of powdered elecampane, Cyprian rush and green laurel. “Sift this in and add finely ground salt and stir industriously for three days or more. Then allow to settle. Everybody will take this for Liburnian oil.”

As is true today, the method of production was understood by the ancients to be fundamental to the quality of the oil, the concept of extra virgin olive oil being one with very deep roots. “The first oil of all, produced from the raw olive before it has begun to ripen, is considered preferable to all the others in flavour,” Pliny explained.

“In this kind, too, the first droppings of the press are the most esteemed, diminishing gradually in goodness and value … The riper the berry, the more unctuous the juice, and the less agreeable the taste.” In 301AD, a set of price controls issued by Emperor Diocletian defined three classes of olive oil: ‘floris’, derived from the word for flower, but used

to mean something in its perfect state; ‘sequentis’—the second pressing; and ‘cibari’, meaning ordinary or common. The first of these was just over three times the price of the cheap stuff— a similar differential as could be expected today between a single-estate extra virgin and a non-virgin blend.

According to The Geoponica, a collection of agricultural lore produced in 10th century Constantinople but compiled from much older Greek and Roman sources, other more surprising factors could also impact on quality. “The olive being pure, ought to have them that gather it chaste; and they ought to swear that they come from their own wife’s, not from another’s bed, for it will thus produce a great abundance of fruit for the time to come,” it suggested. “They say also, that in Anarzarbe of Cilicia [southern Anatolia], chaste boys cultivate the olive, and for this reason, that the olive is there very fruitful.” The same tract offered the suggestion that if a mouse, or any other animal, has fallen into your olive oil, the “unsavoury smell” from its corpse can be removed with the addition of coriander seed, dried fenugreek or red hot coals of burnt olive wood.

Britain is an island with lots of mice but no olives. Here, plenty of evidence has been found that the Romans shipped olive oil to those far-flung corners of the

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77

250

1694

1954

Pliny describes 15 varieties of olive grown around the Roman empire

The English edition of Pharmacopoeia Bateana includes olive oil as a common medicine

empire where no local supply could be found. Thousands of oil amphorae, mostly Spanish but some north African, have been found in major cities such as London and Colchester and in the heavily militarised area

by Hadrian’s wall. Wherever Roman troops were stationed, olive oil followed. Freighting all those heavy jars to this cold, distant realm must have been an expensive and logistically challenging business, but while legionaries became inured to the grim weather and the savage locals, they clearly couldn’t cope without their favourite form of fat.

After the Romans left Britain, those regular shipments stopped arriving, but small amounts of olive oil continued to make their way into the kitchens of the very wealthy. The Forme of Cury (c.1390), a collection of recipes from the household of Richard II, included a handful of mentions of “oyle de olyf”. The instructions for ‘porrey chapeleyn’—battered onion rings—required that “an hundred onyons” be halved, cooked in olive oil and almond milk, separated into rings, lightly battered, then fried in more olive oil. Another recipe suggested olive oil as an alternative to beef broth as a medium in which to cook apples—an option it specified as being for “fysch dayes”.

Fish days were the many occasions, including Fridays, saints’ days and Lent, on which meat and other luxuries were banned by the Catholic church.

Construction of Rome’s Monte Testaccio hill of oil amphorae is completed

1588

The Spanish Armada sets off for England with thousands of gallons of oil on board

Elizabeth David’s Italian Food introduces British readers to the charms of olive oil

On such days, the liberal use of olive oil was perfectly acceptable, while butter and other animal fats were outlawed unless permission had been paid for. In those northern European regions that lacked olive oil, it was a source of some resentment that the clergy, the seat of whose power lay in the heart of olive country, were not just upholding this law but profiting from it. As Martin Luther put it: “At Rome they themselves laugh at the fasts, making us foreigners eat the oil with which they would not grease their shoes, and afterwards selling us liberty to eat butter.”

After England became a protestant country and could happily gorge on butter every day of the week, the next putative invaders of these islands took similar preparatory measures to those of the Romans a millennium-and-a-half earlier.

When the Spanish Armada set off in 1588, its ships were provisioned with 11,398 arrobas of olive oil (around 40,000 gallons)—over a gallon per soldier, designed to last through a six-month stint on this buttery isle. King Philip II may have misjudged completely the speed of his enemy’s fleet and the malevolence of our storms, but he fully understood the British ambivalence towards any fat that didn’t come from an animal.

That ambivalence, though, only fully extended to olive oil’s use in the kitchen. For centuries, producers of olive oil found Britain to be a useful dumping

ground for the worst dregs of their output, convinced as we were that this golden unguent was a medicine, not a food.

Pharmacies abounded with the stuff. In Pharmacopoeia Bateana, a collection of the prescriptions of George Bate, court physician to Charles I, Oliver Cromwell and Charles II, olive oil was used in dozens of medicines. One remedy, good against “pustles of the lips, and cancers of the breasts”, instructed the chemist to take live toads and “boil them in oil-olive for one hour, or till they break; then strain and keep it for use”. A similar recipe using live frogs could, it was stated, be used against “redness of the face” as well as gangrene and cancer (but William Salmon, who edited the 1694 edition of the book, noted in his commentary that toad-infused olive oil was a much more effective medicine).

We did eat some, but not much. As Mrs Beeton explained in 1861: “The oil extracted from olives, called olive oil, or salad oil, is, with the continentals, in continual request, more dishes being prepared with than without it, we should imagine.” The British, on the other hand, occasionally drizzled it onto lettuce in the hope they might fart less: “With us, it is principally used in mixing a salad, and when thus employed, it tends to prevent fermentation, and is an antidote against flatulency.”

Any olive oil that could be bought in Britain would have been vile.

“Really good pure olive oil is

almost unknown outside the boundaries of Italy,” explained Nathaniel Newnham Davis in The Gourmet’s Guide to Europe (1903). “An Italian gentleman never eats salad when travelling in foreign countries, for his palate, used to the finest oils, revolts against the liquid fit only for the lubrication of machinery he so often is offered in Germany, England, and France.”

In the middle of the 20th century, Elizabeth David’s evangelism for olive oil had a profound influence on some British people—at least on the kind of people who bought Elizabeth David cookbooks— but access remained an issue.

Writing in 1963, she noted that good Italian oil could then be bought “in Soho, but almost nowhere else” and that “anything marked simply ‘salad oil’ is best left alone”. Pharmacies remained the principal stockists. Simon Hopkinson recalled in his cookbook Roast Chicken and Other Stories (1994): “The first time I made mayonnaise, the olive oil I used came from Boots the chemist. It was a small bottle, pretty tasteless and quite clearly not meant for culinary purposes.”

It wasn’t until the 1990s that those barriers finally began to break, torn down by foreign holidays, cholesterol scares and the sight of Jamie Oliver glugging litres of the stuff onto everything he made. In 1991, the UK got through 6,800 tonnes of olive oil; by 2018 we were pouring and drizzling just short of 10 times that amount (although, to put that in perspective, Italy, with a slightly smaller population, consistently gets through well over half a million tonnes a year).

Britain’s attitude to olive oil may have changed, but what is perhaps most remarkable about this extraordinary product is how much has stayed exactly the same.

Today, the main producers and consumers of olive oil are those countries that have been making and eating it for thousands of years, and the process by which high quality olive oil is made—for example, the cold-pressed extra virgin sold at Borough by the likes of Oliveology, The Olive Oil Company and Brindisa—differs only minutely from that described in length by the likes of Pliny the Elder. Spain, from where those vast amphorae were shipped, is by a country mile the world’s biggest producer, followed by Italy and Greece, with Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco close behind. A few olive oil producers have established themselves in the USA, Australia, Argentina, Chile and Uruguay—but barely enough to construct even a small hill with their cast-off vessels.

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HEADY DAYS Kathy Slack on how to get the best from cauliflower Images: Kathy Slack I was delighted when cauliflower was taken up by the fashionable set. Usually I cringe at these fads, dismissing them as the frivolous whims of a fickle food world. But I could not be cynical when it came to the rise of the cauliflower.

Because finally it was being installed upon the pedestal where it ought to have stood all along.

For such recognition, I could even overlook the ludicrous cauliflower ‘steak’ moment.

This celebrity is richly deserved for a number of reasons, but chiefly because cauliflowers are frustratingly difficult to grow.

They dislike too much wind, too much cold, too much heat, too much water, two much drought.

In fact, in anything other than the perfect British summer, they will brown and wither without the most skilful care. Such skill had gone unappreciated for too long and cauliflower farmers the land over have been unsung heroes. Until now.

When it comes to eating, it is hard to go wrong with a cauliflower if you roast it. Drizzle florets with olive oil and sprinkle with salt, then bake for 30-40 mins in a hot oven and you have opened the door to a wealth of options: top with parmesan in the final moments of cooking; mix with pine nuts, raisins, parsley and crispy breadcrumbs for a warm salad; blanket in a curry sauce and top with almonds; or, as here, turn into gnocchi. And always keep the leaves—steamed and buttered, they are a dish in their own right.

Cauliflower gnocchi with sage butter and hazelnuts Serves 4

— 1kg cauliflower — 2 tbsp olive oil — 200g ‘00’ pasta flour — 1 egg — 125g salted butter — A small bunch of sage leaves — 4 tbsp roasted hazelnuts, chopped — Parmesan, to serve — Heat the oven to 190C. Break the cauliflower into small florets, roughly 2-3cm and set aside the prettier inner leaves. Toss the florets in the olive oil and a pinch of salt then arrange on a large baking tray, leaving plenty of space around each floret.

Roast for 30 mins. Give the pan a shake and turn the florets over then roast for a further 10 mins until well cooked and charred at the edges. They will seem overcooked, but fear not— it’s important there’s not much water left in the cauliflower.

Transfer to a food processor and blitz until smooth.

— Mix the cauliflower with the egg, flour and a pinch of salt and knead into a soft dough. Be warned, it’s a messy job and you will think it too wet to roll, but persevere. Once combined, flour your hands and a work surface and roll out thick ropes of dough around 1cm in diameter. The key to avoiding a sticky mess here is to be very gentle and avoid squashing the dough, so think light, delicate thoughts. Cut the ropes into rectangular pillows and dust with a little more flour to prevent sticking. You can roll the pillows over a fork with your thumb to create the classic gnocchi divots too if you want the traditional look.

— Melt the butter in a large frying pan. Pour off most of it into a jug, leaving 2 tbsp in the pan on a low heat.

— Bring a large pan of water to a rolling boil, salt it heavily and add the gnocchi. Once the gnocchi rise to the top (around 2 mins) leave them to boil for another minute then fish them out with a slotted spoon and into the butter pan. Keep the water.

— Turn the heat up under the frying pan and fry the gnocchi for 3-4 mins, turning occasionally until golden brown—you may need to do this in batches. Add the sage leaves, the hazelnuts and the rest of the butter and cook for 1 min.

— Meanwhile, pop the cauliflower leaves in the gnocchi water for 1 min, then drain.

— Divide the gnocchi and cauliflower leaves between four warmed plates and serve with a sprinkle of parmesan.

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BLUE SKY DRINKING MATCHING SAUCES Jane Parkinson on choosing a wine to work with an Italian-style sauce

The rock star component of a dish can often be the sauce, and that’s especially true when it comes to wine matching. Dictating the sweetness, sourness, potency and weight of the final recipe, a sauce shamelessly flirts with wine from that first greedy mouthful to the satisfying last.

All those Italian-inspired sauces that are designed to be slathered over pasta or gnocchi are all extremely wine friendly, as you might expect.

Even one of the richest around, a creamy blue cheese sauce, you might think is a potential minefield because blue cheese is best with sweet wine—but there’s plenty of choice. The double whammy of creaminess and saltiness just needs a weighty wine to match all that richness. White wine lovers should give Piedmont’s specialty, roero arneis, a go, but make sure it’s from a warm vintage so it’s nice and juicy. Fans of red wine should opt for Valpolicella, which is succulent in cherry fruit and has that degree of sweetness working in its favour.

A vibrant tomato sauce with herbs can also sing happily alongside a white or red. Fresh tomatoes are a well-known winner with sauvignon blanc, so if you want to match well and keep it local, northeast Italy has some gems to look out, including friulano (AKA sauvignon vert), pinot grigio (a serious one) and pinot bianco. Even the region of Alto Adige in the foothills of the Alps has stunning fresh white wines that would love a zingy tomato sauce, kerner being one great example.

A deeply flavoured ragu of beef or wild boar is more red wine territory, naturally. This is where Italy’s plethora of charming reds comes up trumps, a good chianti (classico being reliably the best quality) is hard to beat but langhe nebbiolo is another great choice. A bit like a declassified barolo and made with the same grape, nebbiolo, it has a beautiful perfume and a lovely earthiness to match the sauce’s meaty depth of flavour.

The simplicity of a mellow butter sauce pepped up with sage and finished with parmesan would love any rich white, chardonnay being the most obvious.

There are some lovely examples of chardonnay in Lombardy, franciacorta included. Yes, that’s a sparkling wine, but a richer/older style would truly be a divine match. Or head much further south, in the direction of Naples, where falanghina, the local white grape of Campania, basks in the warm sun and volcanic soils surrounding Mount Vesuvius to give its wine an extra sense of spice. The waxy coating of its berries is also key to this grape’s character and translates into greater weight for a white wine, giving it the wherewithal to glide seamlessly alongside the tang of sage and the smoothness of butter.

Falanghina, Cantine Federiciane Monteleone, Campania, Italy 2017 £18, Padella (drink in) This is a falanghina that seems made to work with Kathy’s gnocchi dish. Juicy, fresh and reminiscent of oranges to start, which the cauliflower will love, the mellow richness of tropical fruit on the palate has a real affinity with the buttery sauce, while the twist of grapefruit towards the end really enhances the sage and bite of parmesan.

31 Market Life 48 / boroughmarket.org.uk

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PRIZE CROSSWORD Win a signed copy of The Borough Market Cookbook Complete our crossword for a chance to win a copy of The Borough Market Cookbook, signed by the bestselling book’s author, Ed Smith.

The highlighted squares in the crossword spell out a food-related prize word. Clue: Flavourful fruit of a Mexican orchid (7) For a chance to win, send an email to marketlife@boroughmarket.org.uk providing your full name and the prize word. Closing date for entries is 18th March.

Congratulations to the winner of the previous issue’s crossword prize, Petronella Hutchinson.

The answer: iceberg.

Terms & conditions If you want to receive the Borough Market newsletter, please indicate ‘OPT IN’, on your entry. The solution will be available at the web address below from 18th March 2020.

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CREDITS Market Life is a Borough Market publication All material copyright to Borough Market (Southwark) boroughmarket.org.uk

Across 1 Asian condiment (4,7) 9 Espresso, diluted (9) 10 Implement for water-borne propulsion (3) 11 Carb-heavy dishes between antipasti and secondi (5) 13 Antagonists (7) 14 Recommence (6) 15 Staple food of the Americas, also known as cassava (6) 18 Young soy beans, cooked in their pods (7) 20 French meat (5) 21 Unfortunate biblical patriarch (3) 22 Limb (9) 24 Asian condiment (6,5)

Published by LSC Publishing 13.2.1 The Leather Market Weston Street London SE1 3ER lscpublishing.com Editor: Mark Riddaway mark@lscpublishing.com Deputy editor: Viel Richardson viel@lscpublishing.com Deputy editor: Clare Finney clare@lscpublishing.com Managing editor: Ellie Costigan ellie@lscpublishing.com Design: Em-Project Limited mike@em-project.com Editorial consultant: Claire Ford Contributors: Rosie Birkett, Jane Parkinson, Sue Quinn, Kathy Slack, Ed Smith Photographers: Tom Bradley, Maureen M Evans, Orlando Gili, Adrian Pope, Regula Ysewijn, Anna Warnow

Down 2 Fury (3) 3 Snobbery (7) 4 Pictures (6) 5 Wear away (5) 6 Native (9) 7 Broad, flat, sauce-coated component of 11 across (11) 8 9 across, with an added kick (5,6) 12 Tout suite (9) 16 Balkan country (7) 17 Piquant spice, fruity vegetable (6) 19 Modify (5) 23 Curve (3)

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Market Life Issue 49 Out in early April, featuring sweet baking recipes from Juliet Sear, a guest column from Angela Clutton, and Sue Quinn exploring the elements of a massaman curry

Awards Guild of Food Writers Awards 2019 Winner, Food Magazine or Section of the Year Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2019 Winner, Food Writer of the Year, Clare Finney Independent Publisher Awards 2019 Winner, Customer Magazine of the Year Guild of Food Writers Awards 2018 Winner, Food Magazine or Section of the Year Independent Publisher Awards 2017 Winner, Customer Magazine of the Year Highly Commended, Editor of the Year, Mark Riddaway Independent Publisher Awards 2016 Winner, Customer Magazine of the Year Independent Publisher Awards 2013 Winner Writer of the Year, Clare Finney Highly commended, Designer of the Year, Mike Turner

Environment In line with Borough Market’s sustainability policies, Market Life is printed by Pureprint Group to the highest environmental standards: ISO 14001. FSC® certified and CarbonNeutral®.

Pureprint is a CarbonNeutral® company.

Manufacturing mill and printer are both registered to the Environmental Management System ISO 14001 and are Forest Stewardship Council® (FSC) chain-of-custody certified.

The paper is Carbon Balanced with World Land Trust, an international conservation charity, which offsets carbon emissions through the purchase and preservation of high conservation value land.

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If you have finished with this magazine, please pass it on to other interested readers or dispose of it in your recycled paper waste. Thank you.

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