“I’VE NO MYSTICAL TIPS OR TRICKS PICKED UP FROM A ROSY-CHEEKED GRANNY AS SHE SKIMMED THE PRESERVING PAN”

I don’t hail from a long-line of marmalade makers so I’ve no mystical tips or tricks picked up from a rosy-cheeked granny as she skimmed the preserving pan. In fact, I’ve always felt slightly nervous about the whole business of jams, curds and preserves. I was a marmalade virgin until relatively recently – then I read a no-nonsense recipe by wine and food writer Fiona Beckett and I gave it a go. I was so amazed by how straightforward and rewarding the whole process was that I made another two batches. My marmalade is simply fabulous; it’s dark, it’s chunky and perfectly bittersweet.

To start, you’ll need some Seville oranges. These bitter but beautifully fragrant fruits are only available for a couple of months, imported from Spain from December through to about mid-February. Available from Borough Market’s greengrocers, they’re good for cooking with, in marinades, cakes and pickles, but their most famous use is in marmalade.

Opinions are divided when it comes to marmalade methods, in fact it’s almost better not to ask for advice since everyone will have the ‘very best’ recipe. Purists seem to swear by slicing the fruit and leaving it to soak overnight, which apparently gives a more delicate, crystal-clear result than the quicker, boil-the-fruit-whole approach. I went for the latter and though I may not walk off with the WI trophy, my marmalade certainly knocks the socks off anything I’ve bought in the supermarket.

Experienced jam makers can jump the list of handy hints below, but as a novice I needed to go back to basics, and you may too. 

The basics

— Unless you already own a preserving pan, or are planning on opening a B&B, I’d just stick to making the marmalade in a heavy stock pot or better still, if you happen to have one, the base of a pressure cooker.

— You need a piece of muslin in which to tie up the pips and pulp (they are rich in pectin, which sets the jam). No muslin? Well (and I know that this sounds rather unappetising but it’s very convenient!) a NEW pop sock will do nicely, just give it a rinse before using.

— A couple of plates in your freezer or fridge will help you when testing the ‘set’ of your marmalade.

— To sterilise jars you can place them in an oven at 130C for half an hour, or wash with cold water and zap, whilst damp, for 40 seconds in the microwave. The jars must be hot when you pour the hot marmalade into them, otherwise they could shatter.

— If your lids do not fit tightly then use a cellophane cover. A seal is important – otherwise your precious marmalade could go mouldy. It’s advisable to cover the surface of the marmalade with a disc of waxed paper too, if you are keeping the marmalade for any length of time.

— A jam funnel is a blessing, enabling you to ladle in the marmalade quickly and saving on time wiping sticky jars later. Otherwise just use a jug, but go carefully. 

Read Jenny’s recipe for Seville orange marmalade

“THE CHRISTIAN REFRAIN ‘STIR UP, WE BESEECH THEE’ BECAME A REMINDER THAT YOU’D BETTER GET HOME AND MAKE A PUD”

Mum’s always made Christmas pudding. Her routine is a tried and tested one: down comes the battered, spineless, almost loose-leaved, brown covered (and stained) Good Housekeeping recipe book; in goes a colossal amount of dried fruit, suet, breadcrumbs, eggs and a can of stout; then my brothers and I are invited to give it a good stir, make a wish and prod in some old coins (okay, we don’t head home for that stir any more, but mum still measures and mixes thoroughly, and those coins are chucked in for good measure).

This has always been a November process, though I can’t say that I was aware of the general concept of Stir-up Sunday until recently; I thought for a while that recent reference to such an event was something to do with Bake Off.

In fact, Stir-up Sunday is a real thing. It’s been a British tradition for as long as Christmas pudding has existed in its current form – there’s a happy correlation between a 500-year-old Church of England collect that’s read on the last Sunday before Advent (so, five Sundays before Christmas), and Victorian plum pudding’s tendency to get better with age.

Somewhere down the line, the Christian refrain “stir up, we beseech thee” became a reminder that you’d better get home and make a pud… otherwise there’ll be nothing for dessert on the big day once the goose carcass has been ravaged.

This year, Stir-up Sunday is 20th November. I like to eat Christmas pudding but, as mentioned, the recipe choice, shopping and measuring have always been mum’s domain, so looking into the origins of the dessert and at around 15 different recipes has been an interesting process.

The dried fruit varies. While there are always raisins (the ‘plum’ in plum pudding), we also see dried figs and apricots (Nigel Slater), prunes (Dan Lepard), sultanas, candied fruit (Good Housekeeping), dried cranberries and also booze-steeped fruit (Nigella – sherry).

Some add stout or porter (Delia, Good Housekeeping); others ignore alcohol but add treacle (Lepard). Nigella includes vodka as well as the sherry that went into the fruit – which seems totally pointless to me, given that vodka is a flavourless thing.

The ratio of breadcrumbs to flour is always different, though it seems more breadcrumbs make for a lighter result and older recipes appear to use many more eggs than the current trend (more eggs probably make a stiffer pud).

Then there’s the question of whether to include nuts or not. What about orange and lemon zest? Other ingredients creep in, like honey, grated quince (instead of apple, which is in most), candied ginger and its syrup too. Some just chuck in ready mixed spice, others specify some (or all) of ground cloves, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg and mace. Maybe make it with butter instead of suet, a la Mary Berry?

There’s the matter of whether to steep the fruit (Nigella), soak the whole mix overnight (James Beard, Delia), make one large pudding or lots of little ones. And who’s got it right regarding how long to cook the pudding for? It’s always a two-stage thing – first on Stir-up Sunday and then again on Christmas Day. But that first cook seems to be anywhere between two to eight hours long, the suggestion being that the first lengthy cook and five weeks or so in a cool place help the pudding to ‘mature’. Crumbs, it’s a difficult choice and I’d be interested to know what others do.

For what it’s worth, I reckon Delia’s, which you can find on her website, looked like the most likely to be the right mix between tradition and trend, luxury and lightness. As it happens, I’m going to mix and soak and cook the Delia way, but try to incorporate a few ideas from others (prunes in a sherry steeped dried fruit mix, porter, crushed almonds and hazelnuts, grated quince). Fingers crossed and happy stirring.

“TO MEND OUR BROKEN SYSTEMS AND LEARN TO REVALUE FOOD WE NEED TO RECONNECT WITH THE ORIGIN OF OUR FOOD”

Words: Tom Hunt

From the farm stalls to the world-class restaurants, Borough Market is a bubbling hub of sensory delights. However, it is far more than that. Produce markets like Borough Market are a keystone within sustainable food systems. They connect us, the eaters, with the web of producers who make our food. This brings myriad benefits to our communities from social, to economic, to ecological.

From farm to table, our food system is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases. According to a paper published in Nature, food systems are responsible for just over a third of global anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Of these, the vast majority (71 per cent) of emissions come from the use of land for agriculture or activities related to changes in land use, including deforestation and erosion. One of the most eye-opening figures is that 4.5 per cent comes from packaging alone.

Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities and the author of the Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia (‘food-place’, from the Greek ‘sitos’, meaning food, and ‘topos’, meaning place) provides a vision of a better food system that values food and the communities that surround it. 

I asked Carolyn what role food markets play in a sitopian food system. She told me: “Food markets play an essential role in a sitopian food system, since they epitomise everything that sitopia is about: valuing food, close connections between city and country and putting good food at the heart of society. If we want to move towards a more regional, regenerative, sustainable food system, markets have a pivotal role to play, both in supporting the local food networks essential to such a system, and in engaging city-dwellers with food and inspiring them to care about what they eat.”

I also asked her how food markets can influence and contribute towards a carbon neutral community. “Building more resilient regional food systems based on regenerative agriculture will play a key part in helping us transition to a carbon neutral economy,” she replied. “Since food markets have a crucial role to play in helping us build such systems, they will form the natural heart of such a transition, both as food hubs serving local communities and as vital places of exchange between farmers and customers. The sociability of markets creates a positive feedback loop in which urban and rural communities come together to learn from each other and to embrace the challenges (and pleasures) of eating better to improve our lives and save the planet.”

Through our separate disciplines, Carolyn and I have both come to a similar conclusion: food has lost its true value. To mend our broken systems and learn to revalue food we need to reconnect with the origin of our food and, ultimately, nature. Shopping at a produce market brings us one step closer to our food’s origin. It allows us to interact with our food producers and farmers, shortening the food chain, cutting out the middleman.

Produce markets:

— Connect us with our food and farmers

— Stimulate food localism and increase the presence of farms local to cities

— Shorten the food chain

— Reduce packaging waste

— Reduce food waste

— Promote the decommodification of food

— Promote regenerative agriculture and carbon negative food

To reach carbon neutrality we need to lower emissions but also increase carbon capture to compensate for manmade carbon emissions. The oceans and earth are our planet’s natural carbon sinks. The oceans play the biggest role, but on land it’s our soil that captures almost 80 per cent of the carbon.

Certain foods can sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Foods that draw down more carbon than they emit are known as ‘carbon negative’. These include seaweed and bivalves such as oysters, mussels and clams, which store carbon in tissue and shell material. This is also true of some closed-loop farming systems like permaculture and agroforestry, a type of farming that includes trees within a diverse crop system.

Some of the traders at Borough Market are practicing these regenerative forms of farming, including the Food & Forest nut stall, run by Charles Tebbutt. Food & Forest is a community interest company established to expand the use of agroforestry. In practice, this means creating the three key ingredients needed for alley cropping to flourish: demand for produce, production capacity, and a well-structured grant system.

The sort of better farming practices that you might find at a food market help reduce emissions and sequester carbon by building soil with organic matter. Better soil increases nutrition and therefore flavour. That’s why organic and agroecological produce doesn’t just do good. It tastes good too.

“THE TRUST’S FOCUS IS ON ENCOURAGING EVEN MORE OF THE MARKET’S TRADERS TO GAIN ACCREDITATION OF THEIR OWN”

Image: Sim Canetty-Clarke

If in recent months you happen to have browsed the trader listings on this website, you may have noticed atop a growing number of their profiles a colourful logo of interlinking circles containing the words ‘Living Wage Employer’.

So, what does that mean? Administered by a charity called the Living Wage Foundation, this independent accreditation assures shoppers that every employee of the business in question is guaranteed a level of pay that meets their essential needs.

‘Living’, by this definition, is about more than just surviving. The Foundation’s minimum rate, which is updated every year, reflects the changing cost of a ‘basket’ of goods and services deemed necessary for a happy, fulfilling, dignified life. As well as having a roof over your head, food in the fridge and clothes to wear, that might include an annual holiday, a trip to the cinema, a birthday celebration – simple pleasures that far too many workers in the UK are forced to forgo. The current London Living Wage for over-18s is £13.85, much higher than the statutory rates of £11.44 for over-21s and £8.60 for under-21s. As costs go up, so too will that all-important number.

The charitable trust that runs Borough Market has been a Living Wage Employer since 2016, meaning that the dozens of people whose hard work makes this place tick, from the cleaners and security staff to the office workers behind the scenes, know exactly where they stand. Now, the trust’s focus is on encouraging even more of the Market’s traders to gain accreditation of their own.

The moral imperatives may be obvious, but the benefits for employers of gaining the accreditation go much further than a clear conscience. “The viability of this industry relies on people wanting to work in it,” says Jon Thrupp of Mons Cheesemongers, one of the first businesses to join the Market’s growing ranks of accredited traders. The Living Wage offers a compelling reason for potential new recruits to give it a go.

Like most traders, Jon’s business has always been committed to paying its people properly, but the accreditation fixes the parameters of that commitment in a way that can be easily understood by all concerned. “To a younger generation of people looking for employment in London, which has never got any cheaper, it’s a quick way of communicating that we’re trying to make it fair from the beginning,” he explains. A proper wage, he continues, shouldn’t be something “you have to earn a right to after many years of service”.

Coles Loomi, manager of Jumi Cheese, another trader that proudly sports that colourful logo, strongly agrees: “It’s an amazing way to tell people who are interested in starting a career in the cheese world: ‘We’ve got you; this is the baseline, guaranteed.’”

Borough Market’s accredited Living Wage Employers

• Alpine Deli
• Artisan Foods
• Bianca Mora
• Borough Olives
• Condiment Pantry
• Date Sultan
• Gastronomica
• Gourmet Goat
• Gujarati Rasoi
• Hickson & Daughter
• Horn Ok Please
• Humble Crumble
• Jumi Cheese
• Khanom Krok
• La Pepia
• Moishe’s Bagelry & Bakery
• Mons Cheesemongers
• Nana Fanny’s
• Pieminister
• Pochi
• Porteña
• Raya
• Richard Haward’s Oysters
• Shuk
• Tea2You
• The Black Pig
• The Cinnamon Tree Bakery
• The French Comte
• The Parma Ham and Mozzarella Stand
• The Tinned Fish Market
• Trethowan Brothers
• Wiltshire Chilli Farm

“WHILE MANY PEOPLE HAVE A STRONG SENSE OF WHAT BOROUGH MARKET DOES, THOSE PERCEPTIONS CAN VARY QUITE WIDELY”

Imagery: Sophia Spring

Within the Slow Food movement, where I work, we have a pleasingly pithy way of describing the food that aligns with our ethos: “Good, clean and fair.” The way we judge that involves a lot of specialist knowledge, but the message is simplicity itself. If you buy produce with a Slow Food Ark of Taste accreditation, you can be confident that its character and the method of its production fit with those three straightforward descriptors.

As well as being Executive Chair of Slow Food UK, I volunteer as a trustee on the board of the charity that runs Borough Market. If you asked 10 people to describe Borough Market’s food, those same three words – good, clean and fair – might well feature quite prominently, but so would 20 or so others, several of which might completely contradict each other.

The thing is that while most people who know Borough Market have a strong sense of what it is and what it does, those perceptions can vary quite widely – and for good reasons. The Market of today wasn’t planned out around a clear set of well-defined criteria; instead, it grew organically over many years, shaped by the ideas and hard work of a large and disparate band of traders, trustees and staff. As a result, it’s a complicated, colourful place (which is a big part of its appeal). We have produce and street food, producers and merchants, restaurants and events spaces. Our traders span the world, from Southwark to Southeast Asia, selling an incredible breadth of food, from everyday basics to expensive luxuries. Clearly, there are some threads that bind it all together – there are many examples of extremely high-quality food, of sustainable production, of ethical sourcing – but these had never previously been analysed and defined.

That is why my fellow trustees and I have recently published the trust’s first-ever Food Policy. We want shoppers to know with absolute certainty what Borough Market food means, in a way that can be shared, tested and – when necessary – challenged. We want to offer the Market’s leaders a coherent basis for their strategies and plans. And we want to be able to shout from the rooftops about Borough Market’s approach, knowing that the institution’s high profile makes its messaging hugely influential.

Produced after a thorough process that kicked off in 2019 with focus groups, interviews and surveys designed to draw out the thoughts of traders and other stakeholders, the Food Policy presents a detailed set of principles, organised under nine headings: quality, environmental sustainability, social & economic sustainability, animal welfare, knowledge & transparency, opportunity, health, variety, and accessibility.

There are far too many points in the policy to summarise them all in a single paragraph, but some do stand out. Supply chains should be as short as possible, with priority given to foods that are produced by the trader or sourced directly from the producer. There should be equity of reward throughout the supply chain. The food sold here should be produced in a way that has a demonstrably less damaging effect on the environment than that of large-scale producers and retailers. No one should be offering ultra-processed foods, regardless of their calorie level. High animal welfare standards should be expected not just of traders specialising in meat, fish and dairy, but those that feature animal products anywhere in the supply chain. The range of food should reflect the diversity of our community, and this diversity should also be seen in how and by whom the food is sold and promoted.

It is a set of principles that will guide not just what the individual traders sell, but how the entire institution operates – the balance of the Market’s offering, the selection of traders and tenants, the development of staff, even the catering of our meetings.

Although many of the conditions contained within the policy are already very much in evidence within the Market, what we’re offering here isn’t a focused snapshot of what Borough Market is today; it’s a vision for what Borough Market will be in the years to come. And there is a lot of work still to be done.

As with everything – and particularly within an ecosystem as vibrant and complex as that of Borough Market – the devil is in the detail. Our next challenge will be to turn our broad principles into detailed set of standards for each category of food in the Market. To do that, we will be working closely with traders and external experts to ensure that we understand the unique character of each sector and set rules that are truly meaningful.

For example, fulfilling the requirement that traders display good knowledge of “where their food came from, how it was produced and who produced it” is a relatively simple demand for a butcher who only sells British meat and whose work is already directed by stringent government rules around traceability. It is much harder for a spice trader who operates within the vast spider’s web of a global wholesale marketplace and who rarely has the option of buying directly from a producer. We want both our meat and our spices to be as traceable as possible, but what that means in each case will be slightly different. With some of the principles in the policy, we will be able to create simple standards that apply across the board; with others we will need more nuanced, sector-specific rules. What does environmental sustainability look like in the context of sea fishing, as opposed to fruit horticulture? These distinctions really matter.

Once they are completed, those detailed standards will be published alongside the current policy – transparency is, after all, once of the key tenets of the entire exercise. Anyone who wants to see the nuts and bolts, will be able to do so. For most people, understanding our principles will be enough. Admittedly, it takes a lot more than three words to get them across, but they are clear and simple nonetheless.

Shane Holland is Vice Chair Elect of the Borough Market Board of Trustees and Executive Chair of Slow Food UK

“PEEL BACK THAT SKIN AND YOU’VE A VEGETABLE YOU CAN COOK IN EVERY WAY YOU WOULD A ROOT LIKE A PARSNIP OR CELERIAC”

Image: Ed Smith

By my guestimation, kohlrabis landed in the UK about 20 years ago, like stout green sputniks or aliens from a Pixar movie sent to colonise our greengrocers. These weird looking vegetables are thick skinned and knobbly, sometimes with arms sprouting from them, and frankly pretty unapproachable.

Head across the Channel, down and left a bit, though, and you’ll find they’ve been a staple in our Germanic cousins’ diets for, well, pretty much ever. In fact, the etymology of kohlrabi (in German, ‘kohl’ means cabbage and ‘rabi’ is turnip) provides strong clues both to its heritage and what you might do with it.

Though it looks like a root vegetable, the kohlrabi is a brassica (like cabbage or broccoli), having been artificially bred as the swollen growth of a wild cabbage species. This helps explain the taste, which is similar to the stem part of broccoli – kind of sweet, a little bit peppery, a little bit cabbagey, and a little bit nothing at all.

In looks and texture, however, it is more like a turnip. Like turnips, kohlrabis have a fairly high water content, but are tough and almost impossibly crunchy and bitter when left raw and whole; you really wouldn’t want to bite into one as if it were an apple.

None of this is tempting you to buy and cook a kohlrabi yet, is it? Well, let’s start to turn this grubby stem into a flowering plant. Or at least something that’ll please the table come dinner time.

Kohlrabis are multi-talented. Peel back that skin and you’ve a vegetable you can cook in pretty much every way you would a root like a parsnip or celeriac. Dice it roughly, sweat in a little butter before pouring vegetable or chicken stock over the top, and before long you’ll be able to blitz it into a lovely autumnal soup.

You could add stilton, as you would to broccoli, apple as you might to parsnip, or cream and horseradish in the same way you might jazz up a bowl of blitzed beetroot. They roast fairly well, too, particularly when added to a mixed tray of squash and parsnips. I personally think they are perhaps a little too watery and bland to turn into a decent smash or purée.

Perhaps my favourite way to use a kohlrabi, however, is also a reminder of its versatility. For while kohlrabis do cook well, you can eat it raw if you slice it very thinly, ideally using a mandolin. At 1-2mm thick, kohlrabis are crisp and refreshing, the pepperiness is more pronounced, and are a wonderful carrier of citrus flavours and fresh herbs. A grand example is the kohlrabi and shrimp salad I once found on the menu at St John restaurant in Farringdon; I could eat it by the bucketful.

There’s more: if you salt thin slices of kohlrabi and wait for a few minutes, the slices become pliable, and can be artfully draped over other ingredients, or more usefully used as an edible holder for canapés, like vegetable tacos. Cut slices of mandolined kohlrabi into strips, and you can mix up a quick remoulade with yoghurt, mustard and parsley.

All of which means, I think, that this unappealing alien is, in fact, an amiable jack of all trades – a vegetable with which you should experiment if you’re not already well acquainted.

See Ed’s recipe for kohlrabi, spinach & smoked mackerel gratin.

“THERE’S SOMETHING OUTRAGEOUSLY, ALMOST ILLICITLY GOOD ABOUT A WARM, FLESHY MOUTHFUL OF PEACH”

Images: Regula Ysewijn

A bag of ripe peaches heralds the summer. It summons flashbacks to moments suspended in time like peaches preserved in syrup: soporific garden lunches with bowls of peaches and cream; a lone, slightly squashed orb wrapped in kitchen roll at the bottom of my schoolbag – a sweet, longed-for, reviving joy after an ascetic hour of dreaded double maths.

I can be on the Walthamstow marshes, surrounded by nettles, fox poo and teenagers playing football and feel like I’m in the south of France if I’m biting into a perfectly plump peach – its honeyed juices dribbling shamelessly down my chin. There’s something outrageously, almost illicitly good about a fleshy mouthful of peach that’s been left to get warm-to-bursting in the sunshine, and if I’m hauling our meals to the park to escape our stifling London apartment in high summer, these make for a blissful dessert, just as they are.

Along with sublimely fragranced white peaches from France and Italy, flat peaches are a favourite. Slightly less fuzzy than their rounder siblings, their headily perfumed, pale flesh has an extra sweet flavour with a whiff of almond. Originally grown in China – where the peach originated – from a mutation of the common peach, they have become popular across Europe in the last few decades, but make sure you look out for the organic, Spanish-grown versions rather than the sad, plastic-wrapped imports from further afield. One of my favourite ways to use them is baking them into a light, almondy upside-down cake with cherries and basil. The soft fruit keeps the cake moist, sort of self-saucing it, while the basil lends a fragrant edge and the flaked almonds an irresistible crunch. With the addition of a luscious spoonful of clotted cream or creme fraiche (Neal’s Yard Dairy, I’m looking at you), it’s everything I want in a cake.

Almonds and peaches are a happy combination much-loved by the Italians, particularly in the classic dish of ‘pesche ripiene’, or stuffed peaches. The version from my battered, browned copy of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food has been a staple at our kitchen table for years. It calls for six yellow peaches, three ounces of crushed macaroons (in the 1950s, this meant amaretti biscuits), one egg yolk, two tablespoons of sugar and an ounce of butter. You cut the peaches in half, scoop out the stones and mix a little of the pulp with the other ingredients, then stuff it back into the peach, baking them in a buttered dish for around half an hour. I’ve made several versions over the years, replacing the amaretti with flaked almonds or the egg yolk with more butter, and (sorry Elizabeth) adding a splash of sweet white wine, prosecco or rosé to proceedings when the mood’s taken me.

If you’ve not tried before, have a go at pickling peaches. When left to bathe in a sweet solution of good quality white wine vinegar, sugar, fennel seeds and peppercorns (or whichever aromatics you might fancy), they take on an incredible complexity and depth of flavour, and a balanced acidity that makes a wonderful accompaniment for fatty, grilled, meaty things like pork chops or great hunks of hard, nutty cheese such as comte or manchego. The skins will wrinkle with time but don’t worry about that – you can just peel them off.

In a similar vein, peaches are marvellous in substantial salads. I love them paired with the peppery, slightly citrussy flavour of celery leaves, tossed with a sharp goat’s curd, sourdough croutons and prosciutto and strewn with anise herbs like chervil or tarragon. At a late-summer supperclub a few years ago, I served a version of this with Cornish pork belly that had been slow braised in whey and then crisped up under a hot grill. There’s something magical about crispy pork crackling eaten with yielding peachy flesh.

Apricots, with their smooth, deep golden skins blushing hot pink, are another wonder of the warmer months. If the flesh is mealy and the flavour one-note, they can underwhelm – but even these can be rescued with a gentle roasting in the oven or caramelising in the pan, or by poaching in a wine-based syrup. I like to poach whole apricots in sweetened rosé with lemon zest and fresh lavender – the floral, herbaceous notes of the purple flowers add a pleasing complexity, and the poaching concentrates the flavour. I use these in all manner of desserts: baked into tarts, or eaten with whipped cream cut with a little natural yoghurt and topped with crushed shortbread and chopped nuts.

Very good apricots have a unique sharpness that makes them ideal for patisserie. Paired with sweet, vivid green pistachio frangipane, they really sing. I’ve made various ensembles, from blondies to more classical tarts with flaky, buttery pastry. My absolute favourite, though, is to bake them into a biscuity, hazelnut pastry tart shell with a sharp, muscovado-laced buttermilk filling that retains an irresistible wobble once baked, dressing the fruit with tangy, silky custard upon slicing.

Growing up in Kent, plums were the fruit that defined the late summers of my childhood. I still remember my unexpected delight at biting into the dusky reddish-purple skin of my dad’s homegrown plums to find something juicy, sweet and sharp – better than anything I could have bought from the school tuck shop (and that’s saying something, for I was its best customer, loading up on Wham bars and pink shrimps daily – it’s a miracle I’ve still got teeth). In recent years, I’ve become partial to greengages, enjoying their fresh, tangy flesh in dairy-rich desserts and salads with peppery leaves, or in my favourite breakfast compote, made with whole almonds or cobnuts, ideal on hot buttered crumpets or mounds of good yoghurt.

Small wild plums, similar to mirabelles, grow copiously on the marshes where I live. I’ve roasted pork on top of them so that its juices mingle with their blistered skins. I’ve even had a go at salt-fermenting some, inspired by the Japanese delicacy of umeboshi. The resulting shrivelled, concentrated, wonderfully sour fruits were a revelation, so I served them in a dashi-like broth at my residency at Carousel in Marylebone, which I had the unplanned audacity to dish up to some real life Japanese people, visiting from Tokyo. Thankfully, they approved of my approximation – or else were just too polite to let on.

“EVERYTHING GROWS BY ITSELF. MY JOB IS TO MITIGATE ANY ISSUES THAT MIGHT CAUSE PROBLEMS FOR THAT GROWTH”

Interview: Mark Riddaway

Most farmers are born to the role, their roots dug in deep across the generations. Not Steven Brown. “I never really thought I’d be doing this,” he says. “I just always wanted to spend my life outside. Long story short, it turned out the way I could spend the most time outside was through farming.” What began as a series of outdoor jobs became a genuine vocation after Steven found work on a permaculture farm – an approach to food production informed by the natural interplay that allows complex, diverse ecosystems to thrive in the wild. “You look around and there are thousands of trees, wildflowers, shrubs and crops, all squeezed together into this tiny space,” he says. “I started to read a lot about the positive influence this type of farming can have. It really helped shape the way I see the world.”

Steven’s evolving worldview is now being applied in a small but systematic way at 13 Acre Orchard, a beautiful plantation of fruit trees and vegetable patches on a farm close to Saffron Walden in Essex. For the past three years, almost entirely unaided, he has been slowly transforming this patch of land into a regenerative farming system, the produce from which he sells at the new 13 Acre Orchard stand at Borough Market.

How did you come to be running 13 Acre Orchard?

I grew up in this area. A friend of mine introduced me to Laura, who owns the farm. She’d just had a son, and the workload involved in running the orchard was proving too much – even without having children, it’s a lot. The first time we met, I spent a couple of hours walking around the farm while she explained that was involved, and I was thinking, she’s got to be nuts, this is ridiculous, how are you supposed to do all this? But I still came back the next week to have another look. I did a bit of research, I made the visit a few times, and every time I came here it felt a bit more realistic – a big challenge, but possible. I thought, let’s just take the world as it is and see what happens. I’d worked with trees before at the other permaculture place, but nothing on this scale. It’s been non-stop since then. I’ve been working flat out, all the while trying to figure out how to do this, how to improve the land.

You describe what you do at 13 Acre Orchard as ‘regenerative’ farming. In simple terms, what does that mean? 

It starts with the idea that a farmer is there to look after the land. In a regenerative structure, the land you’re looking after will improve as you’re farming. As you grow your vegetables or raise your livestock, or whatever it is you’re doing, you’re putting more carbon into the soil, you’re looking at how water moves through the landscape, you’re creating more wildflowers, more insects are coming, there’s a growing abundance of everything, from microscopic life up to bigger things like birds. There are lots of different elements you can add in, but the main thing I’m concentrating on is building the soil health and depth, creating biodiversity on a microscopic level – more bacteria and fungi, microarthropods and macroarthropods. If you can feed those things, they in turn feed the trees, so you don’t need the fertilisers. That process also results in the carbon sequestering that people talk about us needing more of. You’re sticking carbon straight in the ground, and that’s helping the trees to be healthier as well.

So, you’re intervening in those natural cycles far less than a conventional farmer would do…

Yes, it grows by itself. Your job as the farmer is to mitigate any issues that might cause problems for that growth. Compaction in the soil is the big one. Too much water can also cause problems, as can water in the wrong places. To mitigate that, putting a pond into the landscape can bring all the water together while also creating an environment which is beneficial for different plants, so you get more pond life and healthier trees.

What are you currently growing at 13 Acre Orchard?

Mostly, it’s apples, plums and pears. We have chickens for eggs – Laura looks after all the chickens still. They live under the apple trees and eat lots of the insects that would normally cause problems to the apples. They also produce plenty of natural fertiliser.

We also have a small vegetable garden, which we’re looking to expand, and we’re going to possibly do some flowers very soon too. My long-term plan is to incorporate a lot more growth within the orchard in a way that benefits the trees. Rhubarb, for example, grows well under fruit trees. It will come up at the beginning of the season and grow up big and help the trees to grow. Later in the year I’ll grow another crop within the same space. There’s a world of possibilities – it’s a bit overwhelming at times, but all very, very exciting.

What do you do to ensure that as little as possible is wasted?

We juice the apples that nobody would want to buy. After extracting the juice, you’re left with a pulp, and we use that pulp to make fruit jelly. My mum makes all the fruit jellies and jams – she’s been doing that her whole life, basically. Anything we can’t use gets made into compost, which goes into the vegetable garden and around the trees. Any cardboard waste is also getting incorporated into the compost. The idea is that there is no waste anywhere along the way. At some point in the future, hopefully we’ll be able to use potato starch as pallet wrap – at that point, I don’t think we would have any waste at, because that’ll go into compost as well. It can be done!

You’re also selling produce sourced from other farms. What’s the nature of that relationship?

So, the idea is to build a network of farms that share a similar way of doing things – regenerative, organic, however you want to label it. Ultimately, it’s people growing good food in a positive way. For example, there’s one guy that’s growing peas, but he’s growing wild flowers mixed into the crop. So, you’ve got a field of peas, but with an under-layer of wild flowers. Across a whole field, you end up with millions of extra flowers, and there are lots more insects because of that. We’re looking for people like him who are doing interesting things with farming, we’re buying stuff from them and putting it out into central London. We want this to be the main hub for regenerative agriculture in London.

What can we look forward to seeing on the stand in the coming months?

There’ll still be lots of apples. There’s going to be plenty of squash. There are mushrooms, carrots, beetroot. Brussels sprouts will be coming in, all the Christmas stuff. We’re getting everything ready for Christmas now. We’re trying to work the shop so it’s completely seasonal. There’s still loads of food around now; the challenge will be, at certain times of the year, that there isn’t much growing. But that’s tomorrow’s problem!

Do you enjoy selling food direct to the public through markets?

Yes, it’s good fun. Whether or not people like what you’re doing, you get such a quick reaction. Luckily for me, more people like it than don’t, so they keep coming back each week. We see lots of the same faces, week in, week out, which is nice. It’s like holding 200 brief conversations simultaneously.

By the standards of modern farming, yours is a very small operation. Are the things you do to support the environment replicable on a larger scale?

Yes, regenerative farming is definitely something you can do in a way that would look from the outside more like traditional agriculture – like standard fields of crops. There is a tension in some people’s minds between modern farming and the environment, but I think you can combine the two. To give the devil its due, the farmers who are doing that large-scale monocropping are producing huge amounts of food, which simply wasn’t possible before. I think it’s entirely feasible that you can combine these two schools of thought so you’re getting the best of both worlds. Regenerative farming doesn’t have to be limited to little orchards like this.

“YES, THEY’RE A TEMPTING BAR SNACK, BUT THE POTENTIAL OF PISTACHIOS GOES FAR BEYOND THAT OF A DRINKING PARTNER”

Image: Regula Ysewijn

I didn’t grow up thinking pistachios were something we should cook with. Which is not to say I don’t have fond memories of them. In fact, I have strong recollections of Tuesday night binges – the time of the week when my dad sat down to work through his accounts, with a bottle of red and some salty bites to get him through the grind. Initially, the snacks were small bags of Mini Cheddars or dry-roasted peanuts. Then, as my brothers and I got bigger and our begging hands more greedy, grab-bags of Kettle Chips and Mignons Morceaux. At some point he got fed up of sharing, and it was one bag for him and one for us. And then, as a sign that he had become really frustrated by the thieving tribe he had spawned, the nibbles became pistachios – fiddly, dusty, salty pistachios in shells, which, though delicious, quickly lost the interest of boys who were supposed to be asleep, such was the effort of opening them. Dad and pistachios 1: Boys and their bedtime 0.

Now, I see pistachios in a very different light. Yes, they’re a tempting bar snack. But at a time when Middle Eastern, central Asian and eastern Mediterranean cuisines have opened up to us Brits, it’s clear that the potential of pistachios goes far beyond that of a drinking partner.

There are some food products in which pistachios shine like the diamonds they are: mortadella from Bologna is one example, Sicilian pistachio ice cream another. But we should recognise them as an ingredient to use at home, too. Blitz them in the food processor and bake near-fluorescent frangipane-style tarts (particularly good when embellished with raspberries) or make them into a crumb to form a cheesecake base or crumble (as suggested in The Borough Market Cookbook, by the way). Keep blending them into a paste and there’s material for custards, crème pâtissière and ice cream of your own. They’re savoury but also sweet and creamy – akin to a grassy sunflower seed crossed with an almond, perhaps.

On which note, it’s worth pointing out that pistachios are not nuts but seeds, the shells of which split open with an audible pop upon ripening. You can buy them roasted and salted in their shells, of course. But the very best pistachios I’ve ever tasted (and I would write this on any other organisation’s website too) are the raw, unsalted, shelled pistachios imported by Oliveology from Sparta and sold at the Market.

We do eat with our eyes, and if you stop by their stall, you’ll see that a bag of these are an absolute feast: bright purple skins and even brighter chlorophyll-green centres jump straight out of the cellophane. As it happens, that visual treat is echoed in the eating – the moreish flavours of my youth are amplified and emboldened. These pistachios are many times sweeter than my memories, as bright in flavour as they are in colour. Juicy too. Honestly, try them: you’ll immediately see why, in my opinion, you must always have a bag of them to hand.

They’re the ideal store cupboard ingredient, ready to embellish and improve a multitude of dishes, both savoury and sweet. You could, if you wish, chop half a bag finely, stir into honey and layer between sheets and sheets of buttered filo. But I’ve found I’m more likely to use them a few handfuls at a time: scattered over breakfast (yoghurt and fruit, or porridge); as part of a sort-of-gremolata to supercharge simple lunches (Ottolenghi-style crisp or sharp salads, with labneh or mozzarella); stirred into rice or grain-based platters for flavour, crunch and colour alongside dried fruits, fresh herbs and citrus; used in snacks and treats like chocolate bark and brownies; and on creamy desserts too (trifle, panna cotta). A sprinkling of raw, unsalted pistachios punches above its weight and is never superfluous in the way, dare I say it, pomegranate seeds can be.

If you’d like to do a little more than simply chop and scatter, consider the dukkah suggestion below. The spices, sesame seeds and flaked salt bounce so well off the pistachios in this versatile garnish. As with Oliveology’s pistachios, once you’ve tried it, it may well (read: should) become a constant presence on your shelves.

Pistachio dukkah

Put 1 tsp cumin, 2 tsp coriander seeds and 8-10 black peppercorns in a small heavy-bottomed pan and toast gently on a low hob for 3-5 mins until fragrant but not browned. Decant to a pestle and mortar. Add 4 tsp sesame seeds to the pan and toast those for 2-3 mins until golden. Grind the spices to a powder while keeping an eye on the sesame seeds.

Run a knife through 50g raw, unsalted pistachios a number of times until coarsely chopped (not fine or a powder, but not just split into one or two pieces). Add these and 4 tsp sesame seeds to the spices, along with 2 tsp flaky sea salt and, if you want a little kick, 1 tsp Aleppo chilli flakes too. Mix well and store in an airtight container at room temperature until needed. A homemade jar of this Egyptian garnish can be used to add a new dimension to a wide variety of dishes and meals. Dip some great bread first into olive oil and then into the dukkah. Use it to embellish hummus or baba ghanoush-style dips. Sprinkle it over roasted vegetables, honey-vinaigrette greens like green beans or mangetout and sugar snaps, or fresh cheeses like burrata, ricotta, curd. Or scatter it on platters of yoghurt-dressed charred and chopped kale or other leafy salads.

We are very excited to announce the upcoming publication of our new cookbook, Borough Market: The Knowledge. Available from 27 October, the book is rooted in the passion and expertise of the traders who form the beating heart of the Market.

Across eight chapters, each devoted to a different category of stall, from the butchers to the greengrocers to the cheesemongers, that collective knowledge is brought to life through more than 80 recipes by Angela Clutton, award-winning food writer and presenter. With typical warmth and clarity, Angela explores how the traders’ expertise can be brought to bear in turning Market produce into stunning dishes. The book also distils their wisdom into features, interviews, tips and guides that demystify unfamiliar ingredients and processes, and explains not just what to buy (and why) but how to store it, cook it and serve it.

Recipes include:

— Roasted Cod’s Head with Clams and Seaweed

— Beef, Leek and Ale Pie

— Parsnip Gnocchi and Smoked Garlic Butter

— Moong Dal Dosa with Masala Potatoes and Tomato Chutney

— Jasmine Tea Loaf with Salted Lime Butter

— Ginger and Pink Peppercorn Baked Cheesecake.

Borough Market: The Knowledge, beautifully photographed by Kim Lightbody, is the third Borough Market book to be published by Hodder & Stoughton, following the success of The Borough Market Cookbook and Borough Market: Edible Histories. It is available now for pre-order.