Market Life issue 49

Market Life

No. 49

The Borough Market magazine boroughmarket.org.uk

281003 772397 9

ISSN 2397-2815

A pre-lockdown visit to a smokehouse untouched by time Carolyn Steel on cities, society and food inequality Magnificent cakes to bake at home from Juliet Sear

Food magazine of the year

SOPHIA SPRING

Snapshot Six of the best. And another six of the best. And another six of the best...

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Market Life 49 / boroughmarket.org.uk

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Welcome to Market Life No. 49

pp9 Paprika and sherry short ribs with deli olives

Opening times Monday-Thursday: 10am-5pm Friday: 10am-6pm Saturday: 8am-5pm Keeping you safe — We are open for the local community to buy fresh produce and essential ingredients — We are no longer selling hot food — If we’re busy, you may be asked to queue to enter the Market — You will be asked to stand 2 metres apart — Please don’t come in groups any larger than strictly necessary — There is free parking in Jubilee Place to speed your visit

The Borough Market Kitchen Temporarily closed

Borough Market Online Borough Market produce, delivered to your door goodsixty.co.uk/borough-market Borough Market 8 Southwark Street London SE1 1TL Join the conversation: Twitter @boroughmarket Instagram @boroughmarket facebook.com/boroughmarket

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pp18-23 Chocolate and beetroot cake

Carrot patch tray bake Lemon and elderflower bundt cake Strawberry gatlova Rhubarb crumble loaf cake pp30 Asparagus, lemon and pine nut salad with garlic bruschetta

So, there we were, with an issue of Market Life just about finished and ready to go, when the world completely changed. At first, we dropped everything. Printing a food magazine made no sense at all. Now though, like so much of what Borough Market does to share knowledge and bring people together—including the rich programme of online events and meeting places outlined overleaf—we have decided to move it to the digital sphere. Almost everything on these pages was created before the lockdown began, so if anything appears not quite of these times, that’s why. But most of it still feels relevant. This is a magazine about food, about people, about ideas—and this pandemic has rendered none of those themes redundant. While no one could make the case that it should top the list of our current concerns, there is still a significance in contemplating the food we eat, considering where it came from and how it was made, and relishing the uplift to the spirits a good homecooked meal can offer. It is also vital that we make the effort to connect with each other, however we can. And it is important that we start to think about the kind of world we want to see emerge from the rubble once all this is over, and what that means for the production and consumption of food.

Usually, one of Market Life’s central missions would be to encourage anyone and everyone to come to Borough Market. This issue is obviously a little different. If you live or work nearby, our traders are still here every day except Sunday, offering fresh produce and essential ingredients in a controlled outdoor environment (and to do so, the efforts they are investing and the personal sacrifices they are making are to be applauded). But if you don’t live or work nearby, it is vitally important that you don’t visit until restrictions have been lifted. Instead, we would urge you to visit Borough Market Online or explore the traders’ own online delivery services: any support you can give them will be vitally important in keeping them going, as well as making your own lockdown considerably more bearable.

We hope you stay healthy and happy. We hope you enjoy the cheerful diversion and gentle education that reading a good magazine can offer. We hope you enjoy baking Juliet Sear’s magnificent cakes (make sure you share the pictures with us if you do). We hope that Carolyn Steel’s interview inspires you to think about what kind of city London should be. And we hope to see you here again before too long.

NEWS & DIGITAL EVENTS

IN SEASON

Digital events Join us in the Borough Market Community on Facebook—a friendly, informal space for us to share recipes, articles and videos and for you to connect with likeminded people. Members of the Borough Market Cookbook Club, which is free to join, are coming together face to face over Zoom. The club’s host, Angela Clutton, is also working on pulling together a series of Borough Talks—online conversations with some of the food world’s deeper thinkers. Our regular 30-minute cookalongs on the @boroughmarket Instagram Live channel, featuring an impressive cast of chefs and food writers, are enlivening many a lunchtime.

Look out, for example, for James Walters from Arabica showing you how to construct one of the stall’s signature wraps.

Several of the Market’s experts are laying on free masterclasses of their own: Bread Ahead’s comprehensive schedule of live baking classes is well worth a look.

Feed the Frontline Borough Market greengrocer Turnips has been supplying tens of thousands of packages of fresh fruit and veg to key workers at hospitals across London as part of a charitable initiative.

Visit feedthefrontline.uk for details.

St George mushrooms A sure sign of springtime. After brushing off the mud, roast with olive oil, lemon and sea salt.

Peas A veg to herald the coming of summer. Best served with butter and soft herbs or blitzed into soup and topped with crisp egg.

Watercress A traditionally cultivated leaf with a peppery punch. Whizz into pesto or velouté or eat raw with fish or beef.

Purple artichokes Rosebud-like new season beauties with hearts and leaves sufficiently tender to be eaten raw, dunked in hollandaise.

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On the cover These beautiful chunks of honeycomb were supplied by From Field and Flower. Visit their website to buy highly distinctive raw honey sourced from small-scale beekeepers as close to home as Charlton and as far away as Tasmania.

Cherries English cherries, around by the end of June, herald the start of summer. Look out for the black penny variety later in the season.

Wild sea bass A firm, flaky white fish. Fleeting in its availability, from late May to mid-August, it’s a seasonal treat worth savouring.

FIVE GARLICS

Buy online Black garlic Spice Mountain Wild garlic mustard Fitz Fine Foods

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Black garlic Put simply, black garlic is garlic that, through ageing, has undergone the wonderous chemical transformation known as the Maillard reaction. Left at ambient temperatures for 50 days, it comes out soft, squidgy and spreadable, with a complex flavour reminiscent of sticky date, sour tamarind, and mushroom ketchup—perfect for adding a rich layer of umami to whatever you’re cooking.

Courgette flowers Stuff with soft cheese and herbs, then deep fry or bake. Alternatively, scatter on pizza, or use to parcel up fish.

Buy online Brown shrimp Furness Fish Markets Cherrystone clams Richard Haward’s Oysters Jacob’s ladder Ginger Pig Chicken stock Wyndham House Poultry 21C extra virgin olive oil Oliveology

Jacob’s ladder Betterknown as short rib, this fatty cut of beef appreciates low, slow cooking, be that in an oven or on a barbecue.

Chicken stock Intensely flavoured stock made on site at Borough Market with the carcases of Wyndham’s high quality, free range birds.

Brown shrimp Caught in Morecambe Bay and potted with spices and butter, perfect for piling high on good crusty bread.

Fromage frais A fresh lactic cheese reminiscent of thick, rich yoghurt.

Sweeten with sugar for cheesecakes or drizzle on roasted veg.

Cherrystone clams A large, meaty bivalve famous for its role in clam chowder, but equally good supped straight from the shell.

21C extra virgin olive oil Aromatic cold pressed oil made with semiripe koroneiki olives, walnuts, purslane, fennel seeds and fresh herbs.

Wet garlic This young, immature garlic from Paul Wheeler Fresh Supplies is harvested before the cloves are fully formed and is sold ‘wet’— meaning fresh, rather than dried.

Milder and slightly sweeter than its older dried cousins, it can be eaten raw without it completely overwhelming the palate. Enjoy it stalks and all, sliced into salads or finely chopped and scattered over dishes as you would spring onion.

Wild garlic mustard Noel Fitzjohn at Fitz Fine Foods makes some of the finest mustards around—and this is one of our favourites, making the most as it does of the short-lived season of this mildly pungent leafy green, which Noel forages himself in the woodlands of rural Kent. Stir it into just about anything that’d appreciate an injection of garlicky goodness, mix up with vinegar for a salad dressing or dollop on burgers.

2345 Smoked garlic Typically hot smoked over wood chips (and therefore partially pre-cooked), smoked garlic, available at Turnips, can be used to add layers of mellow, savoury flavour to just about anything a smoky element would improve. Try using the cloves to stuff roast chicken, infuse into gravies, stews and sauces, or add another dimension to garlic butter, mayonnaise or aioli.

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Solo garlic Also known as ‘single clove’ or ‘pearl’ garlic, this small pinkand-white striped bulb looks to the untrained eye a lot like regular garlic, but underneath its papery skin each head consists of just one large clove. Grown using a planting method from southern China and sold at Chegworth Valley, it is delicate, gently perfumed and—sigh of relief— requires much less fiddly peeling than its multi-clove cousins.

IN PRAISE OF PROPER BREAD Words: Mark Riddaway Image: Thom Hobbs

Borough Market’s bakers have really messed me up. For most of my life, I thought the bread I ate from supermarkets and sandwich shops was absolutely fine. I didn’t love it, but then I never really thought about it at all. It was just there, everywhere, like washing up liquid and tea bags. Then I came to Borough and started buying real bread made from the most elemental of ingredients—flour, water, yeast, salt—alchemised into something beautiful through a baker’s skill and the gentle ticking of a clock. No fat, no bleach, no calcium propionate, no L-cysteine hydrochloride, no industrial machinery, no profit-driven corner cutting. Now, ruined by the revelation of what bread can be, by its ability to crunch and chew and yield, I find myself unable to abide the other stuff. Just can’t do it. Can’t stand the pappiness, the blandness, the chemtrail aftertaste.

For my self-image, this is deeply problematic. I was always the kind of man who liked beer and football and fishfingers; now I’m the kind of man who won’t eat a sandwich because it’s not made with artisanal sourdough or Lithuanian rye, and I have to live with the consequences of occasionally saying that out loud.

Stuck at home, I’m feeling its absence. As the lockdown loomed, 6

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while much of the nation was panic buying toilet roll and baked beans, I was dashing wild-eyed to Borough’s bakers to snatch up as much bread as I could carry. Sliced and bagged, it now fills a couple of drawers of my freezer, so I can at least have decent toast, but with no proper bakers in my immediate vicinity I won’t be having a sandwich for the foreseeable future. The good news, I suppose, is that if the biggest trauma in my life right now is the lack of a fresh pain au levain, I’m clearly an incredibly fortunate person—and the perspective that lends is no bad thing. And it definitely won’t last for long. There will always be someone with flour, water, yeast, salt, skill and time. However much things change, one thing that I know with absolute confidence is that there will always be real bread to look forward to.

A DISH DISSECTED MASSAMAN CURRY Sue Quinn on how to recreate a Thai classic at home Illustration: Ed Smith

According to Thai food guru David Thompson, the perfect massaman (or mussaman) curry should be sweet, sour and salty—a holy trinity of virtues that makes devotees sigh with longing when they’ve finished their bowls.

The most complex of all Thai curries, massaman was once ranked by one global travel website as the single most delicious food on the planet. Legend holds that it arrived in southern Thailand from Persia in the 16th century, trailing exotic aromas redolent of western Asia, notably cardamom. And in deference to its Muslim heritage it is never made with pork; beef or chicken, cooked until butter-soft in a rich, thick and deftly spiced coconut sauce, are stars of the bowl.

Massaman is said to be the most time-consuming Thai curry; a long list of ingredients must be carefully prepared from scratch to yield invigorating flavours. Most southern Thai families have their own beloved massaman recipe passed down through generations, says Worawan Kamann, co-founder of Borough Market Kitchen’s Thai street food stall Khanom Krok.

“But there are a lot of things that go into it, so it’s not something that’s cooked every day,” she says.

Born in Bangkok, Worawan was taught to make the stall’s chicken massaman with potatoes and peanuts by her grandmother. “She was an amazing cook right into her nineties,” Worawan recalls.

“We would spend the whole day cooking it, shredding the coconut and doing all the preparation.”

And this, as ever, is the secret.

Khanom Krok’s comforting massaman is made with love and care. Worawan has zero tolerance of short cuts, such as cooking the chicken and sauce separately then bunging them together to serve. This crime against massaman is prevalent in the UK, she sighs. “I stick to the way I learned as a child. I cook my chicken in the spicy sauce, so it sucks up all the flavours.”

The perfect balance of sweet and sour needs judicious application of palm sugar and tamarind juice, and a light hand with the chilli paste. “Massaman is not supposed to be very spicy,” Worawan says. “It’s meant to be quite a mild curry. That’s the traditional way.”

Components Spices Dried spices are heavily roasted in a pan or wok and then used sparingly to impart an elusive fragrance.

Cardamom is a stalwart, but other spices might include cinnamon, star anise, cloves, coriander seeds or cumin seeds.

lightness to the drink. We do make one single varietal cider using the Kingston Black apple. It’s a bittersharp apple which, because the skin is high in tannins, is able to create a balanced cider all on its own. Compared to the other varieties we make, it produces a slightly stronger drink. It is a ‘vintage’ cider—a name reserved for single varietal ciders.

Coconut Coconut milk or cream or both, traditionally made by hand, forms the ballast of the rich sauce. First, it’s simmered in a pan or wok until it begins to separate or ‘crack’.

Chilli paste A puree of chillies, garlic, shallots and other aromatics is cooked off in the boiling coconut along with the toasted spices, to smooth away their rough edges.

Seasonings Palm sugar is added for sweetness, and tamarind (at the end) for a sprightly sour kick.

Meat Chicken or beef pieces are slowly simmered until they reach the sweet spot between falling apart and undercooked.

Vegetables Starchy vegetables are vital: white radish, potato or sweet potato.

Toppings To finish, massaman might be showered with deep fried shallots and toasted peanuts for extra tastiness and crunch.

WHAT IT TAKES WEST COUNTRY CIDER Barry Topp on the intricacies behind the apparently simple task of fermenting apple juice Interview: Viel Richardson What are your cider making roots?

My West Country connections mean I have always gone for a traditional type of cider, made with bittersweet and bittersharp apples. I was taught to make cider by a wonderful woman called Jean Noelle, over in Herefordshire.

One of her mantras was: “You have to be able to look your customers in the eye and say that there were no ‘brook apples’ in my cider.” That means there is no water bulking out the volume.

How many different types of cider do you make?

We make three distinct types, each with its own specific qualities: the traditional West Country ciders, a French-style cidre bouche, and a champagne cider. Each one starts with us pressing apples, but then follows a very different process to get to the final result.

Do you use more than one variety of apple in each cider?

Most of the time. Modern drinkers often find traditional cider a bit intense, so we try to create a blend that will have the feel of a very traditional cider but which has been tweaked a little for the modern palate. For example, I sometimes add culinary apples to the cider blend to bring some

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How do you create a blend?

Creating a blend of juices that will taste great after fermentation is a mixture of art, science and experience. One blend we have uses Black Dabinett, Darlington Mill, Michelin and possibly a bit of Bramley to add some acidity. Others we use include Tremlett’s Bitter, Port Royal and Stoke Red. You either mix up the whole apples and then juice them all together, or else juice the apples separately and blend the fermented juice. I favour blending the whole apples—for me, it gives you something extra. Thankfully, I have the size of machinery you need to do so. Many smaller producers have no choice but to press the individual apples.

Are great apples the key?

Very much so. To get the mix we want for each drink, we buy apples in as well as growing our own. We source some from an old orchard in West Pennard in Somerset and others from a farm in Melplash, west Dorset. We have to collect them in small lorries we call six-wheelers, as you can’t get large lorries down the tiny lanes.

What is the basic process for making a West Country cider?

We pick the fruit in the autumn when the weather is cooling. After blending the apples, we press them and store the juice in large vats for the primary fermentation.

This process continues until some point in January. When the weather is right, we then move the juice—minus the sediment—into fresh vats, adding a bit of sugar.

We don’t filter the fermented juice, so there’s still a little bit of yeast to feed on the sugar. We then seal the vat tight and leave it. The old lore was that cider pressed in autumn shouldn’t be drunk until the cuckoo sings, which is around April or May, when the weather really starts to warm up and the yeast in the cider starts feeding more actively, giving the finished drink a little natural sparkle.

So, making cider is a craft.

The basics are very simple.

But it’s a case of getting to really understand each stage, the weather, the chemistry, the apples and how you blend them to create the taste profile you want to achieve.

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

I’ve heard, many times, that our palates need to “grow-up” before we enjoy olives; that from the moment we’re born the total number of taste buds we have is in permanent decline. Strong, bitter flavours like anchovies, radicchio and olives are the ones we decline into.

So I was confused when my now toddler son began eating olives at an extraordinary (and perhaps alarming, given salt content) rate on pretty much the first occasion he gummed away at solids. What did this mean? Could we declare already that he was a man of great taste? Or, did he, in fact, not taste anything?

Disappointingly, I soon found out he was not the child prodigy I assumed he was; most other babies and toddlers I’ve met in the last few years love olives too. Why is it, then, that this ‘too adult for you’ refrain is so widely accepted?

The answer came when he ate a pizza topped with dull, briny, soapy, pitted black olives. Rather than wolf them down, he spat them out and ultimately rejected the pizza altogether. He did the same with some olives he’d commandeered at a party a few months ago, discarding the bowl and shouting “they’re yucky and disgusting”. It’s not that you need to mature before liking olives.

It’s that you’re never too young to dislike bad ones.

All of which is a long-winded way to note that my horrendous foodie of a son, along with anyone else who chooses to source them, is spoiled by the quality of olives available from Borough Market.

These are true taste bombs, readymade to transform our meals.

Options include the Greek varieties from Oliveology: straight-up organic, handpicked kalamatas; others marinated in the heady aniseed of ouzo; and remarkable Throuba olives, that have ripened and matured on the tree, without salt.

They’re uniquely sweet-bitter, and particularly good thrown 8

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over a tomato and feta salad or chopped into a tapenade.

I love The Turkish Deli’s ink black Gemlik duble olives, so rich, savoury and somehow honeyed too. There’s a hake, cherry tomato and green bean bake recipe in The Borough Market Cookbook that suggests using them to punctuate the other flavours. Other olives exist, of course, but few provide the near maple-bacon impact of those particular pearls.

I look forward to the day that I can once again cruise around Borough Olives’ wooden pots of marinated Spanish and Greek olives. You can disappear down a number of olive shaped holes there—the meaty gordals, the sweet manzanillas, the black or green, the ones stuffed with peppers, the ones marinated in lemon and parsley or tomato and basil. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. Drop some in a tomato-based stew with chicken or squid, warm a few with anchovies and creme fraiche and pour over a pork chop, blitz quickly in a blender, utilising the marinade plus a little more oil to make tapenade, or chop them roughly into something between a salsa and a salad, as with the short rib recipe here. They’re an instant hit of flavour, something with enough power to both enliven subtle ingredients and match bawdy ones. When meal planning, don’t panic: there’s very little chance that whoever you’re feeding doesn’t like olives; they just haven’t tried these ones yet.

Buy online Olives Borough Olives Brindisa Gastronomica Oliveology The Turkish Deli

Paprika and sherry short ribs with deli olives Serves 4

Beef short ribs make for a low effort, high impact meal. They simply have to be browned quickly, then braised slowly alongside a few other flavours.

In this instance there’s a hint of Spain through the fino sherry and paprika. Once cooked (until wobbly and cut-able by spoon), they are extremely rich and need something to punctuate each bite. Here, the answer comes by way of roughly chopped deli olives from Borough Olives— already marinated, there’s so much flavour here you need to do very little else to twist an intense dish into one that feels apt for spring and through summer.

Choose whichever marinade you prefer, but make sure they’re plump, green, pitted—and good.

— 4 echalion (banana) shallots, peeled but kept whole — 2 sticks of celery, roughly chopped — 4 short ribs, around 1.2kg in weight

— 3 tbsp plain flour — 1 tbsp tomato paste — 375ml fino sherry — 1 tomato, halved — 1 bulb of garlic, unpeeled but halved across the middle — 4-5 sprigs of thyme — 4 strips of lemon peel (optional) For the olive embellishment: — 200g marinated, pitted green olives, roughly chopped — 25g flat leaf parsley, leaves picked — 4 tbsp extra virgin olive oil — 1 tsp sherry vinegar — You will need an oven-proof sauté pan or a casserole with a lid, big enough for the ribs to sit in one layer. Place the pan on a high heat. Add 1 tbsp cooking oil, then the peeled shallots.

Fry for 5 mins, so they take on a bit of colour.

— Meanwhile, mix the flour on a plate with generous pinches of salt and pepper, then roll the ribs around so all sides are dusted.

— Remove the shallots and replace them with the ribs and another 1 tbsp cooking oil. Brown every

INSIDER KNOWLEDGE Ten insights into life at Borough Market from Mrs Sandhu of Temptings Interview: Viel Richardson Image: Tom Bradley

1. My family has always made chutneys.

I didn’t really make them as a child, but when I was a bit older I started making them for myself and for friends and work colleagues who liked them. The first time I made them for a wider audience was when I made canapés and snacks for the wedding of one of my daughters.

2. After the wedding, my new son-in-law Timothy said: “This food is amazing.

You should be offering it to the wider public.” He used to come to Borough Market and brought me here to see the Market. He was the one who encouraged me to apply for a stall. That was in November 2000. Timothy is no longer with us, but we see our success at the Market as part of his legacy.

side of meat. This will probably take 10-12 mins.

— Find or make a gap in the pan and add the tomato paste and cook for 1 min more before pouring in the sherry and 300ml water. Squeeze in the tomato, the garlic and thyme.

If you have a lemon to hand, use a vegetable peeler to take four strips of peel, and pop those in too. Place a lid on top and cook for 90 mins.

— At this point, baste the dryer areas, and shuffle and jumble the contents of the pan to ensure everything’s still dipped in braising liquid. Cook for 30-60 mins more, until the beef is wobbly and soft.

— At some point while the ribs are cooking, roughly chop your marinated olives and combine with the extra virgin olive oil, sherry vinegar and parsley leaves (if young and small, just picked; if fairly large, roughly chopped).

— Serve with mashed potato, or chickpeas and some crusty bread, with the cooking liquor spooned over the ribs. Spoon the olives on top or nearby.

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3. I was raised in the Punjab, and my family owned a lot of land. Hunting was a big part of life, and they would make meat pickles called ‘achar’ from wild boar, venison and chicken using old family recipes. Some of these have been in the family for close to 500 years and are still kept secret.

4. I use some spice blends that have been developed by my family and are not widely available. This is one of the things that make my pickles and chutneys unique. Another thing is the traditional methods I use.

5. O n my first day here I had no idea what to expect, so I brought 11 jars of chicken achar. An Irish gentleman came to the stall and bought six of them after tasting a sample. I sold all the bottles in a couple of hours, so I spent the rest of the day just talking to customers. That gentleman still comes over from Ireland and buys things from the stall every Christmas.

6. From the beginning, the public reaction was extremely positive. I have to say it took me a little by surprise how quickly things grew. I never had to advertise, it was all word of mouth. I had to install

a professional kitchen in my home to meet the demand. It was very hard, but I made everything myself. I still do today.

7. This is a real labour of love. For example, the meats achars will take me three days to make in batches of four bottles, so it is not large-scale production. There are always some chutneys or pickles in some stage of production at home. The whole process is very labour intensive. But I think it is worth it—the time and care I take is reflected in the tastes and textures.

8. I love experimenting and creating new chutneys. The achars are old family recipes, which I sometimes adapt a little, but the chutneys are my creations. The only chutney recipe I took from my grandmother was one using pomegranate. All the others I create myself.

9. In the Punjab there is a real mix of religions and cultures and each one has its own culinary identity. Even within each family, there are differences in the way we make a particular chutney, both in the spices and methods used. So the products we sell are really personal. You won’t find them anywhere else.

10. This is all about my connection with my customers—I love talking to them. I have several who have been buying from me since we started and many others who have been coming to the stall for years. You build wonderful relationships here. Temptings is a passion—that is the only way I can describe it. It is not about making money or paying the mortgage, it is about the ingredients, making the products and talking to my customers. I really do love all of it.

Buy online at the Temptings website

SOFT POWER

Angela Clutton on how the soft, aromatic herbs of springtime bring with them a fresh burst of colour and flavour

Image: Regula Ysewijn

I think—I hope—that broadly speaking most of us have got our heads around the seasonality of our fruit and vegetables: strawberries in summer, pumpkins in winter, etcetera, etcetera. We’re starting to get a feeling for the seasonality of some meats, too. And, increasingly so, fish. But herbs? I wonder to what degree many of us even think of herbs as being seasonal—especially when we see the supermarkets selling those same slightly sad-looking plastic bags of basil, dill and the like all year round.

Yet herbs really can be seasonal.

Springtime is when the first delicate leaves of many soft, aromatic herbs begin to make their appearance. Much like the first sightings of crocuses or snowdrops, every year it seems to me a miracle that these dainty herbs have not just survived the harsh winter but are pushing through it, embracing the new light and bringing with them a lightness of flavour too.

They come to bring relief from the woody herbs of winter, such as rosemary and thyme, that have done such steadfast flavour service in hearty stews and more. As the arrival of spring brings a hankering for bright flavours, the new season’s herbs are well set to partner with all manner of other spring and summer produce.

The idea that we should make the most of various aspects of produce that come into season at the same time has rarely been highlighted better than by Thomas Tusser in 1557.

A farmer, Tusser wrote A Hundred Good Points of Husbandry—a sort of ‘how-to’ for the farming year, in poem form. So popular was his poem that by the time it was republished in 1573 the 100 points had become 500, and the recommended herbs of fennel, parsley, tansy, thyme and “mints of all sorts” were amplified with 21 herbs 10 Market Life 49 / boroughmarket.org.uk

for strewing, 22 for salads and sauces, and 28 for the “physic”. And that’s not even all of the herbs he mentions.

Tusser’s point—and it is mine too— was that we should enjoy all the land has to offer at the time that it does so.

Take chicken—or, more specifically, spring chicken. I know, I know, we get chickens all year round now, but in heritage farming spring chickens were young chickens. (And once knowing that, the phrase about being a spring chicken makes rather more sense.)

The meat of young chickens has a lighter flavour than older birds, perfect to be partnered with feathery dill, fennel or tarragon—three of spring’s most vibrant and useful herbs, each bringing its own distinctive note of aniseed flavour.

I like to chop up a bundle of those herbs, stir them through 150g or so of softened butter, season, and then gently push it under the skin of the chicken before roasting. The herb butter pervades the flesh, making it extra succulent and flavoursome.

The butter is also exceptionally lovely for serving with young, sweet spring carrots that have been lightly braised but little more.

Other spring herb and produce partnerships? How about new-season oregano or any of the aforementioned aniseedy three with young goat’s cheeses? You could bake a tart of the cheese with some asparagus and spring onions, and throw some of the herbs in there too. Or whip yoghurt through with chervil or any other spring herbs to serve alongside a piece of baked fish (think plaice or sea trout). Or—and this is a bit of a personal fave—crab and some steamed-to-tender new potatoes mixed together into a salad with lemon, olive oil and chopped lovage.

I could go on and on with similar ideas—but in all of them so far the

The beauty of fresh spring herbs is a large part of their charm. It is why they are so useful as a garnish. The elegant, delicate fronds of dill or chervil. Spears of tarragon. The green vibrancy of mint and chives

spring herbs are there merely as workers, doing a small but important job in among a host of other flavours, complementing and enhancing them. But these herbs are so joyous, so fresh tasting, that we should really take time to enjoy them as more of the main event too. Perhaps herb pies with lots—and I mean lots—of miscellaneous chopped spring herbs, mixed through with hard-boiled eggs and spring onions, before being baked in puff pastry. A true lunchbox treat, right there.

Or you could take inspiration from the Bavarian soup krautlsuppe that I came across in one of Elisabeth Luard’s books. She describes it as being typically served on the day before Good Friday, as, by tradition, bitter spring herbs are often eaten at Easter as a sign of penitence. The recipe calls for a simple base of onion and stock, with a mix of chervil, watercress, spinach and sorrel, and potato to thicken. If a bowl of that is meant to be a punishment, it’s one I’ll happily take.

I’ve been thinking, too, of the Middle Eastern dish sabzi kordhan— a platter of herbs such as mint, fennel, dill, coriander or radish leaves that stays on the dining table throughout a meal. The herbs just sit there, ready to be reached for whenever a burst of freshness is needed. I love the idea of having the herbs ready as a refresher, but also how visually beautiful they must be.

The beauty of fresh spring herbs is a large part of their charm. It is why they are so useful as a garnish. The elegant, delicate fronds of dill or chervil. Spears of tarragon. The green vibrancy of mint and chives.

(Although there is little more likely to ruin for me a perfectly lovely brunch than an unexpected sprinkling of chopped chives on my poached eggs.

But that’s just as personal thing). In an age where Instagram-able food is hotly pursued, herbs have the ability to turn the dullest-looking dish into a photogenic beauty. It is why parsley is so ubiquitous, but parsley is only the very tip of the possibilities.

I find it very hard not to get a little carried away and buy too many of these beautiful herbs at this time of year. Often too many to use, really. But it’s not that much of a problem. I know I’ll steep some in red wine vinegar or cider vinegar for an infusion that will be useful for months to come. I finely chop some into salts. And there’s usually a corner of my spring and summer freezer packed with little bundles of herb butters, like the one I mentioned earlier to go with the chicken. I make the butters with all sorts of mixes of herbs, with maybe a grating of lemon zest added too, roll them up in protective film, and freeze ready for slicing into all kinds of cooking.

It means I’m never short of the fresh burst of colour and flavour that these seasonal herbs can so easily provide.

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SMOKE ON THE WATER Just before the shutdown started, Market Life trekked up to the east coast of Scotland and back in time a good few hundred years to watch the Arbroath smokies sold

by Oak & Smoke being made in a manner resolutely untouched by modernity —and all the better for it Words: Clare Finney Images: Tom Bradley

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S

Soaring costs, squeezed margins, social, environmental and political upheaval: these are testing times for all of us, but particularly smallscale food producers.

Their traditions may be time-honoured, their practices perfected over generations, but when scale and consistency are too often valued over craftmanship, even those within easy reach of rich, global markets have had to modernise to keep up.

Not all of them, though. Certainly not Alex Spink and Sons, supplier of Arbroath Smokies to Borough Market’s Oak & Smoke. Tucked down a seaside street in Arbroath on the east coast of Scotland, their fish house looks and feels a million miles away from modernity.

To enter the Spink smoking room—a murky yet strangely comforting place, redolent with woodchip and haddock—is to travel back in time not just to 1972, when Alex Spink senior decided to smoke fish rather than go to sea with his father, but to 15th century Scotland.

“This is at a slightly bigger scale, but the smoking methods we’re using here have not changed really in hundreds of years,” says our host, Gary, as he builds the fire and tightens the string on the haddock fillets he prepared earlier.

Popular legend has it that in the wee village of Auchmithie, next to Arbroath, a fire broke out in a store where some salted haddocks were hanging up for preservation. Sifting through the soot and ashes to see what they could salvage, the villagers discovered the bronzed and burnished fish—and so, they say, ‘smokies’ were born. Historical fact, alas, affords no such colour: the practice was almost certainly brought over by the Nordic settlers who arrived regularly on this stretch of coast. There are striking similarities between the smoking habits of medieval Scotland and medieval Scandinavia. The name Spink—like many common to the area—has Nordic roots.

Alex Spink senior has retired, but his son, Alex junior, currently on his way back from the fish market, is keeping the family business going. Gary is not a Spink; he has, though, been working with the family since he was 14, so he’s pretty immersed in the business—particularly the smoking side of things. The haddock he’s tying now were salted three days ago, “for four or five hours— it really depends” and hung last night to firm up still further. Though the rule with fresh fish is the fresher the better (most of Alex junior’s haul will go to their fresh fish counter in their local shops), the reverse is true of smoking. “If a fish is too fresh when we try to hang it up and smoke it, it will fall off.”

This doesn’t often happen, but when it does, the lost fish, known as ‘droppers’, quickly find a happy home: “The best time to eat a smokie is straight after it’s come off the fire,” grins Gary. As he checks the string that ties the paired haddock fillets together (one hangs either side of the metal stick) he puts a pinch of salt around their tails to tighten them still further. He’s been here since 5am.

It’s now 7am. The fish will go on the fire soon, and be off by 9am so the courier can collect them at noon and carry them off to restaurants and retailers. “They need to be cool enough to pack, but we want them to be as fresh as possible,” he says. Though there are several smokehouses in Arbroath, Alex Spink 14 Market Life 49 / boroughmarket.org.uk

and Sons is one of the few to smoke every day, “so our smokies are some of the juiciest and freshest there are”.

“It takes a while to get the timings.

Sometimes you can say it will take an hour and a half, but if there’s a fair bit of wind it will make the fire hotter so they smoke quicker. Likewise, if the fish are smaller. The weather, the size of the fish and the freshness of the fish all play a part in the timing,” says Gary, who developed the instincts and experience needed for his craft by spending several years observing his predecessor at work.

The fire lit and crackling, he returns briefly to his colleagues in the main processing area.

Alex junior has returned from the market, so there are several boxes of fish to unload, unpack and fillet, destined either for smoking or for selling fresh at Spink’s local shops, where, in a display of perversity typical of people whose place of living has become bound up with a certain foodstuff, smokies don’t sell particularly well.

The filleting is all done by hand. “There are filleting machines, but they don’t work with smokies. You have to fillet, keep the backbone, and get the head off, but with minimum meat loss. Then you have to clean them.” Gary gestures toward his colleague, Ron, and the whirring brushing machine he is operating, the only piece of mechanisation I’ve seen outside the company office. In the cold, clear running water and Ron’s careful hands, each fish takes around six seconds. After this, the cleaned, filleted fish are packed into containers of dry salt to reduce the moisture, harden the skin and add flavour. The quantity of salt and timing of the immersion depends on the weight of the fish: another complicating factor in what, for all its seeming simplicity, is clearly a remarkably refined process. Part way through the salting, fish of equal size will be paired and tied together by the tail using ‘thrums’: locally produced jute string, once a by-product of Angus’s many spinning mills. Then, once salting’s complete they’ll be washed and hung on rails or sticks to dry.

Every step of this process has been enshrined in EU regulation since 2004, when the Arbroath smokie achieved protected status, a development that made a huge difference to every smokehouse in the area authorised to produce this succulent, salty speciality. Only those operating within a five mile radius of Arbroath can produce smokies—the town having been the epicentre of production since the late 19th century when the fishing families of Auchmithie moved there for its superior harbour and housing prospects—and the haddock must, bar exceptional circumstances, come from Scottish waters. “The Arbroath smokie has been described as being to the humble haddock what prosciutto crudo is to the hind leg of a pig,” the relevant regulation states. “It is the ultimate in flavour that can be achieved from the original article, and the secret, as with prosciutto, lies in the cure which gives the smokie its delicious taste combining the subtle tang of smoke with the sweet, delicate flesh of the haddock.”

For this reason, it cannot be mechanised.

“Many have tried, but it just doesn’t work,” says Gary. As the specification itself notes, smoking over an open fire “imparts a succulence and flavour that cannot be matched by similar products smoked in mechanical kilns”. By this point the fire is ready, its fuel of hardwood fully ablaze in what is still called ‘the barrel’, though

The Arbroath smokie has been described as being to the humble haddock what prosciutto crudo is to the hind leg of a pig. It is the ultimate in flavour that can be achieved from the original article, and the secret lies in the cure

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Alex junior and Alex senior Left: Gary

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By the mid-1970s, the pair trawl had started: two boats, pulling one net between them, which dragged along the bottom and caught all sorts of fish. After two or three years, the fish got very scarce—and that was the beginning of the end for the fishing trade, really

the Spinks’ operation has long outgrown the whisky barrels their ancestors favoured. This makes no difference, Gary observes: “After so much use, the barrels wouldn’t have imparted any whisky flavour.” It’s the fresh hardwood that gives the smoke it’s taste, a mix of cedar and oak. “Some people have tried to use old broken-up palettes and other rubbish, but you can’t do that. The smoke is the flavour, so you need to use quality wood.”

Donning thick gloves, Gary lifts the fish-laden sticks and places them above the fierce, flickering fire. “It’s a nice, calm day without wind” he observes wryly—we’re there a week after Storm Dennis’s ‘visit’—“but these aren’t the biggest fish, so they should take about 90 minutes.” He shuts the heavy wooden lid, another minor and fairly meaningless update on the hessian sacks historically used to trap the smoke. “Sacks are hard to source and wood is just as good. Solid but breathable,” Gary continues. Because one side of the fire is hotter than the other (“No idea why; it’s always been that way”) he’ll need to turn them about half way through the process. He sets his phone alarm and returns to the fish prep room, where Alex junior is unloading salmon: thick, pink sides, from farms in Shetland and Norway that

SMOKING AREA FIVE SMOKED PRODUCTS TO BUY ONLINE

Smoked raclette Jumi Cheese As with all Jumi’s cheeses, every drop of milk in this smoked raclette comes from simmental cows, indigenous to the Swiss Alps. Every morning, the cheesemaker, Herr Glauser, receives a delivery of local milk which, being unpasteurised and unhomogenised, retains all the character of its locale and seasonality. The cheese is aged for two to three months before being exposed to cold smoke from locally sourced wood.

Buy it by the chunk, grill and scrape its gooey goodness onto bread, potatoes and gherkins to savour the salty, smoky quintessentially Alpine taste.

Finca La Barca smoked olive oil Brindisa Produced on the Netasa family farm in La Vera, Extremadura, Finca La Barca smoked olive oil is made with the oil of arbequina olives. Using the same method used to produce the region’s prized smoked paprika, the oil is smoked over holme oak wood for 15 days before bottling. Each bottle is numbered and sealed with wax—an elegant flourish, which the oil itself more than lives up to. Creamy and delicate, its subtle smokiness lends itself beautifully to dressings and dips.

Dalmatian prosciutto Taste Croatia Known locally as pršut, this EU protected product is the rear leg of a pig, salted and air-dried in the winds that come billowing in from the Adriatic and down from the coastal mountains. Unique to the region 17 Market Life 49 / boroughmarket.org.uk

of Dalmatia, it is cured with a mix of coarse and fine sea salt before being pressed and cold smoked over the wood of beech trees, oaks or hornbeam. The legs then dry and mature further for about 12 months, wherein an intensely red ham will develop. Sweet, succulent and almost aromatic in flavour, it’s the best friend of Croatian wines and cheese.

Smoked siracha Eaten Alive The result of Eaten Alive’s founders Glyn and Pat experimenting with their new smoker, this scarlet, smoky-sweet yet spiky sensation won three stars at 2019’s Great Taste Awards.

Customers “eat it by the spoonful”, they say, its blend of smoke and fermented vegetables proving irresistible. Like all great ideas, the premise is fairly simple: pepper, chilli, onion and a range of herbs and spices are individually fermented, then smoked over hard wood before being blended together.

Serve with pretty much anything that would benefit from a bit of crunch and kick, or follow the lead of the aforementioned customers and tuck in with a spoon.

Smoked sea salt Spice Mountain It takes 120 hours of cold smoking over oak to imbue this pure English sea salt with its impressive depth of flavour—but all that time is worth it for the sweet smoky aroma it imbues and the rich twist it brings to everything from steak to boiled or fried eggs.

Sprinkle generously over grilled meats, fish and vegetables, and even if you’re stuck in a flat, you’ll be able to convince yourself you’re at a barbecue.

prioritise sustainability. While Gary slices them up, we retire to the office to chat with the two Alexes: Alex senior has arrived, here to take a break from retirement by filleting fish and filling us in on his life’s work.

Forty-two years ago, when he started the business, Arbroath was still a bustling harbour, with most of the town employed directly or indirectly by the fishing trade. His father was one of them: a fisherman who in Arbroath’s heyday was “catching fish like they’d never caught before”. This was the mid-1970s, Alex senior continues. “The pair trawl had started: two boats, pulling one net between them, which dragged along the bottom and caught all sorts of fish”—a method even more damaging than the one-boat trawler. “After two or three years, the fish got very scarce—and that was the beginning of the end, really.” Trade moved to Aberdeen, and then, when that harbour fell too, to Peterhead and Shetland.

Meanwhile young Alex senior had spurned the family boat in favour of fishmongery and smoking—first for another merchant, then using his father’s steadily diminishing haul.

The draconian quotas introduced by the UK and EU decimated Scotland’s fishing towns, but did have a significant upside.

“There are more fish now than there ever were. At one point we were having to import fish from Iceland to sell. There were no fish at all out there,” he says. Now he’s handing his business on, confident in the knowledge that Alex junior, Gary and the rest of his former colleagues will be secure in its employ. “There is a future in it now—otherwise I’d never have encouraged Alex,” he says soberly. “There are fewer boats, but they are better boats, and the fishermen are investing in it.” Not all are sustainably minded, and Alex junior is careful to buy from those certified by the Marine Stewardship Council, but there is “a lot more confidence in the industry”. That, together with the EU protected name status, has sown hope among fish merchants here in Abroath.

Gary pokes his head round the door. “The smokies are coming off the fire now, if you’d like to watch,” he announces. We follow eagerly, hoping there’ll be a dropper or two, our appetites having been stoked further by the Spinks’ description of eating them “straight off the barrel, when the flesh is juicy and moist and still warm”. In the fug of the smoking room, Gary lifts the barrel’s heavy wooden lid and disappears briefly into a billow of smoke before emerging triumphantly with a rail of smokies. Burnished by the fire, their skin sizzles slightly as he sets them down: “Sometimes I take the temperature, but I’m mainly looking for colour, and whether the skin moves.” He knows these are ready because their skins are coppery, dry and taut. Now it’s the salmon’s turn to enter the smoker: hot smoking requires more heat from the fire, so they follow the smokies, which fare best on its first, less intense flames. Gary makes toward the trays of pink fillets and, as he does so, a single solitary smokie starts to fall.

He catches it just in time and, setting it before us, deftly removes the main bone so the skin splits and reveals its steaming white bounty. We fall upon it and, using our fingers, peel off jagged lumps of the flesh. It is delectable: creamy and barely-cooked, with a lingering hint of oaky smoke that complements its innate sweetness. It is like an apple eaten straight from the tree, a pea podded and popped onto your tongue. It is past and present, time and place, all in one mouthful.

BEAUTY PAGEANT Author and broadcaster Juliet Sear shares a collection of recipes for the home baker, inspired by the visual beauty of seasonal produce Images: Kim Lightbody

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Chocolate and beetroot cake

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When it comes to baking cakes, the real sweet spot for me—no pun intended—is presentation. Most of the time, a cake has been made to be shared. Even when it hasn’t been baked for an occasion that’s explicitly celebratory—a birthday, a wedding—there is usually still that collective moment, that ceremonial unveiling, that instant when everyone’s focus turns to your creation. You can, of course, just bake a bog-standard loaf, and if you do it well it can taste absolutely delicious, but I want my cakes to be a feast for the eyes as well. If you’ve gone to the effort of baking something, with all the care and concentration that requires, you might as well spend just a little more time trying to ensure that when that collective moment does arrive, the reaction is: wow, that looks incredible.

When I’m planning a cake, right from the start I’m thinking about how it will look as well as how it will taste. Designs even come to me in the night, which probably indicates just how obsessed I am (although there are

worse things to dream about, I suppose).

The inspiration behind these recipes—the produce of Borough Market—lent itself very easily to creating that visual punch. I love working with seasonal fruit and vegetables— when the seasons change, I get really excited by the possibilities that open up. You can see it clearly here: the beetroot, the carrots, the rhubarb, the almonds; they’re all so beautiful to start with that using them for their decorative potential as well as the texture and depth they bring to the body of the cake is a real treat. The chocolate and beetroot cake would taste amazing even without those gorgeous slivers of candied beetroot on top— those little spirals of colour that catch the light and bring the whole thing to life—but they’re what elevate it to the next level. The carrots tops poking through the top on the carrot cake are guaranteed to raise a smile, and that’s a reaction that every baker enjoys.

And I like to think there’s at least one of your five-a-day in a portion (there probably isn’t, but hey, it’s a comforting thought!).

Carrot patch tray bake Right: lemon and elderflower bundt cake Below: strawberry gatlova

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Chocolate and beetroot cake 8-10 slices

Carrot patch tray bake 24 portions

Lemon and elderflower bundt cake Serves 10-12

Deep chocolate and earthy beetroot is a classic flavour combination. Serve simply with tangy creme fraiche. The candied beetroot slices make a great cake decoration, but you can also eat them as a sweet treat.

This cake is so delicious and very easy to bake and decorate. The playful use of fresh baby carrots and delicious brittle adds a lovely touch to the creamy frosted top. It’s a real crowd pleaser—plenty to serve up at a large gathering!

Bundt cakes are brilliant because their magnificent shape and structure create a wow factor without needing too much effort. This bake is gorgeous simply drizzled with some delicious elderflower icing. I’ve used some lovely lemon-coloured sugared almonds from Maggio’s Confectionery to decorate, along with some gorgeous edible violas.

For the sponge: — 20g cocoa powder — 115 g self-raising flour — 1 tsp baking powder — 125g light muscovado sugar — 160g cooked beetroot — 2 medium free range eggs — 125ml sunflower oil — 75g dark chocolate, finely chopped, melted and cooled For the chocolate icing: — 140g double cream — 160g dark chocolate — 50g golden syrup For the candied beetroot: — 100g caster sugar — 125ml water — 3 small rainbow beetroot, thinly sliced to give a variety of shades Equipment: — Two baking trays, lined with parchment — Food processor — 7 inch round cake tin, greased, base and side lined with parchment — Palette knife — The candied beetroot will last for up to a week if well wrapped, so you can do this well in advance. Heat the oven to 180C. Place the sugar and water in a medium saucepan.

Over a medium heat, stir until the sugar has completely dissolved. Bring to a gentle simmer. Add the beetroot and simmer for 10 mins.

— On the baking trays, lay the beetroot slices with space in between them. Bake for 10 mins until crisping up, turn over and bake for a further 5 mins. Keep your eye on them, as ovens vary—you want them to keep their colour and not get too brown. Leave to cool.

— To make the cake, heat the oven to 180C. In a large bowl, dry whisk the cocoa, flour, baking powder and sugar—bash out any lumps in the sugar, as muscovado can be a little clumpy.

— Blend the cooked beetroot in a food processor until very smooth—scrape any stray pieces from the side of the mixer to ensure it is all blended fully. With the machine running, add the eggs one at a time, then pour in the oil. Blend until smooth.

— Stir the wet mixture into the bowl with the dry ingredients. Add the cooled melted chocolate and mix thoroughly. Pour into the tin and cook for 40-45 mins, until a skewer comes out clean.

— Remove from the oven and leave to cool for 10 mins, then turn out of the tin and leave to cool on a wire rack.

— To make the glossy chocolate topping, melt all the ingredients gently in a pan until thick, melty, lump-free and glistening. Leave to cool for about 30 mins until cool enough to spread easily without dripping off the cake.

— Use a palette knife to lay the frosting on top of the cake and make a swirl. Leave to set, then slice and serve with a dollop of creme fraiche and some candied beetroot.

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For the cake: — 400g self-raising flour — 2 tsp baking powder — 2 tsp ground cinnamon — 350g light muscovado sugar — 350ml sunflower oil — 6 large eggs, lightly beaten — 300g grated carrot — 250g sultanas — 200g walnuts, chopped into small pieces — Grated zest of 2 oranges Fort the frosting: — 140g butter — 1 tsp vanilla bean paste — 280g icing sugar — 200g cream cheese To decorate: — A few fresh small carrots with their tops, washed and trimmed — 50g nut brittle, crushed Equipment: — Large tray bake tin (I used a 33cm x 23cm), greased and lined with parchment paper — Stand mixer with paddle attachment (or electric beater, or bowl and wooden spoon) — Heat the oven to 200C. Place the flour, cinnamon and baking powder in a bowl and dry whisk through to distribute everything evenly.

— Place the muscovado sugar in a large bowl, add the oil and, with a whisk, mix well to break down any lumps. Add the eggs and whisk through to combine. Add the grated carrot, sultanas and nuts to the mix and stir well.

Add the flour and cinnamon mix and gently fold through until fully combined.

— Pour into the lined tin and bake for 35-45 mins until cooked through, well risen and golden. Test in the centre with a skewer to make sure it’s completely cooked—the skewer should come out clean.

— Leave to cool in the tin for 10 mins, then turn out onto a wire rack, remove the paper and leave to cool completely before icing.

— Make the frosting by beating the butter and vanilla in your stand mixer until pale, light and creamy (an electric beater or wooden spoon would also work). Gradually beat in the icing sugar until light and fluffy. Lastly, on a slow setting, gently beat in the cream cheese.

— Spread the frosting over the top of the tray bake in an even layer. To decorate, add a few baby carrots, chopped at different heights, and sprinkle with crushed nut brittle.

For the sponge cake: — 300g butter — 275g golden caster sugar — Zest of 2 lemons — 1 tsp vanilla extract or bean paste — 5 medium eggs at room temperature — 250g self-raising flour — 75g ground almonds — 2 tsp baking powder For the elderflower fondant topping — 280g fondant icing sugar — 40g elderflower cordial — Juice of 1 lemon — Sugared almonds — Fresh edible flowers For the lemon curd cream: — 300g extra thick cream — 200g good quality lemon curd Equipment: — Bundt tin — Pastry brush — Stand mixer, hand whisk or bowl and wooden spoon — Piping bag (optional) — Heat the oven to 190C and prepare your bundt tin by brushing the inside with melted butter, dusting with additional flour and shaking out the excess (or you can use cake release spray if you have that).

— Cream the butter, sugar, zest and vanilla together in a stand mixer or by hand until very pale and fluffy. Beat in the eggs gently one by one until fully incorporated.

— In a separate bowl, lightly mix the almonds, flour and baking powder to distribute evenly, then gently mix into the wet ingredients until just combined. Don’t over-mix or your sponge may be tough.

— Spoon into the tin, level off and bake for approximately 35-45 mins until cooked through. Use a skewer to check it is fully cooked in the centre. Leave in the tin for 10 mins, then turn out and leave to cool on a rack.

— Meanwhile, mix your fondant sugar, elderflower cordial and lemon juice until smooth and lump free. You might need a little extra water depending on the amount of lemon juice yielded. You need a dripping (but not runny) consistency so it can flow nicely over the cake.

— Use a piping bag if you want to be very precise with how the icing falls over the cake, or use a spoon if you prefer a more rustic finish.

Decorate by dotting around the flowers and sugared almonds.

— For the lemon curd cream, simply add the ingredients to a large bowl and gently swirl together to marble the curd through the cream. Serve a little dollop alongside each slice of cake.

Even when it hasn’t been baked for an occasion that’s explicitly celebratory, there is usually still that collective moment, that ceremonial unveiling, that instant when everyone’s focus turns to your creation

Strawberry gatlova 10-12 portions

Rhubarb crumble loaf cake 6-8 slices

This eye-catching stack of thin, crisp meringue circles looks like a pretty gateau.

It’s also naturally gluten free. Layered with a yoghurt filling, it’s quite a bit lighter than a cream-heavy pavlova and much more impressive looking too. The addition of the beautiful gariguette strawberries make it something truly special. Dipping some whole strawberries in the melted chocolate makes for a particularly show-stopping decoration.

This pretty loaf cake is a little bit special.

You can make this without the crumble and roast rhubarb for an easy everyday loaf, but the addition of the sweet, crunchy topping takes it to the next level. Serve with extra roasted rhubarb (which you can cook at the same time as baking the cake) and delicious creamy mascarpone. It’s a real treat.

— 5 medium egg whites at room temperature — A pinch of sea salt — 250g white caster sugar — 1 tsp vanilla extract — 300g dark chocolate, melted and cooled — 600g thick, Greek-style yoghurt — 2 tablespoons of honey — 2 tablespoons icing sugar — 500g gariguette strawberries—10-12 left whole for dipping, the rest sliced evenly in pieces about the thickness of a pound coin Equipment: — Large baking sheets, lined with baking parchment. I used three baking sheets, each of which accommodated two 18cm round circles with a little room in between — Electric hand whisk (a balloon whisk will work, but will take much longer) — Bain marie or microwave — To prepare the baking sheets, draw around an 18cm (7 inch) round cake board or similar to create five circles. Turn the paper over to prevent any pen being transferred onto the meringue rounds.

— To make the meringue, heat the oven to 120C. Whisk the egg whites and sea salt to stiff peaks, then add the sugar 1 tbsp at a time, whisking well between each addition.

Whisk the vanilla in at the end. You should have a stiff and glossy mixture.

— Spoon the meringue onto your prepared trays with your circles already drawn. Carefully spread the meringue with a palette knife until the circle is filled and you have an even thin layer of meringue.

— Place in the oven for 20 mins then reduce to 100C and cook for another 30-40 mins.

Turn off the heat and leave in the oven to cool completely—you can do this two or three days in advance if you wish as long as you keep the meringues wrapped and airtight.

— When ready to assemble, gently melt the chocolate in a bain marie or a microwave until smooth and glossy, then leave to cool a little.

If you wish to dip a few whole strawberries in chocolate to add to the top, do this now— place them onto a piece of parchment while the chocolate sets. Paint four of the cooked meringue discs with a layer of melted chocolate.

— To make the yoghurt cream filling, whisk together the yoghurt, honey and icing sugar.

— To assemble, place a chocolate-covered disc on a cake plate or stand and add some of the yoghurt filling to thickly cover the meringue.

Add a layer of sliced strawberries to cover, then add the next meringue disc. Repeat for all the meringues, leave the bare one for the top. Decorate with the reserved strawberries, sliced in half, and some of the chocolatecoated whole strawberries, if using. Best served as soon as possible, and within a couple of hours.

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For the loaf cake: — 100g golden caster sugar — 100g butter — Zest of 1 orange — 2 medium eggs — 80g polenta — 1 tsp baking powder — 60g ground almonds — 120g rhubarb (chopped into 2cm lengths) For the crumble topping: — 40g plain flour — 20g slightly salted butter (cold and cut into cubes) — 30g golden caster sugar For the roast rhubarb (optional): — 200g rhubarb cut into 8cm lengths — 20g caster sugar — Mascarpone Equipment: — Stand mixer with paddle attachment or bowl and wooden spoon — Small 1lb loaf tin, greased and lined with baking parchment, sitting on a small baking tray to catch any crumbs — Small roasting dish — Heat the oven to 180C. Beat the sugar and butter together in a stand mixer with a paddle attachment until light and fluffy. Add the orange zest, then beat in the eggs one at a time. Fold in the polenta, baking powder and ground almonds.

— Spoon half the mixture over the base of the cake tin and spread it out evenly with a pallete knife or the back of a spoon. Arrange the chopped rhubarb over this layer of cake mixture, then drop the rest of the mixture over the top. Smooth with a spoon or palette knife.

Bake for 20-25 mins.

— While the sponge is baking, prepare the topping by rubbing the flour and butter between your fingertips until it resembles breadcrumbs, then mix in the sugar.

— When the cake has been baking for 20-25 mins and is set enough to hold the crumble and not sink, remove it from the oven. Turn up the heat to 200C. Crumble the topping onto the part-baked cake, creating a single layer of lumps and crumbs. Bake for a further 20 mins until the cake is cooked through and the crumble is lightly golden.

— While the crumble-topped cake is back in the oven, place the rhubarb in a small roasting dish, sprinkle with the caster sugar and toss through with your hands. Cover with tin foil and bake for 15 mins, then remove the foil and roast for a further 5 mins. Leave the rhubarb to cool in its syrupy juices.

— When the loaf is cooked, leave to cool in the tin for 10 mins, then cool fully on a wire rack. Serve in slices dressed with a couple of pieces of glorious roasted rhubarb and a generous sprinkling of crumble, finished with mascarpone.

Rhubarb crumble loaf cake Buy online Nut brittle Food & Forest Polenta From Field and Flower Dark chocolate So Chocolicious Sugared almonds Maggio’s Confectionery

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WE’VE GOT USED TO THIS THING CALLED CHEAP FOOD, WHICH DOESN’T REALLY EXIST.

WE’VE CREATED AN ILLUSION Carolyn Steel, author of Hungry City and Sitopia, on the urban paradox, embracing nature, and why a good society is one in which everybody eats well Interview: Ellie Costigan Portrait: Orlando Gili

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Carolyn Steel is an architect at heart. When I visit her London flat, once the tea is made (“first things first”), the next thing she does is get out a detailed plan, scribbled some eight years ago, mapping out the bare bones of her just-released second book, Sitopia. “I think spatially,” she concedes. An architect by training, Carolyn’s career has traversed posts at the London School of Economics, London Metropolitan University and Cambridge University, as well as journalism and presenting. The thread that joins all of her work together is a fascination with food: namely, how it shapes our lives and lived environments. Her first book, Hungry City, cemented her position as a leading thinker on the topic. Carolyn’s latest tome, Sitopia, places food firmly at the centre of solutions to the predicaments of the modern age, drawing on architecture, philosophy, literature, history, politics and science to get there.

Did you always have a strong interest in food?

Sort of. My grandparents owned a hotel in Bournemouth and we were there every other weekend. I remember being intrigued and excited by the contrast between the chaos of the kitchen—grease running down the walls and people shouting—and the rooms through the service door, where it was all “yes madam, no madam”, chandeliers and antique furniture. I remember loving that threshold—having the privilege of being able to walk between two worlds. It was completely magic.

Clearly, from very early on in my life I was encountering a lot to do with food, but I would say my interest only really took shape in my early twenties, when I started reading about the history of food.

How did you make the leap from architecture to food?

As I started studying architecture I became conscious that there was something missing for me. That was the beginning of a long and painful 20-year search.

I gradually realised that my interest lay in our relationship with buildings, how we live, rather than the buildings themselves. When I joined the London School of Economics as their first studio director, I was always trying to introduce disciplines that lay outside architecture. I realised people were still stuck in their silos, which drove me completely mad. When I left, almost in despair, I proposed to a colleague that we write a book on cities together. During that conversation, I had the idea of describing a city through food. It was the biggest lightbulb moment of my life—both my arms turned to chicken skin and my hair stood up on end.

This is my thing! Food is my lens. I had the structure of Hungry City in less than a week.

Has studying architecture before coming to food given you an unusual perspective?

The ability to see where it’s all connected is definitely the skill of an architect—that helicopter vision. But I was completely paranoid the whole way through. Some of the stuff I was coming up with felt so obvious, like where I talk about how food shapes the city: why the meat was sold at Smithfield, why the veg was sold at Borough Market. I thought, I can’t be the only person writing about this; it can’t just be me doing this in my pyjamas, there must be a whole section in the library I’ve just not discovered. But there wasn’t. It was just me doing it in my pyjamas.

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So, how was London shaped by food?

It was shaped by how food physically travelled to the city. When the Romans founded London, on the site of what is now the City, they set up the classic cardo and decumanus—the main north-south, east-west routes— and put the main market where they met. A no brainer.

The site of the main market, the Roman forum, is where Leadenhall developed. Cheapside was an extension of that. The meat was coming in from the north and west— Scotland and Wales—getting fattened up in the suburbs and sold at Newgate. When Newgate got too small, it was sold in a ‘smooth field’ just outside of it: Smithfield. All the geese and turkeys from East Anglia would waddle into the city to be sold at the east side of the market at Poultry, which retains its name. Borough Market is at the end of London Bridge, which was the only bridge across the river until halfway through the 18th century, incredibly. It mainly sold fruit and veg, which was coming up from Kent, the key market garden of London.

Interestingly, the government had very little to do with feeding London. That’s the big difference between London and Paris: Paris tried to centralise its food in one place and control it. The English kings and queens just let the city get on with it. Then if they wanted to wage a war, they came begging to the city for money. It’s why London never had one centralised market, like Paris did.

I often say it explains Brexit, though of course nothing really explains Brexit—this free trade attitude we have to feeding ourselves. The king never fed his people in this country, and that feels really significant.

You often use the phrase ‘urban paradox’. What do you mean by that?

There’s an inherent duality at the heart of how we should live as humans. We’re social, we have to be with one another to thrive, but we’re animals, which means that we need nature. How do you reconcile these two things?

Actually, you can’t—and that’s the paradox. The more we gather in cities to be political or to be social, the further we get away from our source of sustenance, out in nature. Historically, utopian thinkers have tried to give you the best of both worlds: Aristotle, Thomas More, the amazing Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s The Effects of Good Governance, which is a painting of the city of Sienna and the countryside beyond, with a big red wall in between.

My latest book is called Sitopia, which means ‘food place’, and it was really a deliberate alternative to ‘utopia’, which doesn’t exist or is so ideal it can’t exist. If you value food, you get a good sitopia. It is the achievement of a balance between the city and the countryside, recognising that they’re both equally important. And not just the countryside, but nature as a whole. Arguably, all farming is an interference with nature, but in many forms of modern farming nature is seen as the enemy. Pests are the enemy. Weather’s the enemy. Infertile soil’s the enemy. But of course, there are mindsets of farming where nature is your friend: the regenerative forms and the organic forms. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that we have to work with nature, not against it, because we’re running out of planet. A good sitopia is about valuing food, valuing farmers and valuing nature.

How do we go about achieving a good ‘sitopia’?

It’s a geometrical problem: if you live in a city the size of London, you have to drive for an hour before you see any countryside. If you live in a small village, it is all around you. Historically, what a lot of utopians have tried to do is limit the size of the city: that’s what Ebenezer

explosion. It also made it possible to transport heavy, bulky food very cheaply, so you got the commodification of grain—the food of cities. Then came the invention of futures trading and, critically, the idea of feeding grain to cattle, so the invention of cheap meat. This all happened in the mid-19th century and we’ve really been doing it ever since. It’s the blueprint of the modern industrial model.

Could things have gone differently?

At the time, nobody could see what the downsides of any of this were. They could see that conditions in the slaughterhouses in Chicago weren’t great, but they couldn’t see what ploughing up prairie land and farming it monoculturally was going to do. That became clear in the 1920s, when the Dust Bowl blew most of the topsoil away. We’re still caught on the horns of that dilemma.

We’ve got used to this thing called cheap food, which doesn’t really exist—we’ve created an illusion of it. We need to internalise the true cost of food: polluting rivers, cutting down rainforest, depleting fish stocks, these all have a cost. Some have a cost that’s so high, you just shouldn’t do it. I think Covid-19 is a massive wake-up call: if you take nature for granted, it will come back and bite you.

Italian peasant food is as cheap as food gets, but it’s some of the best in the world. You grew it, you cooked it, you care about it and it doesn’t have to cost very much in monetary terms. We need to blast apart the idea that good food is ‘posh’

Howard did with his Garden City, that’s what Thomas More did with his Utopia. Patrick Geddes, the father of regional planning, talks about preserving corridors of countryside, so when the city expands it turns into a kind of star shape, with ribbons of countryside in between ribbons of urbanity.

The formulation I’ve come up with involves maximising the urban-rural interface. It’s permaculture, in a way, because it can happen at any scale. I grow Danish pickling cucumbers on my roof, for example. That’s a way of bringing nature into the city at the scale of a house. It goes from that, to planning regionally for a good relationship between the city and its productive hinterland—either the size of the city is limited, or you have geometrical patterns which allow built-up environments and productive nature to coexist.

Looking back at the development of the modern food system, is there an identifiable point at which things changed irreversibly?

I think there are two: one pre-industrial and one postindustrial. Up until the rise of Rome, pretty much all cities were city states: limited in size and fed from their local hinterland. Rome blasts that out of the water, because it’s the first city that radically outgrows its hinterland. It doesn’t even try to feed itself, it imports things from a long way away—Athens did that as well, so it wasn’t the first city to do it, but it did it in a bigger way. If you look at Rome 2,000 years ago, you can see all the phenomena that we’re dealing with now, in terms of struggling to feed the city and supply chain issues.

That’s instance number one.

The second wave is industrialisation. The railways emancipated cities from geography. Until then, the size a city could be, the shape a city could be, where a city could be, were completely prescribed by geography.

The railways made it possible to transport food long distances rapidly. You could now build cities any size, any place, anywhere, so there was a massive urban

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The argument often cited against food being priced for its ‘true cost’ is that there are people who cannot afford it. What’s your response to that?

Internalising the cost of food means all food will cost the same as artisanally-produced, organic food does now, because that is food that is produced without trashing people or the planet. Therefore, everyone would have to be able to afford to eat that kind of food. Currently, 12 to 20 per cent of the population would fall below the breadline—so we need to deal with that. We have the most unequal society in Europe, because, like the Americans, we’ve gone down the neoliberal path. That is the problem: people being unable to afford good food.

We have to turn the problem upside down and start dealing with poverty.

A good society is one in which everybody eats well.

Carlo Petrini of Slow Food is very good on this. He talks about cucina povera, which is basically Italian peasant food. It is as cheap as food gets, but some of the best food in the world. You grew it, you cooked it, you care about it and it doesn’t have to cost very much in monetary terms at all. We need to blast apart the idea that good food is ‘posh’. In a very class-bound society like ours, it’s always going to come down to that.

Surely there are some positives to modern capitalism, in terms of improved quality of life.

The big question is: what is a good life? That is the question I am using the lens of food to answer.

My argument centres on the extent to which capitalism delivers a good life. I think up to a point it does—the trouble is we’ve completely overshot.

Nobody produces anything anymore. We’re not citizens, we’re consumers. But merely consuming doesn’t make us happy. You can see it in the maker movement, people starting to pickle and bake again: there is a deep human need to do something meaningful with your life. It’s interesting to me that often people who go into the City and earn millions, basically gambling with other people’s money, get burnt out at the age of 40 and decide that what they really want to do is make some artisanal cheese.

We know this is a phenomenon. What is this about?

It’s about wanting a life full of meaning.

I think the biggest obstacle to that is our values system. You can see in countries where they still care about food—the Mediterranean countries, the Far East, and so on—that even though there is a battle between traditional food cultures and the horrible fast food monolith that’s trying to take over, markets still thrive, people eat well, family life still revolves around the table. That is what a good life is about. I think we’ve forgotten that.

EDIBLE HISTORIES EGGS

From Babylonian comedy to battery farm tragedies via Roman omelettes and the birth of the full English, Mark Riddaway tells the story of the egg “It has, I believe, been often remarked, that a hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg,” wrote Samuel Butler, the 19th century novelist and prominent critic of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection, in his Life and Habit, an ambitious work of highly questionable science which, among many strange tangents, exhausted hundreds of words on the question of whether eggs have memories.

While steering clear of that particular debate, what we can say with some confidence is that in Butler’s era, and for a long time both before and after, a hen was, as far as most people were concerned, humanity’s way of making another egg. And another egg. And another egg.

Eating a young, tender fowl has, for large swathes of our history, been a luxury afforded only to the more extravagant sections of society, and for a very simple reason: prolific egg layers are gifts that keep on giving. Written in ancient Greece around 600BC, Aesop’s fable of the goose that lays eggs of pure gold, only to be killed by an avaricious couple hoping to find a store of gold inside it, contains a lesson that has long applied to creatures of less singular talent.

If a bird will every few days convert its scrappy diet of grubs, worms, seeds and cereals into a conveniently packaged vessel of gloriously tasty protein—a food that is, metaphorically at least, absolutely golden—why do anything other than encourage it to keep laying?

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Humans have been eating eggs for as long as humans have been doing anything. At first, these would have been taken from the nests of wild birds. Later, when poultry were domesticated—a little further down the line than the mammals that figure prominently in our diet—one of the many motivations for bringing them into the farmyard was their egg-laying prowess.

This aptitude would be honed in some breeds through millennia of careful selection, while others were bred for their meat or their fighting skills. The domesticated chickens whose eggs we eat today evolved from at least a couple of species of wild Asian jungle fowl. Exactly where in Asia these birds were first tamed is a matter of impassioned debate, as is the timing, but certainly they were being widely kept—and their eggs eaten—at least 5,000 years ago, if not a couple of millennia earlier.

Goose eggs feature in what must be the world’s oldest joke about food, dating from the Old Babylonian period. The Aluzinnu Text, a collection of parodic writings that mock various literary genres and fields of academia, includes a list of fancy-sounding menu items, one for each month, each of which pairs seasonal ingredients with disgusting non-sequiturs (chicken feathers, donkey dung, ass’s anus). For the month of “Tebetu”, it is suggested that “you shall eat the egg of a goose from the poultry house resting on a bed of sand and a decoction of

Euphratean seaweed”. Delicious.

When Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria, inaugurated the city of Nimrud as his new capital in the first half of the 9th century BC, he threw a party that was attended by 69,574 people and lasted 10 days. Details of the celebratory banquet prepared for “Ashur, the great lord, and the gods of his entire country” were engraving onto a stela, now part of the collection of the British Museum. Included among the many courses at the dinner were 10,000 assorted eggs. On its own, that sounds like a lot, but the dinner also included 38,500 birds of various sorts, so if anything he was being a little stingy with the eggs.

Not all of the eggs consumed in the ancient world were laid by poultry. In Thebes, Egypt, on a wall of the tomb of Horemheb, a royal scribe and military general who was buried around 1350BC, is a painting of a man (“the superior of the fowlers” according to the hieroglyphs), tending to a group of pelicans, whose dozens of eggs are piled up beside them in baskets. By all accounts, pelican eggs are not the best—off-puttingly fishy—but someone was clearly intending to eat them. The ancient Greeks bred chickens for their eggs, but those of other birds were seemingly valued more highly.

Athenaeus, whose 3rd century book The Deipnosophists offered insight into the lost works of earlier Hellenic writers quotes “Epaenetus and Heraclides the Syracusan” as saying that “the

best of all eggs are peahen’s eggs; and that the next best are those of the foxgoose”. Those of “common poultry” ranked a paltry third.

It was the Romans who were the first to really revel in the culinary power of the egg. In the 1st century BC, the poet Horace used the phrase “ab ovo usque ad mala” (‘from the egg to the apples’) in one of his Satires as an idiom meaning ‘from the beginning to the end’—eating fresh fruit was the accepted way of rounding off a Roman meal; eggs clearly figured prominently at the start. The Apicius cookbook, a collection of recipes compiled in Rome in the 1st century, is overflowing with eggs: fried eggs finished in a wine sauce; boiled eggs “seasoned with broth, oil, pure wine, or served with broth, pepper and laser [silphium—a plant used as a condiment]”; poached eggs served with “pepper, lovage, soaked nuts, honey, vinegar and broth”; a baked custard of egg and milk. It also features what is clearly an omelette: “Four eggs in half a pint of milk and an ounce of oil well beaten, to make a fluffy mixture; in a pan put a little oil, and carefully add the egg preparation, without letting it boil however. Place it in the oven to let it rise and when one side is done, turn it out into a service platter fold it pour over honey, sprinkle with pepper and serve.” The pickled egg, jars of which once sat behind the counters of pubs up and down the UK waiting for drinkers to be sufficiently

9thC BC

Ashurnasirpal II, king of Assyria, feeds 10,000 assorted eggs to the guests at one of history’s greatest feasts

1stC AD

The Apicius cookbook includes a recipe for a Roman omelette

hungry and well-oiled to risk the opprobrium associated with openly eating one, was clearly enjoyed by the Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder. “Eggs, if soaked in vinegar, are rendered so soft thereby, that they may be twisted round the finger like a ring,” he wrote.

In the ancient world, before centuries of selective breeding had increased their size to the relative whoppers we’re used to seeing today, chickens’ eggs were on the small side. According to The Geoponica, a collection of agricultural lore produced in 10th century Constantinople but incorporating much older Greek and Roman sources, hens could be encouraged to lay larger eggs by supplementing their diet with ceramics: “You will make hens produce large eggs if you crush Laconian [southern Greek] pots, mix the powder with bran, moisten it with wine and give it to them or mix a saucer of crushed pot with two choinikes of bran and give as food.”

Eggs were among the foods whose consumption was banned by the Catholic Church on fasting days, including Fridays, saints’ days and the duration of Lent. The Council of Trullo in 692 stated that “the whole Church of God which is in all the world should follow one rule and keep the fast perfectly, and as they abstain from everything which is killed, so also should they from eggs and cheese, which are the fruit and produce of those animals from which we abstain”.

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1651

François Pierre de la Varenne publishes recipes for some of France’s true egg-based classics

1911

Artemus Ward comments on the factory-like conditions of large American chicken farms

1669

Sir Kenhelm Digby recommends poached eggs with bacon for breakfast

centuries-old British tradition of making pancakes on Shrove Tuesday—a way of using up and revelling in eggs and animal fats before the start of the Lenten fast.

During the medieval period, chickens were widely kept around Europe, but to nothing like the same extent they are today—the raising of poultry would have been a marginal activity for any farm or household; a supplement rather than a major focus.

The understanding of the rich culinary potential of eggs was, however, continuing to evolve.

The 15th century cookbook of Maestro Martino, chef to some of Italy’s most powerful churchmen and aristocrats, included a whole chapter on eggs. This included a classic recipe for a frittata, packed with cheese, “chard, a generous amount of parsley, borage, mint, marjoram, and a lesser amount of sage”, and an intriguing one for “stuffed eggs”: hard boiled eggs cut in half, their yolks removed, the cavity filled with a mix of cheese, herbs and spices, the stuffed eggs fried slowly in oil, then served with a sauce made from the reserved yolks, raisins, verjuice and more spice.

Martino’s guide to making boiled eggs was both memorable and potentially flawed: “Place fresh eggs in cold water and boil for the time it takes you to say a Lord’s Prayer, or a little bit longer.” Unless you’re saying the Lord’s Prayer very slowly, or prefer your eggs to be quite liquid, I would definitely suggest the ‘bit longer’ option.

François Pierre de la Varenne’s Le Cuisinier François (1651) was

one of the first French cookbooks to record a shift in his country’s cuisine away from the rich, spice-heavy food of the medieval European elite towards a more modern, regionally-specific form, and his proclivity for eggs was certainly notable. Among over 60 egg recipes, Varenne included one that is essentially hollandaise sauce, and one for a ham omelette that reads like it was written last week—right down to its very Gallic fear of overcooking: “Simply take a dozen eggs, and break them, saving only half the egg whites.

Beat them together. Take your ham, and prepare as necessary.

Mix it with your eggs. Then, take some lard, melt it, and throw in your eggs, making sure not to overcook the mixture. Serve.”

In Britain today, the meal most closely associated with eggs is breakfast, and it’s an association with deep roots. In 1620, the English medical writer Tobias Venner wrote: “If any man desire a light nourishing and comfortable break-fast, I know none better than a couple of comfortable potched egges, seasoned with a little salt, and a few cornes of pepper also, with a drop or two of vinegar.”

His suggestion was to mop this up with bread and butter and— rather more controversially— wash it down with a “good draught of pure claret-wine”. A collection of recipes first published in 1669, based on the scribblings of the diplomat, privateer, sealing wax seller, natural philosopher, astrologer and gastronome Sir Kenelm Digby, added to the eggs

a familiar accompaniment: “Two poched eggs with a few fine dryfryed collops of pure bacon, are not bad for break-fast.” And very few Britons since have found reason to argue.

The 18th and 19th centuries saw an explosion in the production of eggs around the continent, thanks to the coalescence of several factors: the Catholic church began to loosen—or, in the case of protestant countries, lose— its firm grip on people’s diet, advances in scientific thinking unleashed a surge of interest in the selective breeding of animals, and, as trade with Asia opened up, new poultry breeds, including the spectacular Cochin fowl from China, began to arrive on these shores. Soon, chickens were being kept in ever larger flocks, were laying more often and producing eggs of greater size (without anyone sneaking smashed pottery into their feed).

By the 20th century, eggs were, particularly in Britain and the USA, beginning to be produced in industrial conditions. In 1911, Artemus Ward wrote of how on large America chicken farms “eggs are produced and handled very much as the product of any other factory”, and the UK wasn’t far behind in ramping up the scale and intensity of production.

The second half of the 20th century saw the development of cages, high protein feeds and drug regimes, as the keeping of chickens for eggs or meat became a fully automated industry, beset by utter indifference to the wellbeing of the animals.

Consumers have become more aware in recent years of the horrors of battery farming, and free range eggs now make up a considerable proportion of the market, but even free range conditions can be pretty horrific—nine birds per square metre, routine beak trimming, 24-hour lighting. Aside from the ethics, the eggs themselves are rarely worth trumpeting. Anyone who has had the opportunity to eat the eggs of birds from small flocks that are kept in genuinely humane conditions, with access to the highly varied natural diet that chickens enjoy, will immediately notice the difference. Freshness, too, plays a massive part in an egg’s appeal.

In the 19th century, Mrs Beeton wrote: “In choosing eggs, apply the tongue to the large end of the egg, and, if it feels warm, it is new, and may be relied on as a fresh egg.”

Eating a truly fresh egg is still one of the great pleasures of the table, but Borough Market’s traders would kindly ask you to refrain from following her advice.

SCORING POINTS Kathy Slack on the tricky art of growing asparagus Images: Kathy Slack It’s a late May day in the 1980s.

Two old ladies in tabard aprons sit, like wizened Italian nonnas, on plastic chairs in the lay-by of an Oxfordshire A-road. One holds a cash box in her lap, the other clutches a muddy turning knife.

Behind them a sparse, sandy field of prized free-draining soil is peppered with asparagus ferns swaying nonchalantly in the breeze. Pull up here with your mother on the way home from school, and these gingham-clad keepers of the keys will waddle off into the field, joints creaking, turning knife in hand, and return with fistfuls of fresh, young asparagus for your supper.

This, for me, offered an early realisation of why some harvests are so prized and their seasons so fleeting. Encouraged by the memory of those halcyon days, I attempted to grow asparagus myself, but soon discovered that those old ladies were masters of a very tricky art. It is technically possible to grow asparagus from seed, but most opt for planting dormant crowns, which must be left for two to three years before harvesting. It has to be picked by hand, and picked frequently—a spear can grow in less than a day. It needs plenty of space to grow, taking up acres of land, but it hates weeds, so that expanse of bare soil must be weeded constantly, also by hand— asparagus roots are so shallow that a hoe would snap them. And while the ferns will keep coming all summer, growers must exercise superhuman restraint and stop picking by July to allow the juvenile spears to grow into full ferns and secure next year’s harvest. As if all that wasn’t enough, they must then survive the winter without rotting in wet soil or being eaten by hungry wildlife keen to dig the dormant roots out of their shallow graves.

In contrast to the complexity of their growing, the eating of asparagus is best kept simple: steam and serve with butter or a soft-boiled egg. At most, wrap in prosciutto and roast for a few minutes. Or leave it raw, as here, to fully appreciate the juicy, crisp greenness of this most hard-won of harvests.

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Asparagus, lemon and pine nut salad with garlic bruschetta Serves 2

— For the bruschetta: — 2 thick slices of sourdough bread — 1 tbsp extra virgin olive oil — 1 clove of garlic For the salad: — 500g asparagus — ½ lemon, zest and juice — 2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil — 2 tbsp pine nuts — 20g parmesan, or vegetarian alternative — Start with the bruschetta. Heat the oven to 200C. Drizzle the bread with the extra virgin olive oil, making sure all sides are well coated. Peel the garlic clove and slice it in half from top to bottom.

Rub the cut sides all over the bread. Give it some wellie—the more battered the clove, the more the garlic juices will infuse into the bread. Sprinkle the bread with a pinch of flaky salt and roast in the oven for 15 mins until golden and crispy, turning over half way through.

— For the salad, snap the woody base off the asparagus and discard. Cut the tops off the asparagus, half them lengthways and put them in a large bowl. Using a vegetable peeler, peel the stems into long ribbons and add them to the bowl as well.

— Whisk together the lemon juice, zest, extra virgin olive oil and a pinch of salt. Pour this dressing over the asparagus and toss to make sure the asparagus is well coated. Leave to mingle for 5 mins. The asparagus will soften slightly but still retain its crunch.

— Toast the pine nuts in a dry frying pan until golden then add them to the bowl. Use the vegetable peeler to make parmesan shavings and add these to the salad too. Toss everything together gently then pile onto a plate and serve with the bruschetta.

Alternative For extra luxury, you can omit the parmesan and add 100g of white crab meat at the end instead.

Or, load the bruschetta up with prosciutto then pile the asparagus salad on top for a decadent lunch.

Either way, this is a dish best served with spring sunshine.

BLUE SKY DRINKING GERMAN WINES Jane Parkinson on why the reds and whites emerging from Germany should assuage any doubts about the status of the country’s wines

In this era of communication by emoji (cue rolling eyes smiley) our attitude towards German wine is best represented by the thinking smiley. You know, the one gazing skywards with a thoughtful finger placed on the chin, as if saying to itself: “Do I really want to choose a German wine?”

Despite the hesitation still observed by many, our general perception of German wine is certainly far more positive than it used to be. These days, scoffing at the country’s wine is seen as a very Generation X to do, but generational shifts aside it is also just plain wrong. Germany happens to make some of the most serious white wines in the world and that’s a fact.

This world-class reputation isn’t reserved for white wines either, as some (hello again Gen X) might think. Germany’s climate is now warm enough to ripen red grapes in all 13 of its wine regions. More specifically, it excels in the grape nobody thought anywhere could emulate Burgundy in producing: pinot noir.

So much so that Germany now lays claim to being the world’s third largest producer of spätburgunder (as the grape is locally known), making more than New Zealand and Australia combined. And even though quality always wins over quantity in the wine world, and with pinot noir especially, Germany can now deliver both. The excellence of the spätburgunder currently emerging from Germany is really thanks to a new breed of winemakers who are keen to respect this grape’s delicate nature and not oak the hell out of it, meaning you can actually taste its breath-taking elegance.

Germany’s white wine scene is also dominated by one Super Variety: riesling.

A tale of two reputations, riesling is widely adored by wine professionals but sacked off by many drinkers as a scapegoat for Germany’s unfortunate—and out of date— reputation for sweet, poor quality whites.

Today, masses of bone dry, zingy, zesty, supremely classy white wines are being made from German riesling. The best have incredible longevity too, which for wine can be the ultimate test of pedigree and quality.

Thanks to our growing appreciation of Germany’s winemaking talents, more styles are popping up on restaurant wine lists and the high street. Weissburgunder, AKA pinot blanc, is one such grape. Admittedly, it hasn’t yet reached the heights that German pinot noir or riesling have, but its vivacious freshness, frisky citrus fruit flavours and weighty presence on the palate make it a resounding success with recipes like this one, where green veg and citrus are the hero flavours, while that weight gives it the muscles to hold its own with richer, nuttier ingredients like pine nuts. That calls for at least one flexed bicep emoji, surely?

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PRIZE CROSSWORD Win a copy of The Borough Market Cookbook Complete our crossword for a chance to win a copy of The Borough Market Cookbook, a best-selling collection of recipes from Ed Smith.

The highlighted squares in the crossword spell out a food-related prize word. Clue: Nose-paining condiment.

For a chance to win, send an email to marketlife@boroughmarket.org.uk providing your full name and the prize word. Closing date for entries is 19th June.

Congratulations to the winner of the previous issue’s crossword prize, Ying Yeung.

The answer: vanilla.

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

Across 1 Big fish, often canned (9,4) 8 Alien (7) 9 Bharat (5) 10 Goo (4) 11 Pedigree (8) 13 Chinese cinnamon (6) 14 Exert, injure, sieve (6) 17 Ecstasy (8) 19 Manipulated (4) 21 Bright lights, fordhook giant, lucullus, rhubarb red (5) 22 Saag (7) 24 Asian aquatic vegetable (5,8)

Published by LSC Publishing 13.2.1 The Leather Market Weston Street London SE1 3ER lscpublishing.com Editor: Mark Riddaway mark@lscpublishing.com Deputy editor: Viel Richardson viel@lscpublishing.com Deputy editor: Clare Finney clare@lscpublishing.com Managing editor: Ellie Costigan ellie@lscpublishing.com Design: Em-Project Limited mike@em-project.com Editorial consultant: Claire Ford

Down 1 West African tuber (3) 2 Fatty precursor for boeuf bourguignon and coq au vin (7) 3 Exclude (4) 4 Steaming pot of raclette, emmental, gruyere etc (6) 5 Small round of meat; small cup of coffee (8) 6 Milk receptacle (5) 7 Left (9) 10 Immune from criticism (6,3) 12 Chaos (8) 15 Swear off (7) 16 Spirit used to flavour 4 down (6) 18 Factory (5) 20 Fragments of roasted cacao bean (4) 23 Titfer (3)

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Contributors: Angela Clutton, Jane Parkinson, Sue Quinn, Juliet Sear, Kathy Slack, Ed Smith, Sophia Spring Photographers: Tom Bradley, Orlando Gili, Kathy Slack, Regula Ysewijn

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Twitter @boroughmarket

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Instagram @boroughmarket

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

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boroughmarket.org.uk

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32 Market Life 49 / boroughmarket.org.uk

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