Market Life issue 51

Market Life

No. 51

The Borough Market magazine boroughmarket.org.uk

281003 772397 9

ISSN 2397-2815

Recipes and tips from Borough Market: The Knowledge Ed Smith’s guide to the perfect Christmas turkey How Capreolus turned Dorset into a charcuterie hotspot

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KIM LIGHTBODY

Snapshot Taking a load off at Maria’s Market Cafe

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To ensure that a weekly fix of articles, recipes and Borough Market event information lands in your email inbox, sign up to our newsletter: boroughmarket.org.uk/newsletter

Welcome to Market Life

Cover image: Kim Lightbody

Regular opening times Monday – Friday: 10am – 5pm Saturday: 8am – 5pm Sunday: 1 0am – 3pm Christmas exceptions On Sunday 4, 11 & 18 December, the Market will stay open until 4pm.

No. 51

pp16 Fishmonger’s pie with fish crackling pp17 Loaf-baked whole cheese with girolles pp27 The Christmas turkey

The Market will be open: 23 December: 8am – 6pm 24 December: 8am – 3pm 31 December: 8am – 3pm

pp27 Chestnut, sage, apricot & quatre épices stuffing balls

The Market will be closed: 25 – 27 December 1 – 3 January

pp27 Wine-braised chantenay carrots pp28 Brussels sprout gratin with smoked pig cheek & farmhouse cheddar

Borough Market Online goodsixty.co.uk/borough-market

pp28 Cranberrymisu

Borough Market 8 Southwark Street London SE1 1TL

pp28 The perfect cheeseboard

Underground London Bridge Train London Bridge Join the conversation: Twitter @boroughmarket Instagram @boroughmarket facebook.com/boroughmarket Published by LSC Publishing lscpublishing.com Editor: Mark Riddaway mark@lscpublishing.com Design: Em-Project Limited mike@em-project.com Editorial consultant: Claire Ford Contributors: Hatty Cary, Angela Clutton, Ellie Costigan, Clare Finney, Orlando Gili, Kim Lightbody, Kathy Slack, Ed Smith

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First and foremost, Borough Market’s traders are here to sell food – amazing food from every corner of the world, produced in ways that place an unusually strong emphasis on quality and sustainability. But food isn’t the only thing they offer.

They also provide, in abundance and completely free of charge, their knowledge.

While modern retail becomes increasingly remote and impersonal, dominated by digital giants and supermarket self-checkouts, markets provide an echo of a time when shopping was about interaction as well as consumption. It’s almost inconceivable that you could pass through Borough Market without buying a hunk of cheese or a bottle of oil, and it’s absolutely impossible to leave without having a conversation. That exchange may be little more than a friendly smile and a word about the weather, but it could amount to something altogether more enlightening. The traders know so much about food. They work with it every day. Many of them produce it themselves. They know where it comes from, what makes it special and how to get the best from it. Most importantly, they genuinely care, and they’re desperate for other people to care too.

Some people feel intimidated by the idea of shopping at a place where not everything is pre-portioned and extensively labelled, where unfamiliar vegetables, fish and cuts of meat sit side by side with the carrots, salmon and sausages. The warmth and expertise of the traders is what breaks that down. No one will judge you for not knowing how to prepare a whole crab or choose between four different types of rye bread. They’ll just tell you what you need to know.

That’s what Borough Market’s new book, Borough Market: The Knowledge, is all about. Its mission is to use the knowledge of the Market’s traders to demystify some of the ingredients sold here, allowing you to broaden your horizons, try new foods or get more out of the ones you already enjoy.

Its author, Angela Clutton is the perfect conduit for all that knowledge: as the host of Borough Market’s Cookbook Club and presenter of the Borough Talks podcasts, she knows the place inside out. Her brilliant recipes bring together Market ingredients, the traders’ tips and her own abundant skill to create dishes that are both inspiring and accessible.

In this special edition of Market Life, we have some extracts from the book, as well as an in-depth interview with Angela about her journey into food writing and what Borough’s traders have taught her along the way.

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NEWS & EVENTS

IN SEASON

Christmas hampers Borough Market Online is offering a range of hampers packed with Market produce. Visit the website to order.

Christmas video guides Through December, visit Instagram to watch our traders offer Christmas tips on everything from oyster shucking to wine pairing to cheeseboard styling. Cookbook Club Our ever-popular club is back hosting in-person events at the Market. Join now free of charge to stay updated.

Borough Talks Our monthly podcast has hit its groove this year, with some amazing guests. Visit the website to access the archive.

Plan Zheroes The charity that redistributes traders’ surplus food to feed vulnerable people is looking for volunteers. This year saw 8.31 tonnes of food collected from traders, providing 19,785 meals.

Young Marketeers 972 local students took part in our food education programme, organised

by School Food Matters.

Their next Winter Soup Sale will be on 2nd February. Frost Fair Through December and January we’re partnering with Better Bankside to celebrate the historic festivals that took place when the Thames froze over. Look out for public art, offers and events.

Salsify An unassuming winter root vegetable belonging to the dandelion family. Offers a subtly sweet alternative to the parsnip.

Heritage beetroots Combine roasted golden and purple beets with clementine, goat’s cheese and cobnuts for a zingy winter salad.

Sagitta potatoes A floury potato variety that’s the go-to for many UK chip shops thanks to its fluffy texture. Ideal for roasties.

Silverskin onions Diminutively sized alliums, sweet in every sense of the word.

Perfect for pickling or adding whole to a stew.

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On the cover The castelfranco is an absurdly pretty variety of radicchio, known as the ‘tulip of winter’ on account of its seasonality and shape. Its mildly bitter leaves are a beautiful addition to a mixed salad, risotto or pasta dish.

Passion fruit A tropical import that makes a welcome appearance as native fruit harvests dwindle. Look out for yellow Granadilla.

Cedro Also known as citron, a large, knobbly citrus fruit with edible pith. Candy the peel and add it to a homemade panettone.

Turbot A celebratory flat fish with firm, meaty flesh that retains moisture well. Cook simply to allow the flavour to shine.

Sirloin of beef A deeply flavoursome roasting joint, prized for its marbling and thick cap of fat that guarantee tenderness.

Mushroom pâté A n intensely flavoured dinner party essential, whether served as a dip or added to the layers of a beef wellington.

FIVE SWEETS

Medjool dates The Date Sultan Sugared almonds Maggio’s Confectionery Turkish delight Arabica Chocolate candied orange Brindisa Christmas pudding fudge Whirld

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Medjool dates with candied ginger The starting point for Usman – aka ‘the Date Sultan’ – is highquality dates sourced from farms he’s visited personally, to ensure fair wages and good working conditions. Grown in Egypt and stuffed by Usman and his family in east London, the filled dates on the stall are the medjool varietal – big, plump and chewy. Our favourite is filled with candied ginger: sweet, with a spicy kick.

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WHERE TO BUY Mushroom pâté Pâté Moi Arbroath hot smoked salmon Oak & Smoke Stuffed baby squid The Tinned Fish Market Caramelised walnut bread Olivier’s Bakery East London Single Malt Whisky East London Liquor Company Jamaican sorrel jelly Pimento Hill

Roasted cobnuts These pre-shelled and gently roasted Kentish hazelnuts are ready for stuffings, desserts or immediate consumption.

Caramelised walnut bread Rye flour and sticky nuts give this loaf a sweet and sour flavour that pairs beautifully with most cheeses.

Arbroath hot smoked salmon A responsibly sourced side of Scottish salmon, infused with oak and beechwood smoke.

East London Single Malt Whisky This biscuity, London-made spirit is the perfect base for an after-dinner tipple or hot toddy.

Stuffed baby squid Filled with tomato and rice, this tinned Spanish seafood can be served warm as a ready-made canapé.

Jamaican sorrel jelly Also known as hibiscus, sorrel is a Jamaican Christmas staple. Use the jelly to liven up a Boxing Day sandwich.

Chocolate candied orange Brindisa has been working with Paiarrop for 20 years. Based in Valencia, a region known for its oranges, the producers use the locally-grown salustiana varietal – its sweet juice and thin skin making it perfect for candying and coating in dark chocolate.

Segments are gently cooked in sweet syrup until softened, before being dipped in quality 56% cocoa chocolate for the perfect bitter-sweet treat.

Christmas pudding fudge Whirld’s beloved Christmas pudding fudge is back, packed full of nuts, dried fruit and candied peel – with a decent slosh of brandy for good measure. Like everything on the stall, it’s made by hand using real butter and clotted cream, to owner Justine’s mum’s method.

Perfect to nibble on with a coffee after Christmas dinner, if you’ve no room for a helping of the real thing.

2345 Sugared almonds If you’ve been to an Italian wedding, you may have seen the colourful sugared almonds given out as snacks or wedding favours – known in Italy as ‘confetti’. Massimo of Maggio’s Confectionery is bringing that tradition to London. Made with the prized Sicilian ‘mandorla di Avola’, this classic confection is a plump, creamy pizzuta or fascionella almond, encased in a thin, crisp coating of sugar.

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Pomegranate and pistachio Turkish delight Made in London, the jewel-like pomegranate Turkish delights found at Arabica are studded generously with chopped pistachios and dusted with icing sugar. Being locally produced in small batches means they’re as fresh as can be, full-flavoured and just the right side of squidgy.

They’re made with corn starch rather than gelatine, making them halal and vegan to boot.

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THE AWKWARD SQUAD

served with ice cream or creme fraiche.

Alternatively, the softened quince can be used in a frangipane tart or added to cakes. Many of mine are arranged in the base of a polenta cake spiked with saffron for an upside-down cake of almost obscene decadence. Come Christmas, I will layer the poached quince in a trifle with sherry-soaked slices of panettone, a thick seam of custard and generous spoons of cream.

The sweet poaching liquor is not to be missed either. Keep it in a jar in the fridge for a couple of weeks or freeze, mix it with prosecco or gin and tonic, or stir it into creams and custards to add a perfumed sweetness.

A similar approach can be taken to pickling quince. Peel, quarter and core the fruit then submerge in a warm pickling liquor that is two parts cider vinegar and one part sugar. Again, add some aromatics as you see fit – juniper berries, peppercorns. Simmer for about 30 minutes until the flesh just about yields to a skewer.Allow to cool then jar them up, storing in the fridge for a few weeks. Pickled quince offers that holy grail of flavour combinations – simultaneously sweet and sour – so pairs especially well with rich salty meats like ham, where it cuts through the fat, or bitter leaves like radicchio.

Better still, both together. I also serve it with roast pork or rich game like venison or partridge. And a cheese toastie is utterly transformed by a slice of pickled quince nestled within.

The quince is of the most ornery and uncooperative of English fruits. But, says Kathy Slack, its otherworldly beauty makes it worth all the trouble Image: Kathy Slack

Picture an English orchard. The apples are rosy cheeked, bright and eager to please. Rambling over their frames, the autumn-fruiting raspberries are obligingly prolific. Drunk wasps stagger from one plum to another, the branches of the young tree so festooned with fruit they nearly touch the ground. It might trouble you to pick some soon. All is amiable, agreeable and abundant.

Except for one. This tree stands alone in a corner, aloof and uncooperative. It was planted two years ago but will not be prevailed upon to fruit for at least another four.

It has no friends; technically related to both pear and apple, but not on speaking terms. It expects attention, flowering so early in spring that it must be protected from frosts if the fruit is to set and even then susceptible to codling moth, brown rot and blight throughout the summer. It is the quince tree – the most recalcitrant of fruits in the English orchard.

You can never trust a quince. Even once its tree has finally deigned to bestow upon you a harvest, you must beware. The fruit may appear perfect on the outside, the very embodiment of temptation – firm of flesh and heady of fragrance. But when you do take a knife to it, you may well find the interior brown and rotten. This is a result of underwatering over the summer: malicious revenge for your lack of attention. And then, even if they seem fine when you cut them, I have known quince to disintegrate at the first tremor of a poaching liquor, puffing up into a mushy mess. No, you can never rely on a quince.

Should you find a perfect clutch of quince on a greengrocer’s stall (which is a much better way to guarantee a good specimen than attempting to grow your own) they will still come 6

with a stubborn streak. They are livid yellow and rock hard, quite impossible to eat raw, and dangerously unyielding to a knife. (I have been known to don a chainmail oyster-shucking glove for protection.) It can take several hours of poaching, roasting or preserving to coax them into an edible form.

You’d be excused for wondering why anyone even bothers. But one sniff of these strange fruits is answer enough. Their fragrance is so alluring, their flavour so sweet and floral, their colour (once cooked) like a sunset – somewhere between golden amber and dusky pink – that any cook should go to the ends of the earth to find them.

They are incomparable, so unlike anything else in the orchard they might be from another world.

And this strangeness has intoxicated cooks since the days of Babylon. The ancient Greeks gave quince a god all of its own: Aphrodite, goddess of love and fertility, the most sensuous of gods. Through the ages, the quince has been associated with rare otherworldliness, its voluptuous curves and luscious scent gracing the stews and sweets of monarchs keen to display their wealth and opulence.

The quince is the definition of charisma in the kitchen, its unique flavour – like a pear drop dipped in orange blossom honey – working equally well in both savoury and sweet dishes. For sweet dishes, I usually begin by peeling, halving and poaching them in equal amounts of water and caster sugar which I have dissolved together over a low heat. It can take anywhere between 45 minutes and two hours of gentle simmering to poach them into submission, but once cooled, the hard core can be scouped out, leaving them ready to use. If you have added flavours to the poaching liquor – a bay leaf or a sprig of rosemary, for example – then the halved quinces can simply be

Quince Elsey & Bent Stark’s Fruiterers Ted’s Veg Turnips

A word on membrillo, a rich preserve made by boiling quince with sugar to concentrate it into a thick, jelly-like paste. It is delicious on a cheeseboard but treacherous to make at home. The mixture must be boiled until so thick that it erupts, launching volcanic splutters of boiling hot quince paste into every crevice of your kitchen. Even if your hands have survived cutting up the kilos of rock-hard quince required to make membrillo, they will not avoid being burnt before the quince paste is jarred.

I am still scarred by my only attempt.

Roasting is your final option.

This can be done by tossing peeled, quartered and cored quince in melted butter then baking in a low oven until tender (anything from 30 to 90 minutes, depending on the belligerence of your fruit). From here you might simply serve it with roast chicken, pork chops or blue cheese. Or, since quince already smells like the suitcases of the three wise men, you might try Nigella’s excellent quincemeat recipe for Christmas. Similarly, this is also how I prepare quince whenever I intend to add it to festive flapjacks spiked with cardamom, cloves and mace (which is often).

What I love about the quince – yes, despite all the faff – is its ability to make an otherwise conventional meal seem lavishly sensuous and luxurious.

A toastie, leftover ham, a bowl of ice cream, a flapjack: all become extraordinary when the amber glow of quince shines upon them.

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IN THE KNOW

UNDERSTANDING OLIVE OIL

Marianna Kolokotroni, Oliveology

Though today home to a host of Greek speciality foods, Oliveology began, as the name suggests, Borough Market: with olive oil, grown and The Knowledge, the Market’s new cookbook, is pressed by traditional, rooted in the passion and organic family farms on a part of the Peloponnese expertise of the traders peninsula that has been who form the beating cultivating olives for over heart of Borough. Across 3,000 years. eight chapters, each devoted to a different category of stall, that knowledge is distilled into The best way to understand olive features, interviews, tips oil is to view it in the same way you would wine. Like wine, there are many and guides, and brought olive oils from numerous to life through more than different different regions – and, like wine, 80 recipes by Angela there are many factors that will affect Clutton. Here, to whet the price and quality. The scale of production is one; if the plantation is your appetite, is a little large, and most of the harvesting and taster processing is done by machinery, Recipes: Angela Clutton Interviews: Clare Finney Images: Kim Lightbody

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the olive oil will be cheaper. One reason that olive oil from Greece is rarely cheap is because Greece is so mountainous; you inevitably have no choice but to harvest at least some of the olives by hand.

Another factor to consider is whether you’re buying a single-variety olive oil or a blend. If the oil is produced from a single variety of olives from a

single plantation, you can – again, like wine – really taste the terroir. Some producers blend two or three different types of olives, gathered from estates that don’t grow enough olives to make their own oil. This can produce a good result, but blends are often used to hide faults in a particular harvest.

The more places the olives have come from, the less assured you can be of its quality. Kalamata olive oil will be a blend of olives from across the Kalamata region of Greece; Greek olive oil will be a blend from across Greece; European olive oil will be a blend from multiple countries. Our olive oil is a single variety, the Koroneiki variety, from a single estate in Sparta, Greece.

Of course, the main thing affecting the quality of the oil is the quality of the olives themselves. If you use pesticides and fertilisers on the crop, the quality will inevitably be affected, because these chemicals make their way into the harvest – you can’t wash them away if they’ve been applied from the start. But growing organically is becoming a lot more challenging because changes in climate have resulted in more diseases, pests and extreme weather events.

Then there is harvesting. On commercial plantations, they let the olives fall to the ground. This makes them easier to collect but can result in some olives being bruised or rotting slightly. The longer the olives are left, the worse this will be. Even for extravirgin olive oil, you can allow up to 48 hours between harvesting and pressing. If those damaged olives go through the press, they will affect the result. Our producers pick the olives rather than allowing them to fall, then

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Marianna Kolokotroni of Oliveology

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transport them to the press in less than two hours. Before pressing, they discard any that are defective; last year they had to discard 30–40 per cent.

They would rather suffer that loss than damage their reputation.

Finally, there is the processing of the olives into olive oil. For an oil to be extra-virgin, the producer must cold-press the olives, meaning the temperature at which the oil is extracted is no more than 27C. At higher temperatures, the olives start to cook, the acidity of the oil increases, and the flavour and nutritional benefits deteriorate. Cold-pressing results in less yield, so you need to use more olives, but the lower the temperature, the higher the quality of oil. Each of our oils is labelled with a large number, which refers to the temperature of extraction. We’re keen to teach people why this is relevant.

Any olive oil that is not labelled ‘extra-virgin’ will have been extracted at a higher temperature and made with poor-quality olives. ‘Virgin’ and other low-grade oils are simply a way of selling off bad olives. Sometimes people think they have a higher smoke point so are better for cooking, but that’s not true: extra-virgin olive oil has the highest smoke point of any type of olive oil. It’s also a bad way of thinking about it, in my opinion. You’re still eating it, you’re still putting it in your body.

Another common impression is that greener olive oil is fresher and better – in fact, some manufacturers add green colouring because of this perception – but the colour of olive oil is not a guarantee of its quality. Olive oils that are unfiltered and cloudy are good to buy if you are going to use them quickly, but the sediment means they will deteriorate much faster. Our olive oil goes through a simple, natural filtration process – it is left in a metal tank until the sediment settles to the bottom.

I usually recommend that people go around Borough Market, try different olive oils from different stalls, and see which flavours they prefer. There are olive oils from Croatia, Spain, Italy – and Greece, of course. They are spicy, or bitter, or vibrant, or subtle. I don’t believe there is a ‘best’ olive oil, in the same way that there isn’t a ‘best’ wine.

It is totally subjective.

Q&A

Nadia Gencas, Karaway Bakery

The origins of Karaway Bakery lie in the Baltics, where rye bread has been a staple for centuries.

It is this rich baking tradition that the bakery’s founder Nadia draws upon in her loaves, cakes and biscuits.

What is rye flour?

Rye flour is a dark, nutty flour milled from rye kernels, also known as rye berries. Baking with rye was once widespread in the UK, but it’s now more commonly associated with Germany, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries, which is where we source our flour from. The heritage and rich baking traditions of the Baltics mean there are many varieties of rye bread based on different techniques and ingredients, each with its own characteristic taste profile and texture.

Is rye bread always sour and dense?

Like wheat flour, the characteristics of different rye flours are determined by how much of the kernel – the endosperm, bran and germ – is present. The greater the proportion of rye kernel, the darker the flour, and the stronger the flavour and density of the final loaf. Rye does have a strength of flavour that wheat doesn’t have, and if wholegrain rye flour is used in a simple sourdough, the bread will be sour and dense. We do sell these firmer versions, and some people do really love them, but a lot of

Nadia Gencas of Karaway Bakery

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our breads are mellow, moist and soft. Customers tell us they can’t believe that it’s rye bread.

What techniques do you use to make those breads less dense and sour?

One of our signature techniques, which derives from the Baltics, is the scalding process. This takes place pre-fermentation: we scald the rye flour with boiling water, which breaks up the gluten, making it more digestible. Then, during the bread dough resting stage, the natural sugars develop, contributing to the sweeter, mellower flavours of the bread. By keeping the moisture in, the scalding process also extends the shelf-life of the bread – bread made with scalded flour will stay softer and fresher for longer. The fermentation process is also important: each type of loaf has its own sourdough starter and goes through a three- or four-stage natural fermentation process, taking up to 48 hours.

What do you use to flavour your loaves?

We use four or five different rye flours, milled to

FIVE BUTTERS Cultured butter The cultured butter at Northfield Farm is made in small batches by Grant Harrison at the Ampersand Dairy in Oxfordshire. “Cream from the milk of Holstein and Jersey cows, Himalayan salt and lactic cultures. That’s it,” says Dominic McCourt of Northfield Farm.

Lactobacillus cultures are added to the cream and left to ferment before churning, lending the butter its rich, slightly tangy flavours and lengthy shelf life. After churning, the fermented cream is kneaded by hand with the salt before being shaped into fat pats.

Unpasteurised butter The butter at Hook & Son is made from the cream of unpasteurised semi-skimmed milk, matured for between 24 and 48 hours before being churned. It’s a sweet cream butter, so unlike cultured butter, no bacteria are added. “Because it’s raw, it develops a stronger, more savoury taste after a week or so,” says Stephen Hook. “When it has that stronger flavour, it’s delicious in mashed potatoes and scrambled eggs. If you prefer it mild, cut it into portions while it’s still young and freeze them.”

Ghee “Ghee is clarified butter: butter that has been heated until the moisture steams off and any impurities either come to the surface or sink to the bottom,” says Stephen of Hook &

different textures, as well as other flours like wheat or spelt that we can add to the rye. Some loaves contain malted grains, roasted and ground to different levels, lending a particular colouring and aroma. We might also add seeds, nuts, sprouting grains, fruit and spices. Caraway, for example, is particularly popular in the Baltics, and we use loads in our breads, sometimes in unusual combinations: our fruity rye has prunes, apricots, raisins and caraway seeds, which gives it a bit of a kick and rounds out the flavours. Another Baltic classic is the borodinsky bread, which is very fragrant and infused with coriander seeds.

Then there is a bread with six different types of nuts, which when you cut it looks like a biscotti.

to. In the process of developing them, we found we were creating some really nice-tasting bakes, such as our carrot, rye and caraway cake, which won a Great Taste Award. The technical challenge with rye is that, because it has less gluten, it doesn’t create a good rise. It works well with biscuits and denser products, but when we create muffins and cakes, we combine rye with spelt to give it a lift and a more open texture.

How have you incorporated rye into your sweet bakes?

The main reason we decided to experiment with using rye flour in sweet bakes was health: rye contains more fibre than modern refined wheat and has a different type of gluten, which people with mild gluten intolerances are less likely to react

Son. The clear oil is poured through a muslin cloth and sealed in jars. Discerning customers buy their ghee in spring and summer.

“The best milk of the year is from April to June, which is when the grass is at its most luscious.”

You won’t find a ‘use by’ date on Stephen’s ghee. “We put the date it was produced. Ghee is over 99 per cent pure oil; nothing can survive in it, and it doesn’t even need refrigerating.”

Whey butter Whey butter is “a reflection of how, in dairy farms of yore, nothing went to waste during the cheesemaking process”, says Bronwen Percival of Neal’s Yard Dairy. Although most of the fat from the milk goes into the cheese, a small proportion will get lost in the whey. By collecting this ‘whey cream’ and churning it into butter, cheesemakers “ensure they get every bit of yield out of the milk that they possibly can”. Neal’s Yard Dairy sells two versions: clean, fresh Keen’s Moorhayes butter from the makers of Keen’s cheddar, and the more flavourful Appleby’s whey butter from the makers of Appleby’s Cheshire.

Flavoured butter “Flavoured butter has long been a companion for filled pasta in northern Italy, as it adds to the flavour but doesn’t overpower the filling,” says Giuseppe Palumbo at La Tua Pasta. When married with filled pasta, the starch from a splash of reserved pasta water combines with the fat from the butter, coating the pasta with a silky emulsion. “The classic flavouring is sage, typically served with pumpkin-or spinach-filled pasta,” says Giuseppe. “Lemon butter or chilli and garlic butter both go well with seafood fillings, and truffle is perfect with mushroom.”

HOW TO… REDUCE FRUIT WASTE

Chloë Stewart, nibs etc.

“When it comes to reducing fruit waste, the headlines are: a) use your senses to judge if something is off, not just a date on a packet; b) love your freezer, particularly when it comes to delicate summer fruits (before bagging them, separate them out on baking trays so they don’t clump together); and c) cooking is often the answer. If your fruit is starting to look a bit old or soft, you can still cook with it – in fact, you’ll often get even more flavour.

The same goes with steeping fruit in alcohol.

Make sure to remove any mouldy specimens: old is fine but mould is not.

If you’re juicing fruit, the leftover pulp can be used in cakes or pancake batter. Fruit peel can also add an oomph of flavour: bake it low and slow until dry, then pulverise into a fruit powder which you can bake with or use as a decorative sugar. Usually, I’ve zested my citrus already before eating it, but un-zested citrus peels can be candied for baking. Come Christmas time, it’s really satisfying to make mince pies and stollen with your own peel.”

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Fishmonger’s pie with fish crackling Angela Clutton Serves 4 as a main

So called because the best fish pies don’t start with a rigid set of ingredients, but with a conversation with the fishmonger about what is good and fresh and available. Aim for a mix of three or four fish.

Not less than a third should be something smoked – ideally undyed smoked haddock.

Then some chunky white fish – perhaps cod, pollack, coley or hake. And consider adding prawns and / or salmon too, so long as, like everything else, they are sustainably sourced.

Buy your fish fillets with the skin on and you’ll be able to enjoy the recipe at the end for crisped fish crackling: a fabulous cook’s perk, pre-meal bite, or to have with the pie.

Best served with peas, or wilted and buttered greens.

— For the sauce, melt 30g of the butter in a medium saucepan over a low heat, add the flour and stir with a wooden spoon for a few minutes until it turns light brown, but take care it doesn’t burn. Gradually pour in the reserved poaching liquid and keep on stirring to get it all worked into the flour.

Add the saffron, a few good gratings of nutmeg and the mustard. Stir over a low heat for about 10 mins until the sauce thickens, then add 150ml of the cream and stir again for a further 5 mins or so until the mixture has a good sauce consistency. Remove from the heat and check the seasoning.

— By now the potatoes should be nearly cooked. Once they are, drain them and mash well with the remaining 100g butter and 50ml cream. Salt generously.

— Leave the fish, sauce and mash separate for at least 30 mins and up to 2 hours until you are ready to get the pie in the oven.

— When you’re ready to cook the pie, preheat the oven to 210C. Spread the sauce over the fish and then top with the mash, making sure the potato is tight at the dish sides to help stop the sauce bubbling over. Fork the mash into little peaks.

— Sit the pie on a large baking tray that can catch any bubbling sauce and bake for about 30 mins (40-50 mins if the fish

and sauce are being baked from cold). Your pie is ready when the potato is crisp and browned. If it is being slow to crisp, put under the grill for a minute or two, but keep close watch to make sure it doesn’t scorch.

To make the crisped fish crackling — Simmer the skins in boiling water for 3 mins, then lift out and leave to thoroughly dry on kitchen paper or a clean tea towel. Use a spoon to gently remove any small bits of fish flesh on the skin. Heat a little olive oil in a frying pan over a high heat, lay the skins in the pan and let them bubble up and crisp. Turn them over and, when fully crisped, lift out and scatter over lots of salt.

— 1kg fish fillets and shellfish (a mix of smoked haddock, salmon, hake, prawns etc – whatever you prefer) — 500ml fish stock — 100ml dry vermouth or white wine — A handful of flat-leaf parsley and tarragon — 100ml whole milk — 1-1.5kg floury potatoes, depending on the surface area of your baking dish — 130g butter — 30g plain flour — A large pinch of saffron threads — Nutmeg, for grating — ½ tsp English mustard — 200ml double cream — You will need a baking dish of approx 1.8-litre capacity — Skin the fish fillets if necessary and be sure to keep the skin for crisping.

— Pour the stock and vermouth or wine into a large saucepan.

Bring to a vigorous simmer over a medium heat and slide in half of the fish fillets. Poach for 3 mins, then lift the barely cooked fillets out with a slotted spoon and transfer to the baking dish. Repeat with the rest of the fish. Gently mix the fish together, breaking it up into chunks and watching for bones. Chop the herbs, scatter over, and season with pepper. Set aside while you make the rest of the pie.

— Add the milk to the poaching liquor and set aside.

— Peel the potatoes, cut them into chunks, and simmer in a large saucepan of salted water for 15-20 mins until tender. You can make the sauce while the potatoes cook, but keep an eye on them.

Above: Fishmonger’s pie with fish crackling Right: Loaf-baked whole cheese with girolles

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I try not to get too caught up on marching to the Market with a specific cheese in mind, but prefer to talk to the stallholders about what they have

Loaf-baked whole cheese with girolles Angela Clutton Serves 3-4 as a main

Camembert is really just one of many soft cheeses that would work well for this. I try not to get too caught up on marching to the Market with a specific cheese in mind, but prefer to talk to the stallholders about what they have and what might suit what I want to do with it. For this, I’d be just as happy with a vacherin Mont d’Or or Époisses. Whatever cheese you choose nestles within a whole loaf and is then baked for tearing and sharing, its flavours layered up with garlic, mushrooms, honey and wine.

— 1 round baking cheese such as camembert (about 250–300g) — 1 round sourdough or cob loaf — 1 clove of garlic — 30g butter — 25g small girolle mushrooms — ½ tsp herbes de Provence — 2 tsp honey — 50ml white wine or vermouth — Preheat the oven to 190C. — Cut the top rind off the cheese.

Then cut the top off the loaf and pull out enough of the crumb inside that the cheese can sit comfortably in the loaf.

— Peel the garlic and cut into slivers. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over a low–medium heat. Cook the mushrooms until just softening, then add the garlic

slivers and stir in the herbes de Provence. Take off the heat and stir in the honey and the wine.

Mix well and season lightly.

— Sit the loaf on a large piece of foil on a baking tray. Spoon the mushroom mix over the top of the cheese, then spoon the rest of the juices over, allowing some to go over the outside of the bread too. Push at the garlic pieces so they sink into the cheese a little.

Wrap loosely in the foil and bake for 20 mins. Increase the oven temperature to 210C, open the parcel up just enough to reveal the cheese, and return to the oven for another 5 mins to finish off.

— Cut or tear the loaf into wedges and serve immediately while the cheese is still meltingly hot.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

FIVE CRUSTACEANS 1. BROWN SHRIMP Character Tiny, sweet and pinkish brown when cooked – which they must be almost as soon as they’re caught, to prevent them from sticking together.

Source Caught by day boats in Morecambe Bay, off the coast of Lancashire and Cumbria, where they’re often set in spiced butter to create the famous local speciality, potted shrimp.

2. LANGOUSTINES Character Pale, sunset-coloured crustaceans resembling a cross between a prawn and a lobster, both in appearance and flavour.

Source Over a third of the world’s langoustines are landed in Scotland, though the vast majority are exported to other countries.

3. VANNAMEI (KING PRAWN) Character Sweet and meaty tropical prawns with grey shells that turn orange-pink with heat.

Source Farmed along the equator in Central America and Asia, where concerns around environmental impacts have led to more sustainable methods being adopted.

4. CARABINEROS Character Dazzlingly crimson in colour, with an equally intense flavour, many regard these as peak prawn.

Source A deep-sea species sustainably caught by small family-owned boats off the coast of Spain and Morocco.

5. MADAGASCAN PRAWNS Character Large, succulent, grey-pink prawns renowned for their sweet flavour and lean meat.

Source Farmed in the warm waters of Madagascar in accordance with Marine Stewardship Council sustainability standards.

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Angela Clutton on food as a connector, the joy of cookbooks, and writing Borough Market: The Knowledge Interview: Mark Riddaway Portrait: Kim Lightbody

EVERY CONVERSATION WITH A BOROUGH MARKET TRADER

FILLS UP THE TANK

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I

Is yours the familiar food writer origin story of a culinary obsessive who learnt to cook at her mother’s knee, honed her craft in restaurant kitchens and has been feeding people ever since?

No. My friends from university would tell you I lived off microwaved jacket potatoes and baked beans – that was about it. To think that I do this now, the Angela of her early twenties would not have believed it for a second! I had a slightly complicated relationship with food when I was a young teenager, then when I left home, I didn’t know how to cook and didn’t really have any interest in it. I grew up in Blackburn, the youngest of three girls, and was lucky to have a mum who cooked for us every night. There wasn’t loads of money and my mum was so busy, but bless her, every day she would produce a fresh meal for us to share. Looking back, I really appreciate that family thing of gathering together to eat – but one result was that I never learnt to cook.

So where did your interest in food begin to gestate?

The first time I began to recognise what food could do – beyond being something delicious on the plate – was at uni. I shared a house with this incredible Sophia Loren lookalike called Vivienne, who was part Spanish, part Dutch, this wonderful mix of culinary cultures. She’d have people around to ours for dinners. Everyone would gather over this wonderful table of food, the wine would be poured, someone would get a guitar out. That was the first time it really dawned on me: my goodness, this feels amazing and the connector here is food.

That sense of connection, the way that food brings people together, seems to be a thread that runs through your work.

It really is. I studied history at university, and I’ve always been interested in people, place and time, and food is fundamental to those three things. When I started writing about food, I came into it through that, rather than through cooking, really, or through recipes.

When I think about my food memories, it’s always about those things – the people, the experiences, the connection – rather than the food itself. I was in Fortnum & Mason last week, lucky me, and I was thinking of a time I came down from Blackburn with my dad. We went to Lillywhites, the sports shop, so that he could look at tennis rackets, then we went to Fortnum’s and had a rocky road ice cream in the ice cream parlour bit they used to have. And it’s such a lovely memory. It was just me and my dad, having an ice cream together, one of the few times it was just the two of us without a sister or my mum.

When was the first time you thought, “Oh, I’m actually quite a good cook”?

When I left university, I worked as a theatre producer for about 12 years. Towards the end of that I hosted a family

Christmas. My parents came down to London, which was very exciting. I remember putting a lot of effort in and being really, really proud of it. The connection I’d experienced with my friends at university – that Christmas was probably the first time I ever created it myself. That stuck with me. After I stopped working in theatre, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do next, and my mum wasn’t so well, so I started spending more time with her. At that point, she was living in Fife, on the east coast of Scotland, which does have lovely food. All that wonderful fish. I started to get more into cooking then, really giving some time and thought and intention to it.

How did you parse that growing interest into writing about food?

I knew I wanted to write. I knew I wanted to build on this interest in food, people, place and time. So, I started just trying to do it. I did some work for online magazines, pitching myself out. My first paid writing was for The Independent abut cocktails, which was very nice, and then I was scrapping around for occasional commissions, building something very, very tentatively.

Then I had the phenomenal fortune of connecting with Claire Ford in the comms team here at the Market, and that changed absolutely everything. She mentioned the idea of setting up the Borough Market Cookbook Club, and as soon as she did, I could see completely how it would work and what it would do. It was everything I’ve just been saying: about connecting through food, about people, place and time. Everything just crystallised and it made absolute, complete sense to me. That unlocked absolutely everything, because I just completely fell in love with this place.

You’ve hosted Cookbook Club for years now.

What is it?

It’s like any other book club, really, except it’s about cookbooks. We have about 1,300 members. We choose a book, people read it and cook from it, and then we gather to share food and share our thoughts about the book.

But then it becomes, immediately, about so much else as well – it really is about people and community.

Cookbook Club is a place of absolute joy and open spirit.

Everyone’s supportive. There’s no competition. It’s cross-generational, which I love. People from different walks of life and different ages. Some people are great cooks, and that’s brilliant, but some people aren’t, and some are quite nervous. There are people who are local to the Market, there are people who travel. We had someone who came from Australia once, just for Cookbook Club!

You’ve become something of an expert on cookbooks. What is it that you personally look for in a book?

It’s people whose voice you can feel with you in the kitchen. I’m never really swayed just by the look of a book, by the ones that are style over everything else, the ones that no one is really intending you to actually cook from.

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Borough Market: The Knowledge.

Available now from The Borough Market Store and all good bookshops

So when you’re writing your own recipes, is it always your intention that people will actually cook them rather than just appreciating them on the page?

As a food writer, this is the heart-breaking question: to what degree do people really cook from books? It’s something we talk about a lot at Cookbook Club. What is the point of cookbooks? Why is it that we love them?

To what degree are they functional? To what degree are they aspirational? There’s nothing wrong with that, of course – there’s a lot to be said for having things that give you ideas and aspirations. There are all kinds of things that a cookbook can do, other than be cooked from. A lot of people read cookbooks in bed, like they would a novel.

But as a food writer, what you really want is for the book to be covered with splatters and spills and dribs of oil.

If I ever do an event and someone brings along a book of mine and it’s a bit battered around the edges and has Post-its stuck to its pages, I’m like, “God, yes, all those hours in the kitchen researching and planning these recipes has paid off.” That’s what we all want, really.

Your recipe writing has a very generous, informative tone. It feels like you’re trying to illuminate things for the reader rather than just stating what the process is. How deliberate is that?

Very. I really want people to know what they’re doing. I really, really want people to understand. I want people to feel empowered in the kitchen. When they’re shopping, I want them to make informed choices. It’s why I always loved Jane Grigson – I feel that she’s very clear about what it is you’re headed towards. You also want people to be able to feel they have space to be creative for themselves, but they can only do that with a recipe if they feel confident. What I want to do is provide a level of confidence and certainty, and then, once there’s a basis, you can relax and do your own thing.

Does that approach stem from the fact you didn’t have a formal cookery education? A lot of your learning must have come from cookbooks.

I’ve never really thought about it before, but that’s probably right. I learnt so much from Felicity Cloake, Nigel Slater, Nigella Lawson. With all those people, you know where you are, you know what you’re doing. I really respond to that.

Your new cookbook, Borough Market: The Knowledge, is all about that sharing of information. Tell us more.

Its strapline is “produce, skills, recipes”. The whole book is full of all those things. The recipes are inspired by the knowledge of the Market traders. What we tried very hard to do is corral some of the skill and knowledge that is found all over the Market, then create recipes that spring out of that knowledge, as well as the products on the stalls. The recipes are, I hope, pretty attainable for people to do at home. There are very, very few intimidating recipes in there, if any. This is home cooking, but it’s food that, I think, chimes well with the Market’s philosophy of “know where your food comes from”.

Why does that philosophy matter?

Oh, God, there are so many answers to that, aren’t there? I think it matters to us all individually. It matters environmentally. It matters in terms of these guys making a living. It matters to the communities they’re part of. You know, it’s blooming hard being a farmer, a fisherman, a market trader, out there in the cold. If we don’t use these things, they’ll go. Raw milk, for example: if people don’t buy raw milk, there will not be raw milk.

Does that matter? It does. It does for the guys who run the stand. It does for the quality of life of those cows.

It does for the pasture they graze upon, and what happens ecologically to the land around it. The concentric circles of all the choices that we make are huge, and they go on and on and on.

Is part of the intent of this book to encourage shoppers to ask questions?

Very much so. I worry sometimes that people are slightly nervous about asking questions. They don’t want to look silly at the stand. Well, the first thing to know is that the traders love to be asked stuff – it’s a very long, cold day if you’ve got no-one to chat to. Every conversation with a trader fills up the tank a little bit more. You can’t spend time at Borough Market and not find yourself just imbued with the spirit of it, which matters as much as anything. That’s very much what we’ve hoped to do with The Knowledge. Not everyone can be here at the Market and have those conversations on a regular basis, but we’re hoping the book is the conversation you’d have had if you were.

Is there anything that you learnt in the production of The Knowledge?

Loads. Absolutely loads. The other day I was writing a piece about game birds and I went back to The Knowledge, because we have a whole section about when they’re in season and what to do with them. It was really lovely to think, “I need some knowledge about this and I’m going to go to The Knowledge to get it.” There’s so much in there, and I love that the contributions from the traders are so many-layered. We have traders who feature as a big interview, but sometimes it’s just a paragraph. There’s a little tip about how to store cheese or how to skin a piece of fish. A paragraph, no more. There’s food theory, which is great, but some real practical bits too. How to make a really good cup of tea.

Fantastic.

Does creating cookbooks give you a greater appreciation for the books you talk about at Cookbook Club?

It makes me a bit cross with some of them, to be honest.

I mean, making a cookbook’s hard, but if you’re going to do it, make it the best it can be. If recipes haven’t been tested properly, the person at home is always going to think it’s their fault, they’re never going to think it’s the book. That strikes me as a huge shame. For The Knowledge, we had Cookbook Club members testing recipes, then other friends and family as well, to make sure they really, really work.

With this book, I owed it to everyone to get the recipes right. There’s so much work that goes into something like this, from so many people. Whether that’s Clare Finney’s work with the traders or Kim Lightbody’s photography. The guys on the shoots, Claire Ford steering the entire thing, my recipes, Dave Brown’s design. There are a lot of elements that need to be brought together smoothly for a cookbook to work.

I think we have. I hope we have!

Have any recipes from the book now entered your repertoire?

The celeriac, potato, and gruyère pie – that’s my husband James’s favourite, so that’s entered our repertoire. The orange blossom doughnuts too – they’re so good. There are also recipes in there that were already very personal to me. It really mattered to me that the book felt very connected with the Market, but also very connected with me. We have the baked gammon in there, which no Clutton Christmas is ever without. The Arbroath smokie croquetas too. I first encountered Arbroath smokies at the farmers’ market in Fife with my mum on a Saturday morning. I’d never seen or smelt or tasted anything like it. I did those croquetas for my 10th wedding anniversary. There are quite a few things which have come from my life and into the book and then other things that come from the book and are now part of our life. What you hope for is that they become part of other people’s lives too.

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From tiny acorns...

For 15 years, Dave and Karen Richards of Capreolus have been making charcuterie and salumi of a quality that rivals anything produced by their Continental peers, including ham from pigs that spend the autumn months roaming the New Forest in search of nuts Words: Clare Finney Images: Orlando Gili

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Cured meats ageing in the Capreolus maturing rooms in Dorset

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T

They called him Posh Dave, laughs Karen Richards, reflecting on the days pre-Capreolus, when her husband worked on a building site. Made redundant from his job in a nano-technology company, David had sought the only employment he could find in rural Dorset, aged 50 years old. He didn’t mind it, he points out. It was better than not working, and if he folded his Telegraph, the damp seat of the steamroller could almost be cosy. “Yet all the while he was smoking things in the garden – cuts of meat I mean, nothing dodgy,” Karen laughs, and when they speculatively knocked on a few doors with samples of this meat and received orders from River Cottage and the National Gallery, “we thought we might be onto something.”

Fifteen years, five employees, two maturing rooms, one ancient smoker and a stall at Borough Market later, and it turns out the Richards are indeed onto something: an award-winning charcuterie business. As well as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall of River Cottage, Capreolus can count chefs Tom Kerridge, Mark Hix, Theo Randall and many more among their supporters. “We’ve had two golden forks, eight three-star and nine two-star products from the Great Taste Awards and we’ve just won a Taste of the West Champion award for our coppa,” Karen says, proudly. “We do sometimes get up in the morning and pinch ourselves. We don’t really understand why some of the best chefs in the country are using us, or why it’s selling the way it is – but it seems people like the produce and the way we work”: which is to say carefully, with respect for the time and effort required to make good charcuterie.

The sweet-sharp tang of vinegar hangs in the air as I chat to Karen in her kitchen, a lingering reminder of her morning’s task of transforming her glut of green tomatoes into chutney. While in her greenhouse, she sowed her winter vegetables so that, come November, she’ll be picking pak choi, rocket and beans. “It takes planning and time – but the best things in life are worth waiting for,” she tells me. That’s true of gardening, and it’s true of charcuterie too. “Some of our products take a year to make. When they sell out, it can be months before there’s more on the shelves. We hope people can understand that. That is why we joined Slow Food.”

Slow Food is a worldwide movement that supports a low-impact approach to food production, with an emphasis on localised customs. Making air-dried meats is not a longstanding UK tradition because we haven’t had the warm, dry climate necessary for its production – at least not historically.

Yet in recent years, advances in technology have enabled aspiring British-based meat curers to recreate these climactic conditions in purpose-built maturing rooms. In the Richards’ Tardis-like outbuildings, David makes everything from coppa, chorizo and air-dried beef to salami and pancetta. As an example of just how slow they go, Karen mentions his lardo, made from the back fat of rare breed pigs.

“Modern pigs are bred with little fat. It’s not something people want from the bacon and sausages – but you need fat if you’re making charcuterie, especially if you’re making lardo.

The New Forest is the only place where pig owners still have and practice their ancient right to ‘pannage’ We’ve found farmers in Exeter and Cornwall who breed their pigs for this purpose, which basically means they eat as much as they can.

They are the happiest pigs on the planet,” she grins. From these, the Richards receive a rich, thick back fat which they dry cure with a blend of herbs and spices. “We grind fresh spices for every batch. We’re using the best meat we can lay our hands on, so we treat it with dignity.” Even so, these spices and herbs take four or five months to permeate the fat – “flavours permeate meat much more easily,” she explains – after which, the cured fat is washed, and infused with English truffle oil for another month. “It takes on average six or seven months to produce what is essentially a lump of fat – but anyone who knows lardo knows it’s a wonderful thing.”

Shaved onto risotto, snuck onto the skin of a fillet of sea bass, even sliced onto sourdough toast – a little goes a long way with lardo. Indeed, the same could be said of all charcuterie, which is in part why it’s a sustainable form of meat so long as it’s well sourced and well made. The Richards source grass-fed beef from the West Country, Herdwick mutton from Cumbria, and wild boar from the New Forest in Hampshire. At the time of our visit, they are also expecting

Above: Pig breeder Nigel Forsyth, one of the Commoners of the New Forest who for 60 days of the year are allowed to turn their pigs out into the woods to forrage for acorns and beech mast. Nigel supplies meat to Capreolus for their New Forest Pannage Ham

an imminent delivery of pork legs from the New Forest, from which they will make their acclaimed New Forest Pannage Ham, another Great Taste Award winner.

The New Forest is the only place in Britain where pig owners still have and practice their ancient right to ‘pannage’ – that is, releasing livestock pigs into the forest in autumn. There, the pigs roam and graze on acorns, chestnuts and green beech mast. “Pannage used to take place all over the country but now the only place left where it still happens is the New Forest and only about 600 pigs are released into the Forest for pannage each year,” says David. The resulting meat makes for extraordinary and sought-after pork, on a level of Ibérico pork in Spain. Only the legs are reserved for producing hams, which is in part why they’re so small.

“Most of our products are made from pigs which are grown for charcuterie. Those pigs are huge because they’re so fatty. But these farmers want pork pigs, so they’re smaller.” What it lacks in size, it makes up for in flavour, which is dark, rich and sweet.

Capreolus’s pannage pork comes from rare breed British pigs that are well suited to the New Forest’s climate and rough common land. There, they graze side by side with the ponies and horses to which their beloved diet of acorns and beech mast is dangerously

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poisonous. “Without pannage, many ponies and horse would die,” David observes. The practice of pannage takes the forest’s free and abundant foliage and ultimately turns it into delicious sustenance for humans. The same could be said of the tough, rugged grass of Dartmoor, which the West Country’s rare breed cattle herds turn into richly flavoured, nutritious beef. “You can’t plough those fields.

The soil is hopeless. It has been like that for centuries – so it acts as a rich carbon sink,” says David. Thus, when it comes to the beef used in the couples’ air-dried beef and Dorset pastrami, “there is nothing more sustainable.”

By this point, we’re in the third of the Richards’ three maturing rooms, all built

by David himself. “Had we commissioned someone from the continent, it would have cost us hundreds of thousands of pounds. We did it for £14,000,” he says proudly. The first is disconcertingly warm and wet: 22C and 100 per cent humidity, in order to allow all the bacteria in the raw chorizo and salamis to breed. “We put dextrose in to really encourage them to multiply and grow. It sounds revolting, doesn’t it?” David smiles. “But we’ve added our own bacterial cultures, which we buy specifically for salamis.”

Under these conditions, this bacterial

You need fat if you’re making charcuterie, especially if you’re making lardo. We’ve found farmers in Exeter and Cornwall to breed their pigs for this purpose, which basically means they eat as much as they can. They are the happiest pigs on the planet!

culture multiplies far faster than any nasty bacteria. “They grab hold of that sugar, eat it and within three days have converted it into lactic acid – just like in cheese.” By the time the pH has dropped to a maximum of 5.4, any pathogenic bacteria will have died off.

Then they go to the second maturing room which is cooler and drier – though still about 70 to 80 per cent humidity. “You don’t want them to dry out too fast; the outside would be hard and dry, but the inside would remain damp,” David explains – just as when you sear meat, it remains moist. The salamis and chorizos stay there drying out until they are deemed dry enough to be packed, which takes about a week.

The third room – the room we’re currently in – is where the larger pieces of meat sit: the mutton, guanciale, pancetta, air-dried beef and pannage ham. Here, in cool, dry conditions, the meat can sit for a year at least.

“These are a different set of bacterial cultures.

They aren’t making the meat acidic; they work on the meat until it is dry, and then when it is dry the bacteria die off. However, for the bacteria to work on meat and break down fat in these conditions, it takes a long time,” David explains. Time is clearly a running theme.

Indeed, there are only two ‘fast’ elements to the whole process: the smoker from Germany, and the people slicing and packing upstairs. The smoker they bought at auction and it looks its age of 40-odd years – but it is efficient and very well made.

“The Germans have been smoking like this for decades, and this is a very good piece of kit. If you look inside, there is a big fan that circulates the smoke before it goes out the top, so the meat or cheese is smoked quickly and evenly.” The meat is never left for more than an hour, otherwise you can’t taste the meat, the Richards point out. “If you’re smoking it that much you might as well as have New Zealand lamb as Herdwick sheep.”

As for the men and women who work in the butchery and who take charge of slicing and packing the final product, they are as much a part of Capreolus as the rare breeds and the hand-built maturing rooms. “This is Kirsty, the queen of slicing,” David says by way of introduction to a young woman deftly slicing pancetta. Father and son Aaron and Robert have worked with the Richards since the start in all parts of the business, though now they’re mainly focused on the butchery. All employees are local. Many were struggling to find work before Capreolus came along. When the Richards arrived, the estate who owns the village was the biggest employer; many were unemployed. “Dorset is a lovely county,” sighs Karen, “but there’s very little money to be made.”

Since then, the Richards have become the biggest employer in the area – particularly come Christmas when they need extra help with processing and labelling the larger orders. “I think the locals are quite pleased that we’re here,” Karen says quietly, “and we do what we can to look after them.” After all, not long ago the Richards themselves were in a similar place. That they aren’t any more is testament to the chefs, retailers and customers who put Capreolus on the map and kept them there, despite the pandemic and the lure of cheaper products. And it’s testimony to their mentality – an unfashionable, yet pertinent one these days – that the best things in life take good people, products and patience to be made.

Christmas cure

Ed Smith’s ultimate Borough Market Christmas cured meat platter COPPA DI ZIBELLO The Parma Ham & Mozzarella Stand This cut, from the hard-working collar of a pig, is both silky and flavourful, thanks to the balance of lean meat and a marbling of intramuscular fat. Most varieties are good, but this version is so pure and unadulterated, it’s wonderful.

VENISON SALAMI Alpine Deli Make the most of the offer at Alpine Deli and walk away with three Tyrolean salamis. A mix of venison, boar and spicy pork sausages will see you through the period (cut them into slices slightly thinner than a pound coin). For the sake of this spread, use the venison.

SMOKED MUTTON Capreolus To my palate, this is one of the great British cured meats. It is very of this isle, and a wonderful expression of ‘lambiness’. Sweet, smoky, slightly tangy, very grassy, a little bit of Marmite too. Unique and memorable.

IBÉRICO DE BELLOTA SALCHICHÓN Brindisa One of Brindisa’s concentric swirls of jamon Ibérico de Bellota would go down a treat – but maybe that’s something for that ‘just one thing’ mood. The acorn-fattened pigs from whom those hind legs hail are used for other cured meats too, including these rich, salty and pleasingly fatty slices of salchichon.

MOUSSE DE CANARD Le Marché du Quartier Some soft charcuterie is a good call.

I was tempted by pâté de campagne or duck rillettes, but something about the silky-smooth beige mousse grabbed me and demanded I take a slice. Rich and luxurious.

BRESI The French Comte Dark red and bursting with flavour, as you would expect from cured beef fillet from a Montbéliarde cow.

It’s lightly smoked, too, so there’s another thing that’ll bounce off your tongue.

FINOCCHIONA Gastronomica Finally we return to pork, with perhaps its perfect partner, the fennel seed.

Light, sweet, tangy and aromatic, with hints of anise, finocchiona will round this platter off nicely.

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SC OF H YU OO LE L With the right bird and some inventive sides, the classic Christmas turkey dinner is capable of overcoming its reputation for blandness.

Ed Smith offers his recipe for a turkey and trimmings that really sing Images: Kim Lightbody

The Christmas turkey has a strange reputation in the UK. For a significant proportion of households, turkey is The Thing to have as a centrepiece on The Big Day. And yet, so many of us claim to fear the cooking process and feel (at best) ambivalent about the eating experience. “Takes too long”, “it’s dry and tasteless” and “there’s no room or time for the best bits – the trimmings”: all are common complaints.

It doesn’t need to be this way. Your meal will always taste best if you focus on high-welfare animals and seasonal fruit and vegetables. You will enjoy both the cooking and eating of the turkey far more if you can buy a slow-grown heritage breed turkey, such as those you will find at Wyndham House Poultry, Ginger Pig and Northfield Farm. They are almost totally different animals to the intensively farmed Broad-breasted White.

When it comes to creating the perfect Christmas dinner, I suggest you bear in mind these five points: 1. Source a high-welfare, slow-grown heritage breed turkey.

2. Don’t panic about cooking the bird, nor assume that it’ll take all day – just follow the instructions I’ve set out here.

3. Plan only a couple of ‘star sides’, such as my carrot and sprout recipes, one of which is virtually hands-free, the other easily prepared in advance. Beyond them, keep things straightforward: cranberry sauce and bread sauce, stuffing balls, roast potatoes, gravy.

4. For the potatoes, the most important steps are: a) par-boil the potatoes a day earlier in salted water with some garlic and a few sprigs of rosemary, drain, rough-up, leave to cool, then refrigerate overnight; and b) when you roast them, do so in a shallow-sided tray in which the potatoes sit with plenty of space around them.

5. Rest the bird for at least an hour – it won’t be cold! – and cut the breasts from the carcass before slicing across them. Both steps are helpful for ensuring tender, succulent meat.

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The Christmas turkey with chestnut, sage, apricot & quatre épices stuffing balls

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Above: Brussels sprout gratin with smoked pig cheek & farmhouse cheddar Wine-braised chantenay carrots

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The Christmas turkey Serves 6-12 Prep 15 mins Cook 2½-5 hours, plus resting

These instructions and the cooking times are for high-welfare, slow-growing heritage breed turkeys, such as the Norfolk Bronze.

These birds cook more quickly than commercial varieties, and taste so much better too.

— 3.5-7kg turkey — 2-3 onions, peeled and quartered — 2-3 sticks of celery, chopped into 4-5cm batons — 2 bulbs of garlic, halved through their middles — 1 lemon, halved — 2-3 sprigs of rosemary — The night before, ensure a) the turkey is already defrosted (if you have frozen yours); b) any plastic covering has been discarded; and c) the pack of giblets have been removed from the cavity. Pat the bird dry, rub a generous amount of fine salt all over the breast, legs and cavity, then return the turkey to the fridge and leave it uncovered overnight so the skin dries out a little.

— Bring the turkey out of the fridge a few hours before cooking. Heat the oven to 220C. — Fill the base of a roasting tin into which the turkey snuggly fits with the onions, celery, and garlic bulbs. Drizzle 1-2 tbsp oil over these aromatics, tumble until glossy then place the turkey on top.

— Place the lemon in the cavity of the bird, plus a couple of sprigs of rosemary. Drizzle 1-2 tbsp oil over the skin of the turkey, rubbing it so that it’s glossy all over. Place in the oven, reduce the temperature to 180C and cook for 25 mins per kilo. Try not to open the oven or add other things to it during this time.

— With 30 mins to go, baste the turkey with any juices in the pan. If it’s looking pale (smaller birds might), rub with a little butter and increase the temperature to 200C. Return to the oven. When time is up, use a temperature probe to check the biggest part of the breast is around 65C, and the legs above 80C. If not, return to the oven for 10-15 mins more. If so, remove from the oven and leave to rest in a warm place for 60-80 mins before carving.

— Meanwhile, turn the oven right up to cook your potatoes, stuffing and sides. Make your gravy by pouring any fats and juices from the roasting tin into a smaller tin or saucepan, vigorously whisking 1 heaped tbsp plain flour into that, then gradually whisking in a few tbsp vegetable or giblet stock to that. Pour through a fine sieve if a little lumpy.

— To carve the bird, remove the legs from the body and slice the meat from them. The breast will be most tender and succulent if you remove it whole, then cut into slices across its width. Transfer to a warm serving platter and douse with some hot gravy before serving.

Chestnut, sage, apricot & quatre épices stuffing balls Serves 6 Prep 15 mins Cook 20 mins

The quatre épices and sage in these stuffing balls add a festive fragrance, the chestnuts and apricots a pleasing texture and sweetness. You can prepare the mix well in advance, but if more than 12 hours before cooking, leave the egg out and add that just prior to rolling into stuffing balls. Cooking these separately from the turkey reduces the time the bird needs to be in the oven, and just generally makes the logistics easier.

— 200g cooked chestnuts — 500g Cumberland sausage meat — 1 shallot, very finely diced — 200g apricots, diced — 12 sage leaves, finely chopped — 1 medium egg — 50g soft breadcrumbs — 2 tsp quatre épices — Crumble the chestnuts into a mixing bowl, then use a fork to mash them further. A little rubble is fine, it doesn’t need to be a puree.

Combine with the remaining ingredients (except for the egg if you’re preparing this in advance – I leave an unbroken egg on top of the otherwise mixed ingredients before covering and refrigerating, so it’s not forgotten). Mix thoroughly until you’ve a fairly uniform paste – turning and squeezing with your hands is the best way.

— Take a spoonful and squash it into a patty, fry in a hot pan for 1-2 mins on both sides. Then taste – season with salt and pepper as you think appropriate, or add more herbs, spices or apricots if you think they’re needed.

— Wet your hands and roll the stuffing mix into 45g balls – something between a golf and snooker ball size. Line a small baking tray with parchment. Set the balls on this and refrigerate until required.

— When the turkey is resting and there’s more space in the oven, blast at 200-220C for 15-20 mins, turning once after 12 mins to ensure fairly even colouring.

Wine-braised chantenay carrots Serves 6 Prep 10 mins Cook 45-60 mins

Chantenay carrots always look cute, but in this recipe they’re also a very easy, low-effort but high-reward side dish that will feel special. No peeling, and no worries about hob space or overcooking either. Elsey & Bent tends to have multi-coloured heritage carrots, so look out for those. If you can’t find these mini carrots, then peel normal carrots and chop across them into cylinders about 4cm long.

— 600g chantenay carrots — 2 sticks of celery, very finely diced — 30g butter, diced — 200ml dry white wine or dry vermouth — 2 heaped tbsp finely chopped parsley — Heat your oven to 200C (if you’re roasting potatoes or other Christmas sides at the same time, 220C is also fine).

— Scrub the carrots and trim any stringy bits, but don’t peel them. Transfer to an ovenproof dish or shallow casserole into which they fit snugly in one or two layers.

— Add the celery, dot with the butter, tumble everything together, then pour in the wine.

Put a tight-fitting lid on the dish or cover with two layers of kitchen foil and bake for 45-60 mins. Check that the carrots are tender.

Remove from the oven if so, or leave for another 10 mins if not. The carrots can sit warmly in this dish without ruining for longer if other trimmings are not quite behaving.

— Just before serving, add the chopped parsley and a heavy scattering of flaky sea salt.

Turkey Wyndham House Poultry Cooked chestnuts Brindisa Sausage meat Northfield Farm Quatre épices Spice Mountain Chantenay carrots Elsey & Bent Butter Hook & Son Vermouth Borough Wines Savoiardi biscuits Gastronomica

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Brussels sprout gratin with smoked pig cheek & farmhouse cheddar Serves 6 Prep 15 mins Cook 35 mins

This sprout dish should appease the nonbelievers. It’s also excellent as a get-ahead dish – you can assemble the gratin dish the day before and simply heat at a high temperature for 10-15 mins while everyone’s ambling towards the table.

— 130g smoked pig cheek lardons — 600g brussels sprouts, finely shredded — 1 large echalion shallot, finely sliced — 2 large cloves of garlic, crushed — 300ml double cream — 60g Isle of Mull Cheddar (or other mature farmhouse cheddar), grated — 2 tbsp finely chopped rosemary — 1 heaped tsp ground black peppercorns — ¼ nutmeg, finely grated — 150g focaccia (or the end of a sourdough), cut into fingernail-sized cubes — 1-2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil — Trim any woody bases from the sprouts then shred very finely (use the shredding attachment on a food processor if you like).

— Set a large frying pan or saucepan over a medium-high heat. Add the lardons into the pan while it’s still cold, then let these render and fry for 7 mins until crisp. Reduce the temperature a little, add the shallot and soften for 5 mins without colouring, stirring occasionally. Add the sprouts and crushed garlic and cook for 2-3 mins, stirring occasionally, just until the sprouts change to a vivid and glossy green.

— Add the cream, 100ml water, the cheese, half the rosemary plus the black pepper and nutmeg. Allow the liquid to bubble up and warm through for 1-2 mins maximum (we don’t want to overcook the sprouts). Remove from the heat and decant into a gratin dish or low-sided casserole (around 2 litres).

— If assembling in advance, stop at this point, cover the dish and refrigerate. On the day, tumble the bread and remaining rosemary in extra virgin olive oil (1 tbsp if focaccia, 2 tbsp if sourdough) and scatter over the dish.

— Heat the oven to 220C, then bake for 15 mins or so, until the bread layer is browning and the cream is bubbling through.

Cranberrymisu

Cranberrymisu Serves 6-8 Prep 30 mins (plus 3 hours in the fridge)

Tiramisu + cranberries = a winning and festive combination. I think this is best whipped-up and assembled around the time the turkey goes in – ideally one person does this while another concentrates on savoury stuff. But if that’s not possible, it’s fine if made and kept chilled overnight. Just add the cocoa and chocolate topping at the last minute. This fits a 2-litre container, ideally with 4-5cm high sides. Rectangular is best, I think.

— 250g cranberries — 1 large orange, zest and juice — 110g caster sugar — 250ml strong black coffee — 75ml Grand Marnier — 3 egg yolks — 250g mascarpone — 300ml double cream — 3-4 tsp cocoa powder — 20-24 savoiardi biscuits (lady fingers) — 20g dark chocolate (80-90% cocoa solids) — In a small saucepan, combine the cranberries, orange zest and juice and 50g sugar. Bring to a steady simmer and cook for around 5 mins, until roughly half of the berries have popped and broken down, but the remainder are whole, yet soft. Remove from the heat and leave to cool.

— Brew the coffee, decant into a small container that will snuggly fit the length of one savoiarde biscuit. Add 3 tbsp Grand Marnier to the coffee and set aside.

— Use a balloon whisk to whisk together the egg yolks and the remaining sugar and liqueur for a few minutes, until the mixture is light in both colour and texture and has more than doubled in volume – it should look and feel like a thin mayonnaise. Use a spatula to combine this with the mascarpone.

— In a separate bowl, use a balloon whisk to whip the cream to an airy, luscious but nottoo-stiff ribbon stage. Fold and beat the egg yolk mixture into this, then very briefly use a balloon whisk to whip it back to that notquite-soft peak stage (it will set further once in the fridge and a little ooze is preferable to over-whipped).

— To assemble, dust the base of a 2-litre capacity serving dish with 1 tsp cocoa powder.

— One by one, soak half the biscuits in the coffee and booze mix so that they’re wet and flavourful but not soggy, then transfer directly to the dish until the base is covered (I hold a biscuit flat in the liquid without letting go, say “and one”, then move it to the dish).

— Spread the cranberry sauce over the biscuits and dust that with another teaspoon of cocoa powder. Spread just under half of the mascarpone mixture on top.

— Repeat the biscuit soaking and arranging for a second layer. Cover with the remainder of the mascarpone, then refrigerate for 3 hours or more. Just prior to serving, dust with a final, generous teaspoon of cocoa powder, then use a fine microplane or similar to grate the chocolate over the top.

The perfect cheeseboard

When discussing cheeseboard strategy, I normally tend to argue (strongly and perhaps a little patronisingly) that the correct approach is to go big on just one or two things – I’m partial to a quarter of Stichelton and a significant wedge of aged comté.

But let’s be honest, it’s impossible to limit yourself to two types of cheese when you arrive at Borough Market, where there are over 20 different traders from whom you can buy quality, artisan-produced cheese.

If two might be too few, then I think that more than seven is too many. Plumping for five, six or seven cheeses allows you to cover the steady crowd-pleasers, while also exploring a few leftfield choices. If you lose all self-control and find yourself with more, will anyone really appreciate the effort, or get to fully enjoy all the cheeses at their peak?

Pitchfork Cheddar, Trethowan Brothers An unpasteurised farmhouse cheddar from the Somerset-based makers of Gorwydd Caerphilly.

Not overly mature or feisty (it’s aged for a touch over 11 months) but it’s characterful, grassy and earthy.

Oude Beemster Gouda, Borough Cheese Company Aged for a minimum of 24 months, this gouda from Beemster in northern Holland has a dense, buttery texture and crystalline crunch. Its flavour offers notes of caramel, cocoa, coffee and spice.

Bath Blue, Bath Soft Cheese Co A mellow, creamy, blue-veined cheese, made at Park Farm from the organic milk of its own herd of cows. Powerful flavour without being gumreceding.

Saint-Félicien, Mons Cheesemongers This oozy-soft white rind cheese from the Rhône-Alpes region of France is as creamy and luscious as you would expect from something based on double cream. There’s a little tang to it too. A beauty.

Young Pecorino, Bianca Mora Pecorino comes in many guises, and Bianca Mora’s aged variety is exceptional, but I think this young, pale, salty smooth version balances my board really nicely. The flavour of sheep’s milk is really evident.

Dorstone, Neal’s Yard Dairy A light and fluffy cylinder of goat’s cheese with a bright white paste, displaying citrus acidity. This will contrast nicely with the likes of Bath Blue and Pitchfork (and indeed the turkey, goose or beef from earlier on).

Basajo, L’Ubriaco Drunk Cheese Here’s my wild card: a sharp soft blue reminiscent of a roquefort, but this time it’s had a swim in passito di Pantelleria, an Italian dessert wine, so there’s a sweet and slightly boozy edge too. You don’t need much per biscuit, and yet it’s remarkably moreish!

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The perfect cheeseboard

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EDIBLE HISTORIES

COFFEE

From Sufi worshipers to market speculators, via seditionaries and foppish husbands, Mark Riddaway tells the story of coffee

Surprisingly, given how thoroughly the liquor of its roasted beans now soaks the daily life of the planet, coffee is something of a newcomer.

Compared with beer, wine and tea, whose stories are woven into the histories of the world’s oldest civilisations, the drink that wakes up the planet each morning is a brash arriviste – a market disruptor that conquered the world like a tech giant, changing everything for better or worse. Often worse.

The Coffea arabica plant first worked its magic in the highlands of Ethiopia, where its bright red cherries were consumed by local tribespeople.

European writers of the 17th century attributed the discovery of the plant’s vivifying qualities to an Ethiopian herder who, inspired by the remarkable friskiness of his sheep or goats, ate the fruit on which the flock had been grazing and then, hyped up on caffeine, set about spreading the word. A fun story, but as with so many fun stories, almost certainly not a true one.

At some unrecorded juncture, coffee plants established themselves across the Red Sea on the Arabian Peninsula. It was in Yemen that a drink made by brewing the grounds of roasted beans first emerged, and it was Sufism that proved the architect of its burgeoning popularity.

Adherents of Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, seek to shed themselves of worldly concerns and commune with the divine.

One route to spiritual congress is the ‘dhikr’: a ritual that, through rhythmic recitation, song or movement, aims to focus the mind on God. As dhikrs often took place in the dead of night, when a trance-like state can easily tip into a deep, unenlightening sleep, coffee proved revelatory. It is, of course, possible that rural Yemenis had been quietly quaffing hot coffee for centuries, but it was the Sufi orders, which included an abundance of cosmopolitan, well-travelled men, that took the beverage abroad.

By the last decade of the 15th century, coffee had made its way to Mecca, and by the first decade of the 16th century had arrived in Egypt, where it was used to stimulate nocturnal worship in the “Yemeni quarters” of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque complex. Here, wrote Abd alQadir al-Jaziri, a Cairo-based writer, the Sufis “drank it every Monday and Friday evening, putting it in a large vessel made of red clay”. Before long, coffee was being sold in the streets around the mosque and was moving into the city’s secular realm. The same transition soon happened throughout Egypt and the Hejaz. In no time at all, the coffeehouse had become a defining institution of Arab social intercourse.

Coffee’s rapid progress was not without controversy, with some Islamic jurists suggesting it should, like alcohol, be considered ‘haram’ – forbidden.

In 1511, the governor of Mecca banned its sale, his argument being that the gatherings it inspired were morally undesirable and that the drink was bad for health. Coffee beans were burned in the streets (an act of state violence that at least would have smelt good), and many vendors and drinkers were beaten up. A letter was dispatched by the governor’s legal team to the authorities in Cairo requesting that a general prohibition be enforced, but the response came back that, while the carousing prompted by its consumption was indeed a concern, there was nothing fundamentally wrong with the drink itself.

Coffee was accepted as righteous, but the same could not be said of the establishments in which it was drunk.

Opposition came from religious conservatives who argued (with some justification) that coffeehouses were dens of iniquity, rife with gambling and prostitution. Skittish secular authorities, meanwhile, were wary of the political threat posed by the communal consumption of an energising drink. After coffeehouse culture had been disseminated across the Ottoman Empire’s vast territories, bans were sporadically enforced by the autocrats of Istanbul.

According to the scholar Kâtip Çelebi, writing in the 1650s, “coffeehouses experienced varying fortunes for several years,

now banned, now permitted”.

In 1633, the public consumption of coffee in Istanbul was made a capital crime by Sultan Murad IV. Spooked by the fate of his predecessor Osman II, who had been murdered in a coup, Murad was eager to snuff out the slightest threat of rebellion and coffeehouses were, he believed, the dark corners in which an insurgency would be fomented.

About 20 years after the ban began, Çelebi wrote of how the coffeehouses of the capital were still “as desolate as the hearts of the ignorant”. Those outside the city had, though, continued to flourish, and before long Istanbul was back to being a place where coffee and conversation could be obtained several times over on every street.

The first westerner to write about coffee was Leonhard Rauwolf, a German physician, who described a visit to Aleppo, Syria in 1573: “They have a very good drink, by them called ‘chaube’, that is almost as black as ink … of this they drink in the morning early in open places before everybody, without any fear or regard, out of china cups, as hot as they can.” In 1601, an English traveller, William Parry, described “a certaine liquor, which they do call coffe, which is made of seede much like mustard seede, which will soone intoxicate the braine like our metheglin”.

Given that metheglin is alcoholic and coffee quite clearly isn’t, it

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seems dubious that he actually tried this exotic brew – but had he done so it’s unlikely he would have enjoyed it much. Certainly, the other Englishmen who encountered it on their travels weren’t exactly glowing in their reviews. In 1610, the poet Sir George Sandys described Turkish coffee as “blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it”.

Its initial oddness to the English palate did not, however, inhibit the swift assimilation of a drink whose exoticism appealed to the country’s more cosmopolitan citizens. The first reliable record of coffee being drunk in England came in a May 1637 diary entry by the naturalist John Evelyn, who mentioned it being consumed at Baliol College, Oxford, by one Nathaniel Conopios.

In 1652, Londoners were confronted by their first sight of a coffeehouse (described by one chronicler as a ‘shed’), which appeared within a warren of alleyways behind St Michael Cornhill and was part-owned by an enterprising Ottoman immigrant, Pasqua Rosée. Rosée’s marketing message was strong: one handbill suggested that as well as preventing drowsiness (plausibly enough), coffee’s “vertues” included protection against consumption, coughs, dropsy, gout, scurvy, scrofula, miscarriages and the deeply unpleasant sounding “hypocondriack winds”.

The social scene would be utterly transformed by the buzzing crowds who took this miraculous new beverage to their hearts. In the words of one appalled poet, coffee (a “Turkish renegade”) seduced the English “snap by snap, / As hungry Dogs, do scalding porrige lap”. By May 1663, there were 82 coffeehouses operating within the tight confines of the Square Mile, with dozens more springing up around Covent Garden.

Contemporary estimates from the first half of the 18th century suggested that thousands of coffee shops were in operation in London.

It is hard to overstate the importance of the coffeehouse on the commercial and political life of Restoration England, providing as it did a place for men (and it was largely just men) to gather, talk and make deals while being marginally less drunk than usual. Many of the activities associated with investment banking, share trading and insurance evolved in London’s cafes – the insurance market Lloyd’s of London started life in Lloyd’s Coffeehouse on Tower Street.

The nascent newspaper industry was also sparked into life by demand for information and entertainment from these bustling pits of caffeinated interaction.

Different political factions had their favourite haunts.

Thomas d’Urfey’s comic play Sir Barnaby Whigg (1681) drew a laugh with the line: “In a coffeehouse, just now among the rabble, I bluntly asked, which is the treason table?” But Charles II wasn’t laughing. In December 1675, the King, whose father had been beheaded just a couple of decades previously and who, like Murad IV, had an understandable aversion to sedition, published a proclamation banning coffeehouses, insisting that from their smoky rooms “diverse false, malicious and scandalous reports are devised and spread abroad”. Such was the public outcry, the ban was quickly withdrawn.

A more entertaining objection was presented in 1674 in the form of The Women’s Petition Against Coffee. In this satirical pamphlet, the almost audibly smirking writer complained that London’s men were being rendered impotent by the coffeehouse (“they come from it with nothing moist but their snotty noses, nothing stiff but their joints, nor standing but their ears”) and that, far from being a sobering influence, coffee was being used as fuel for even heavier drinking (“like tennis balls between two rackets, the fopps our husbands are bandied to and fro all day between the coffeehouse and tavern”).

At the start of the European coffee boom, almost all the world’s beans were grown in the drink’s historic homeland of Yemen and exported from the port of Mocha. The Dutch, whose previous dominance of Asian trade had been superseded by the British, decided to seek a different route.

Starting in 1696, they made a concerted effort to establish their own coffee plantations on the Indonesian island of Java.

The success of Javanese coffee, the first sales of which took place in 1711, sparked a rush by European powers to introduce the crop to their slave-powered colonies in the Caribbean and the Americas. What had for centuries been purely an Arabian product rapidly became a global one.

The planet’s consumption of coffee soared, bolstered by the hearty appetite for coffee that developed in the United States.

To keep pace with demand, more and more equatorial land

This is an extract from Borough Market: Edible Histories by Mark Riddaway, a book inspired by his regular column in this magazine.

The book, which was shortlisted in the Fortnum & Mason Food & Drink Awards, has just come out in paperback – available now from bookshops, online and at the Borough Market Store, priced at £10.99.

was seeded with coffee plants – by 1750, coffee was being grown on five continents – but this explosion in cultivation came at an awful cost. In 1773, the French botanist JacquesHenri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre observed: “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world: America has been depopulated so as to have land on which to plant them; Africa has been depopulated so as to have the people to cultivate them.”

Even as European colonial power shrank, coffee production remained gruesomely exploitative. In 1822, Brazil declared independence and rapidly turned itself into the world’s biggest coffee producer, powered by the labour of millions of slaves and the destruction of vast swathes of virgin forest. It took until 1888 for Brazil’s slaves to be freed, and then only because a new form of exploitation had filled the void: poor European workers, mainly Italians, shipped across the Atlantic, then forced to pay off the plantation owners for the cost of their crossing. As a result, freedom did little to improve the lives of black Brazilians, with racist bosses preferring to employ white migrants, who were considered genetically superior but still eminently exploitable.

In the second half of the

19th century, political leaders in Central America began to see coffee as the perfect crop with which to enrich their nations and themselves, and the impact was grim. The usual pattern was for productive farmland to be requisitioned, then sold off cheaply to wealthy families or European migrants, while the indigenous people who had tended that land for centuries were chased away at gunpoint. Once the coffee fincas were established, those same indigenous people were coerced into selling their labour to the plantation owners on terms not far removed from slavery.

As coffee increased its grip on US households, high demand, fluctuating supply and the possibility of either huge profits or damaging losses made it a product ripe for commoditisation in the pulsing new heartland of capitalism. A coffee exchange was incorporated in New York in 1881, and speculators rushed in, bringing the benefits of commercial liquidity and access to investment, but also making the market increasingly complex, faceless and iniquitous. “Coffee is the most speculative business in the world,” pronounced the coffee magnate John Arbuckle in 1897, and that remains not far from the truth today.

The coffee trade remains as murky as a 17th-century stoveboiled decoction. The bounty from the world’s staggering capacity for cappuccino is enjoyed by hedge funds, commodity traders, global food corporations and taxaverse coffee shop chains, while those who cultivate the beans remain poorly rewarded, their livelihoods hostage to an unstable monoculture, the price for which can collapse in a heartbeat, thanks to the machinations of the markets.

Little wonder that poverty and political instability remain prevalent in many coffee-producing nations. For centuries, authorities worried about the potential of the coffeehouse to cause social and political mayhem. They had a point – but rather than the places where coffee is drunk, it is the places where coffee is grown that too often feel the sting.

It is now incumbent upon any coffee drinker with a conscience to seek out beans that have passed along the shortest of supply chains, from producers who’ve been fairly remunerated for their skill and hard work.

Good coffee should always have bitter notes. It shouldn’t have to leave a bitter taste.

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