“OVER THE PAST DECADE, CHEFS AND COOKERY WRITERS HAVE THROWN OUT THE ASPARAGUS RULE BOOK”

Words: Bee Wilson / Images: Regula Ysewijn

“What if you do not possess an asparagus boiler?” asked Jane Grigson in her Vegetable Book. It is not a dilemma that troubles many cooks now. But back in 1978, when Grigson’s book was first published, everyone knew that there was only one way to cook asparagus: boiled, standing in a bundle. Not owning an asparagus boiler could make this tricky task even trickier.

An asparagus boiler – for the uninitiated – consists of a tall cylindrical lidded pan with an inner basket. The bundle of asparagus is put in the basket, stalks down, with a few inches of salted water. The idea is that in the time it takes every last bit of stringiness to be boiled out of the stalks at the bottom, the tips will steam to tender-crisp. To readers who did not possess this elaborate vessel, Grigson suggested improvising an equivalent using some other tall saucepan and a “wire blanching basket”. As for those who had no wire blanching basket, she recommended tying the asparagus in a bundle in a normal saucepan and improvising a domed lid of foil for the tips. The one thing Grigson did not suggest was cooking this sublime spring vegetable by any other method, because back then boiled asparagus was seemingly the only option.

Thinking about asparagus, it struck me that modern cooks express our love of ingredients very differently from cooks of yesteryear. In the past, asparagus-lovers worshipped this expensive vegetable by cooking it in one way only, which almost seemed to be demanded by the anatomy of the plant. To respect asparagus was to know that it needed to be kept in a bundle and boiled upright, with obsessive care for not overcooking the tips. By contrast, cooks now celebrate the all-too-brief season of these green vibrant spears by cooking them in as many different ways as possible. We griddle asparagus and we braise it; we shred it and eat it raw; we toss it with pasta and noodles; we use it to add spring freshness to green minestrone or risotto.

Cooks used to signal that an ingredient was special by cooking and serving it in one particular way and often in a single designated vessel. Turbot, for example, was poached in court-bouillon in its own special turbotiere. Hot salmon called for hollandaise and cold salmon for mayonnaise. And asparagus, prince of vegetables, demanded to be gently scraped to remove any tough outer stalks, then cooked in water.

There are 19 asparagus recipes in Haute Cuisine by Jean Conil, first published in 1953, and except for one recipe for green asparagus soufflé, all of the others consist of boiling it and serving hot or cold with a sauce. Many of these old haute cuisine ideas for boiled asparagus are in fact still lovely. Conil’s suggestions for asparagus sauces include ‘Maltaise’, a tangy hollandaise made with blood orange instead of lemon and a simple fresh cream sauce sprinkled with chopped chives and chervil. I am a big fan of Conil’s ‘asperges Espagnole’: hot asparagus served with poached eggs and vinaigrette.

When I started cooking in the 1990s, I was firmly of the boiled asparagus school. Someone gave me an asparagus boiler for a wedding present and I was determined to master making proper bundles, like a Dutch still life. I knew that some recipe writers had started blackening asparagus on a char-grill, but the first few times I tried it this way, it tasted harsh and burned and half-raw, a waste of those expensive spears. So, I persevered with my asparagus boiler, even though I found the process frustratingly hit and miss. As Jane Grigson said, depending on the size and quality of the asparagus the timing could vary “from 15 minutes to 45”, which made it impossible to plan supper.

The recipe that changed the way I thought about asparagus was River Cafe penne with asparagus carbonara, which I first read about in 2000. This was a carbonara, but with spears of asparagus cut on the diagonal in place of the pancetta. The thing that startled me was the wondrous economy of the method. While the pasta boiled until al dente for nine minutes, you cooked the asparagus in a separate pan. The stalks were added first, then after two minutes, the tips, which cooked for a further four minutes. The blanched asparagus is tossed with pasta, egg yolks, parmesan, butter and thyme to make a richly spring-like dish: green and golden.

The first time I made it, I couldn’t believe that the asparagus had come out so perfectly with so little effort. I never used my asparagus boiler again, realising that I could boil the spears unbundled in a big pan for five minutes, with none of the fuss and better results.

Over the past decade, chefs and cookery writers have developed a much more experimental and playful approach to asparagus. We have thrown out the asparagus rule book. Take the controversial question of snapping versus slicing. Many cooks used to swear by the tradition of snapping each stalk to separate the edible top from the inedibly woody bottom. But in 2009, food writer Harold McGee experimented by snapping 130 spears and found that the snapping method was far less reliable than simply looking at the spears and cutting them at what seems to be the right point. Don’t discard the stalks. Much of the bottom part is still edible too, notes McGee, if you slice it very thinly and add it to a soup or stir-fry.

It was Yotam Ottolenghi who convinced me that chargrilled asparagus could make a welcome change from plain-boiled. Freshly harvested asparagus contains a lot of natural sugar and charring it accentuates both its sweetness and its umami flavours. Ottolenghi’s first cookbook contained a recipe for chargrilled asparagus, courgette and halloumi cheese salad. It was a bit of a palaver to make: the asparagus was blanched before it was charred with thin slices of courgette and anointed with garlicky basil oil. But the firm, bright spears took on a savoury depth that was a revelation. I have since discovered that I like charred asparagus even more if it is sliced up, tossed with salt and oil and browned for between five and 10 minutes under a very hot grill, with lemon zest added at the end.

If you don’t try different things out, you will never know what you’re missing. As J Kenji Lopez-Alt of The Food Lab writes, we should embrace asparagus “in all its forms from raw and crunchy to braised, olive-green and totally tender”. The best of all ways to cook asparagus, I am now convinced, is neither boiled nor grilled, but braised. By braising, I mean browning the asparagus in a single layer in a paella pan or similar before cooking with butter and a splash of water or stock until the liquid emulsifies to a glossy sauce, which takes less than 10 minutes. Braised asparagus offers both the browned intensity of charred asparagus and the delicacy of boiled.

My introduction to braised asparagus was Lopez-Alt’s excellent recipe on the Serious Eats website but I also recommend the Patricia Wells version on the Food 52 website, where the asparagus is flavoured, surprisingly, with rosemary and bay. With middle age, asparagus season has started making me feel wistful. It lasts such a short time, and who can say how many more asparagus seasons remain? This is yet another reason to expand your horizons beyond boiled asparagus. Not possessing an asparagus boiler is no loss. The real pity would be to miss out on squeezing every ounce of asparagus-joy from the season before it is gone.

“USE RAW WILD GARLIC SPARINGLY – IT MIGHT LOOK MILD AND DELICATE, BUT BOY DOES IT PACK A PUNCH”

Image: Ed Smith

I recently realised that I’ve never really covered the question of what makes a herb a herb. That realisation struck when I was pondering whether wild garlic – or ramson, as it is otherwise known – qualifies for inclusion in this series.

As it happens, I determined well before getting too bogged down in detail that, regardless of the true definition of ‘herb’, these pungent allium leaves should be included on a matter of practicality: despite their ‘wild’ nature, we increasingly see these long, wide, pointed, vivid green leaves on the grocer shelves next to chives, coriander, mint and so on. They carry and impart an incredible flavour, and over the last few years have become an essential part of the British cook’s springtime larder.

In any event, after a spot of foraging through botanical guides and dictionaries, it’s clear that wild garlic fits technically too. A herb is defined as “any plant with leaves, seeds, or flowers used for flavouring, food, medicine, or perfume”; and “any seed-bearing plant which does not have a woody stem and dies down to the ground after flowering”. To my mind at least, wild garlic fits both of those.

Wild garlic grows in moist soil, usually under partial cover of deciduous but not yet leafy trees (often near to bluebells). The season runs from around March to May, depending where you are in the country. You’ll easily identify a patch of wild garlic as there’ll be more than a hint of garlic in the air – it’s a bit of a give-away. Moreover, towards the end of their season, a flurry of beautiful six-pronged white flowers highlights their presence.

Storage

Whether you’ve found and picked the leaves yourself, or bought them from a grocer, my advice on storage remains the same: use them as quickly as possible. Wild garlic leaves wilt in moderate heat and bruise easily too, so it’s best just to pick or buy a few of them, and in short order.

You should store the leaves in the paper or plastic bag or plastic box that you buy them in (or put them in something similar if you did the foraging). Then put them in the fridge.

I tend to then ‘refresh’ the leaves in a bowl of very cold water before using them. Or, if on the same day and I’ve space in the fridge / kitchen, I’ll cut out the middle storage process and just leave the leaves in the water until required.

Don’t bother trying to dry garlic leaves. You could, though, make an oil as per the chive oil in my previous post. Or beat into butter, roll in clingfilm and freeze until your wild garlic butter is required.

Cooking tips

There are three ways to use wild garlic in your cooking:

The first is raw as a chopped garnish. Slice finely with a knife and sprinkle is probably the best advice to give here. But use raw wild garlic sparingly – it might look mild and delicate, but boy does it pack a punch.

The second is to wilt the leaves in a little butter or oil, or very quickly blanch them. This quick application of heat mellows and rounds the flavour of the herb. It’s also my preferred way to use it – it’s so powerful when raw that you’d struggle to get through all of the garlic you’d picked or purchased if you only ate it in its fresh state.

Finally, many chefs will pickle wild garlic (called ‘ramps’ in the States), and add it as a punchy seasoning to numerous foods throughout the year.

Oh, one other thing: do use the flowers if you have them – they also carry a delightful garlicky flavour. Keep them raw and just sprinkle over your dish at the last minute; they’re not as harsh as the leaves, and they sure are pretty.

Classic uses

In terms of flavour pairings, it’s hard to say what ingredients you wouldn’t match wild garlic with (except sweet things). Basically, where normal garlic goes, wild garlic will too. That said, the likes of white fish, salmon, lamb, beef, eggs and wild mushrooms are particular fans.

It wouldn’t be correct to state that wild garlic has particular ‘classic uses’ in the same sense of many of the Mediterranean herbs covered in this series. However, well established uses and flavour combinations include:

— In a pesto, pistou or picada, obviously swapping normal garlic for the flavour in the raw leaves. You’ll see some recipes that completely substitute wild garlic for basil or parsley leaves too. But for me, this is too much. I’d keep a handful of either of those two herbs in the mix to mellow the effect of the garlic.

— As part of a sauce vierge (green sauce) mix alongside tarragon, parsley, capers, anchovy and a splash of red wine vinegar.

— Blanched at the last minute with asparagus.

— Beaten into a butter to melt over griddled beef steaks and lamb chops, or place within a wild garlic chicken kiev.

— Stirred through creamy risottos.

— Cooked in an omelette or with scrambled eggs.

Market herb hero

Any of the grocers stocking the herb – you’ll find it at Fitz Fine Foods and Turnips (and probably the other grocers too from time to time) – plus Neal’s Yard Dairy who, towards the end of the wild garlic season and then for a month or two after, may well have the wild garlic-wrapped version of Lynher Dairy’s Cornish yarg.

A recipe suggestion

Try my wild garlic & new potato frittata: because of its short shelf-life, I prefer to use as much of the wild garlic in my possession at the same time as possible, which usually means applying a bit of heat to mellow the flavour. One way to do that is to use a good bunch of the stuff in a frittata.

“LOCATION IS EVERYTHING. IF YOU WANT THE BEST PRODUCE, YOU NEED A LOCATION WITH THE IDEAL CONDITIONS FOR THE PLANT”

Interview: Viel Richardson

How did you come to be a professional forager?
When I started Fitz Fine Foods, foraging was never meant to be a major part of the business. We were making mostly pâtés and terrines, and I wanted to ensure that the ingredients we were using came from people whose methods were environmentally sensitive and sustainable. I had been foraging for myself for years, and some of that produce occasionally made it into my products. When I analysed what people were buying, the two most popular areas were our small selection of mustards and anything based on foraged plants. I decided to find a way to combine the two. That led to a range of flavoured mustards using foraged goods.

What is the key to being a successful forager?
Location is everything. If you want the best quality produce, you need to find a location with the ideal conditions for the plant. Plants can often gain a foothold in less than ideal places, but they will not be at their best, so you need to know and understand the environments in which they really flourish. Another big issue is dogs: if you forage in areas favoured by dog walkers, it is inevitable that your favourite patch will one day be used as a dog latrine. Essentially, any public land where dogs are common is off limits, so I mainly forage on private land.

Is that legal?
The laws around trespass and foraging have some grey areas, but from my perspective one thing is crystal clear: if you forage on private land for commercial purposes, you have to obtain the landowner’s permission. Tracking down the owner of a piece of land can be tricky, but it is absolutely essential. One place I go, which produces really wonderful wild garlic, is a private wood used for timber; the wild garlic plant is so out of control that it’s actually a real problem for the owner, so he lets me take as much as I need.

How laborious is foraging?
Anyone who has harvested plants commercially by hand will tell you it is hard work. If we take wild garlic as an example, I will gather for about three hours. That sounds a lot, but the idea is to never clear too large a patch. If you do, other plants like dog’s mercury and cuckoo-pint may colonise the area, crowding out everything else. I will clear a patch about two metres square and then move somewhere else – that way the wild garlic can recover. It is all about preserving the resource. You also have to be very observant and inspect the leaves as you harvest – while you’re not picking the leaves individually, you are glancing at each one.

What happens to the wild garlic once picked?
I wash the leaves in a large vat before inspecting them again. I then lay the leaves out to dry, before inspecting them a third time. I just want to make sure nothing else has crept in. After that, if I am going to make a mustard, I blanch the leaves like spinach; if it is for a pesto or for sale as leaves, it is left raw.

This all seems very time consuming.
Very much so. If you want to do it well, it has to be. That means that I cannot do all the foraging myself, so I do have to buy in produce from other foragers. If you’re going to stock produce that people want, you have to be able to offer it to them most of the time. They will forgive an occasional absence, but to build a stable customer base you have to offer some consistency. This is particularly relevant to me, as I make all the mustards myself, so I simply do not have the time to seek out locations, then forage and process everything I need.

How do you pick suppliers?
You do your research and assess the produce they offer. You really need to know how they operate. To give one example, some samphire pickers are paid by weight, while others are paid on quality. Lower quality, older samphire has wooden stalks in the centre, making it heavier – so if you’re paid by weight, there’s an incentive to pick the lower quality plant. You also need to make sure the suppliers are foraging sustainably. Luckily there are some very good companies out there. It is this mix of self-foraged and carefully bought produce that allows me to consistently offer high quality products.

Where do you get your recipes?
Most of them I create myself through experimentation – trial and error. To get the wild garlic pesto recipe nailed down took about three seasons of honing. There are some happy accidents. One day, some chopped-up wild garlic was left in a pot with some honey by mistake. I found it after a while, tasted it and thought it was quite nice, so tweaked the amounts and made some experimental batches – that is now a product. It turns out it takes quite some time to mature – the longer you leave it, the better it gets. If I had tried it straight away, it would have gone in the bin.

What foraged produce will be appearing as spring unfolds?
As you would expect, this is a time when a lot changes – and it can also be very unpredictable, depending on the vagaries of the weather. As our weather gets more unpredictable, you will often find things that the ‘books’ say are out of season. With the wild mushrooms, I’ll be harvesting St George’s, chicken of the woods and the scarlet elf cap, which is a really beautiful, bright red mushroom. Three cornered leeks should be making an appearance, as well as wild asparagus, marjoram and wild alexanders.

“IT’S PRETTY SALTY BUT ALSO PECULIARLY AROMATIC, THANKS TO THE PASTURES OF PAG UPON WHICH THE SHEEP FREELY ROAM”

“The bora, the sheep, the man, and the island of Pag.” That, writes Šime Gligora is the recipe for Paški sir, a cheese from the Island of Pag. A cheesemaker of world renown, Šime is the third generation to run the eponymous Gligora dairy on this weather-beaten island, where a sunny Mediterranean climate meets the harsh, cold conditions of the snow-covered mountains above the Adriatic Sea.

Their clash sparks a strong wind – the bora – which, rolling down the southern mountain slopes to meet the sea, creates a thick, dense fog of salt water drops that spreads over the island. As it dries, Pag is coated with a white dusting of salt in which only the sturdiest of herbs can flourish: sage, immortelle, cistus, fennel and Jerusalem thorn, upon which the island’s native sheep graze freely.

There aren’t many livestock capable of braving the combination of this dry and salty diet and the bitter bora, but according to Šime, the Pag sheep have been coping since at least 800BCE, when the Liburni, an Illyrian tribe, were (likely) some of the first farmers here.

Then, as now, milk and wool were vital parts of Pag’s economy. Together with salt and honey infused with the sage that grows in abundance on the salty soil, one of the most important exports throughout the island’s history has been its cheese. In 2005, conscious of the uniqueness of the Paški sir cheese and its value to the island, a number of Pag’s most established dairies formed The Association of Pag Cheese Producers, in an attempt assure the authenticity of the product.

Milk has to be from autochthonous Pag sheep milked from January to June by the island’s shepherds, who bring the milk to gathering points for it to be stored and cooled. From there, it’s to the dairy, where it’s pasteurised, coagulated and cut, allowing the mass of cheese curds to form. These are put into moulds and pressed for several hours. The cheese is then salted and left in liquid brine for a few days.

Needless to say, it’s pretty salty – but also peculiarly aromatic, thanks to the pungency of the doughty plants that pepper the pastures upon which the sheep must, according to the association’s rules, roam freely. The cheeses are ripened on special shelves in a mild, humid environment for anything from 60 days to two years, though at Taste Croatia most are six months old. During that time, the cheese producers turn, wash and oil the ripening cheeses every day.

The result is a cheese that looks a little like parmesan. Hard, candle-yellow and granular, on first bite even the taste seems indistinguishable. Then something new and unexpected kicks in. It’s a flavour that’s sturdy, vegetal and savoury; there’s salt, sure – but there’s a definite sense of sheep blowing in with it, adding an extra layer of complexity.

“We serve it to customers with fig chutney, which works very well, even though chutney is more of an English thing than Croatian,” explains Taste Croatia founder Chris Stewart. “There they serve it with charcuterie on boards, drizzled with nice Croatian olive oil.” It also pairs well with wine, he continues – another product for which this veritable pantry of a country deserves more acclaim.

In conclusion, it’s versatile. Though noticeably different to parmesan, there’s nothing to stop you grating Paški sir on your pasta or serving it ‘a l’Italia’ with a drizzle of syrupy vinegar – though naturally, we recommend you try Croatia’s fig vinegar over balsamic. “It’s won a gold medal two years in a row at the World Cheese Awards, so it’s pretty good,” says Chris, but the only proof you really need is in the sample he’ll give you, slathered with sweet, figgy chutney. “We like to get the customers a bit messy,” he grins.

“CHATTING TO TRADERS FROM AROUND EUROPE, EASTER SUNDAY MEALS HAVE ONE THING IN COMMON: THERE IS MEAT”

After the fast

Traditionally, Christians have observed a period of fasting for the 40 days between Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday (although it’s usually a little more than 40 days because Sundays aren’t included). This mirrors the time Jesus spent praying, fasting and resisting temptation in the desert, before returning to Galilee on the arrest of John the Baptist.

Today, strict observance of the sacrifices of this period is relatively rare; certainly in the UK now, most people who mark Lent at all tend to deny themselves a small luxury, rather than fully fasting. However, many denominations and cultures do still give up meat, dairy and eggs for some or all of the period (in particular Ash Wednesday and all Fridays). Moreover, those traditions do continue to inform contemporary eating, in particular around the period from Good Friday to Easter Monday.

Across Europe, and in other countries and communities where the more traditional Christian faiths are followed, it is the case that most people will centre a Good Friday meal either around vegetables or fish; that eggs and dairy will play a key role through the weekend; and that on Easter Sunday, to break the fast, there will be a meaty (frequently lamb) centrepiece. We also see a wide variety of sweet, dairy-enriched, leavened breads being consumed over the period.

Fish

Some Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays throughout the year. For others, that abstinence is more strictly observed on Ash Wednesday and Fridays through Lent. Fish flesh, however, is different, and so the tradition of eating fish on a Friday has informed European diets for millennia. In the UK ‘fish on a Friday’ is a societal habit that now goes beyond religious observance. The same is true elsewhere, so inspiration for a fishy Good Friday feast this Easter is plentiful, if not particularly prescriptive.

Walking round the Market there are plenty of ideas – starting, of course, with grabbing a fish pie mix from the fishmongers. Maybe pick up some tortillas and make Mexican Baja fish tacos. Or buy some salt cod from Brindisa and try this salt cod pil pil recipe – succulent, flakes of cod under an oily blanket, just wonderful with roasted peppers.

Eggs

Of course, we Brits know that Easter means eggs! It’s just that, in relatively recent times, those eggs have become chocolate ones, and probably fairly divorced from the meaning still appreciated elsewhere.

Eggs are symbolic. At a base level, they represent new life and rebirth, and so are a timely ingredient at this time of year. The tradition of foil-wrapped chocolate eggs evolved from painted or died Paschal eggs being given as gifts. The link also runs deeper in some cultures, with the egg seen as a representation of Jesus’s tomb, and eggs being stained the colour red – as the blood of Christ.

Marianna from Oliveology recalls that at home in Greece it is customary to stain eggs using natural dye (a packet version of which she sells at her stall). Those eggs can be blessed at a midnight service on Good Friday, and often sit decoratively atop braided breads. Having been forbidden during Lent, they’re also made use of with gusto over the weekend, for example in galatopia, a delicious egg, semolina and milk pie – we’re lucky that Marianna has kindly shared with us her mum’s recipe for that.

No doubt, eggs will feature over your Easter weekend. We like them for breakfast Slavic style, with horseradish cream and rye bread.

Breads and cakes

Speaking with Borough Market traders from around Europe, it was interesting to find that, as in Britain, there tend to be few absolutely prescriptive dishes or meals over the Easter period. It is  more the case that people follow hyper-localised (or even familial) interpretations of the general themes discussed in this piece. One of the themes to bring the broadest smiles is that of enriched, sweetened, leavened breads.

The tradition for such breads arises (pun intended) for multiple reasons, including the deep-seated Judeo-Christian significance of breaking bread, and the symbolism of the leavening reflecting the resurrection.

In Britain we have hot cross buns. Elsewhere there’s Greek lambropsomo and tsoureki: soft, fluffy, aromatic braided bread with a golden-brown crust. Another example of Easter bread is Italian pane di Pasqua, a brioche-style bread likely decorated with bright sprinkles and braided to look like a nest holding a colourful died egg.

There’s also colomba di Pasqua – a cake not dissimilar to panettone, in the shape of an Easter dove – which you’ll find at Gastronomica.

A meaty centrepiece (or not)

And so to the Easter Sunday meal.

Chatting to traders with links to Spain, Italy, Croatia, Greece, eastern Europe and elsewhere, we all have a common response to the traditional Easter meal: “Yes… there is meat.” However, few of them cited anything as specific to the occasion as the British Christmas turkey and trimmings, or Italian braised lentils and cotechino at New Year.

The meat is often lamb, although obviously where lambs are not common, it might very well be veal or pork instead. As in the UK, the lamb will generally be cooked quite simply – roasted, grilled or barbecued. It’s typically a large joint or, in countries like Spain and Greece, a whole milk-fed lamb, no doubt because the meals in which it is eaten tend to be relatively large family gatherings.

Marianna mentioned that this year she’ll be back in Greece for the first time in a long while, enjoying all her family customs, including barbecued lamb. Given that sunshine is more likely guaranteed for her than it is for us, we suggest sticking to a more classically British roast leg of lamb, but adding hints of Greece through dried oregano, lemon and bay potatoes, and generous splodges of tsatsiki.

That said, if you or others around the table plan to abstain from red meat for just a little longer, try an artichoke torta Pasqualina. Again this savoury pie (from Liguria) involves the symbolism of eggs, and makes a mighty-satisfying centrepiece. It’s also excellent for an Easter Monday lunch table or picnic.

“FROM ITALIAN NONNAS TO BRITISH MUMS, THERE IS NO DENYING THE MATERNAL INFLUENCE IN BOROUGH MARKET”

Words: Clare Finney

There is a recipe my brother and I will cook all our lives; will entrust to our offspring and forever guard against outsiders. It is our mother’s cheesy pasta with peas and sweetcorn. Oh sure, it sounds easy – but only with the right pasta shape, a suitable strength of cheese and one very special, secret ingredient can you recreate the cheesy pasta of our childhood. Through it we learnt not just the trick to making a good roux and an appreciation of good cheese, but the delicate interplay between the thickness of the sauce and the shape of the pasta.

It was with this in mind that I approached Borough Market’s traders in the run up to Mother’s Day. How had their mothers and grandmothers shaped their culinary futures? What role had these women played in the products and philosophies of various stalls?

From Italian nonnas to British mums, there is no denying the maternal influence in the Market. “My mum and my gran were the greatest food influencers in my life. They taught me everything: recipes, tricks, traditions, preservations, seasonality,” says Marianna at Oliveology. In Greek culture, food is a predominantly female preoccupation, and her stall is a living testament to the influence of the women in her life: olives, olive oil, herbs and wine that she grew up on, produced on her family’s farm in Greece. “All this inspired me and guided me in the values that we want to come across, through Oliveology, to the public,” she says proudly.

Olive oil also runs in the blood of Luigi at The Olive Oil Co: “I am from Puglia. My grandmother was a chef,” he smiles, “and I remember when I was very young she would give me bread and olive oil to keep me entertained in the kitchen – and out of her way. My mother didn’t really cook. She wasn’t very interested.” His grandmother, however, would ply him with “different combinations of flavours and new recipes”.

Our mothers and grandmothers often hold sway in our relationship with food: and for that reason, it is deeply emotional. What they cook, how they cook, and how they involve us in the process forms the bedrock of our culinary lives. When Urvesh’s mother Lalita Parvais (pictured above with Urvesh) arrived in the UK from India in 1968, it was her recipes that brought her solace: the mung bean dal, chapattis and bhujia passed down to her through the generations of Parvais females. “In a winter not dissimilar to this one, food was a sensory, nostalgic journey,” explains Urvesh (pictured above with his mum, Lalita).

When he came to establish Gujarati Rasoi, it seemed only natural that he draw on his heritage – his “time capsule food” – in order to provide as true a taste as possible of rural Gujurat. “My great grandparents lived in east Africa for years before moving back to India. Then my mother and grandparents moved to the UK in the 1960s. Any alterations or twists in these recipes would automatically mean it wouldn’t have had the same nostalgic hit,” explains Urvesh.

Meanwhile, in Zambia, Bill Ogelthorpe’s parents’ attempts to recreate the dishes of their Swiss homeland were frustrated at every turn. “My mum and dad grew up in Switzerland, so they were always trying to make fondue. But there is no tradition for cheese in Zambia. The climate is too hot. It was difficult to find it.” More often than not, the Oglethorpes would be reduced to mixing “some sort of cheddar and beer, or whatever they could find,” he laughs – wine being equally rare. “The Swiss would have died if they’d seen it.” Still, the young Bill must have tasted enough potential in the melting pot for him to embark on a stellar career in Swiss-style mountain cheeses, sold at Kappacasein.

As Nigel Slater will forever attest, culinary greatness can also be born out of a quest to better your childhood experience of food. “We tried to make baguettes once. It was an absolute disaster,” grins Matt Jones, founder of Bread Ahead. “Mum was a great home cook, however: lovely Christmas cakes, great puff pastry for sausage rolls, an amazing carrot cake. She was a big culinary influence and we were always experimenting together. It made me want to get into this world.” He’s got the recipe for the carrot cake. It appeared on the stall a few years ago and may well appear again. The stories and recipes linking traders to their mothers and grandmothers are as diverse as they are many – yet one thing strikes me in particular. None of them – the chapattis, the cakes, the fondues, the koftas – are particularly complicated or unusual. “There is a dialogue that takes place between someone cooking food for someone they love and the eater, which is not verbal,” Urvesh exclaims feelingly, of his family’s hot mung bean dal. “It is affection, love, warmth, anticipation – all those things in a mouthful.” I think of mum’s cheesy pasta: zinging with peas, juicy with sweetcorn, the golden, cheesy strands stretching with each steaming forkful, and I am not just full and happy – I am home.

“WHEN YOU MAKE CHEESE IN A MASSIVE BLOCK, YOU LOSE THE CONNECTION TO THE PLACE IN WHICH IT’S PRODUCED”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Images: Orlando Gili

There are very few cheesemakers in Britain more thoroughly steeped in the history and culture of their craft than Mary Quicke, the owner of Quicke’s. Her family have been farming the same beautiful stretch of land near Newton St Cyres in Devon since 1540, so dairying is in her blood as well as being something that both fascinates and excites her. Mary’s exceptional cloth-bound cheddar cheeses are sold at Borough Market by Heritage Cheese and Neal’s Yard Dairy.

You’re a 14th-generation cheesemaker. Did you always know you’d take on the family business?

I’ve got three brothers, so I always assumed one of them would take on the farm – that’s the traditional thing. My dad was very off-putting. I think he felt he’d done it by obligation, so he was very keen for us to explore other things. I ended up living in London but whenever I went back to the farm, I was just so inspired. I just wanted to come back – eventually I said, “Dad, please can I!” And he said yes. I’ve been running the business since 1987.

Your family has farmed in Newton St Cyres since the 16th century. The dairy industry must have changed a lot during that time.

In the old days, cheese used to be made in every farmhouse, because that’s how you took milk from the summer to the winter. We’ve got pictures of people making cheese on the farm in the 1920s and 1930s. But all that stopped, along with most farmhouse cheeses, during the war. At that point all milk – other than a few places that made national cheese, which was kind of a young, sub-cheddar – went as liquid to feed the population.

One day, my grandfather was told by the milk buyer of Exeter, “We don’t want your milk today Mr Quicke.” That really struck my father, as a little boy: dairy farming doesn’t work if you don’t sell your products. When he came to run the farm, he wanted to make sure he produced something that people would really want. There is always demand for cheese – it’s up to us to make sure we make it delicious. My mother – who’d been told during art school that her training allowed her to do anything – built the current dairy in 1972, while raising six kids. My parents wanted to make cheese the old-fashioned way.

What makes your traditional farmhouse cheddar different to the mass-produced stuff?

We pasteurise our cheese, but otherwise we are very much still making it the old-fashioned way. The milk is 100 per cent from our own herd; we use heritage starters; we hand-cheddar, which is the process of stacking up the blocks of whey. When it’s made on an industrial scale, you’ve got these things called CheddarMasters, where a huge amount of whey is turned over very slowly in a waterfall-like motion, which produces a different result. Every teeny-weeny thing you do, every decision you make, affects the outcome of the cheese. The mantra of Malcolm, our cheese manager, is: “Do it as it’s meant to be done.” Industrialising is about putting less work into it. When you make cheese in a massive block, you lose something – the connection to the place in which it’s produced, that interaction with the environment.

How intricately linked are the environment and the flavour of the cheese?

Cheese is like wine; it’s a real expression of the terroir. Milk or cheese produced even just 10 miles away will taste different to ours. In our cheese store – our cheese cathedral! – what we’re doing is growing a mould garden. Those moulds make a real difference to the flavour of the cheese. We did a swap with James Montgomery in Somerset – put two of our cheeses in his storage, two of his in ours – just to see what effect it had. The difference was profound. Cheesemakers from other farms come here, we show them what we do, and we absolutely know that they won’t end up with the same results.

Cheese tells the story of the place it’s come from. We love coming to Borough to see people learning about our cheese. What’s fantastic about Borough Market is, every one of those foods has a great story. You can cross the wavy bridge from the heart of the financial centre, where it’s all about business and money, and there in the Market people are thinking about soil, about mould. It’s extraordinary.

The word ‘consumer’ encourages you to be passive – to be on the receiving end of a huge chain, as opposed to choosing on the basis of knowledge, after proper consideration. But if you eat with knowledge, you’re absolutely in the driving seat. You can, as Slow Food says, be a co-producer. Your buying decisions make a difference – you’re funding that place. In so doing, you’re impacting the people there and planet you live on. I think that’s enormously empowering.

Do you think the microclimate you have here is particularly conducive to dairy farming?

Neal’s Yard Dairy described our cheese as “luscious” – it’s a good word for it. We do have this incredibly lush pasture. Our grass grows by itself, and it grows beautifully – incredibly. Among those farmers who measure their grass, it’s famous. We’re situated in a rich, alluvial valley next to the River Creedy – I always wonder if it’s a coincidence that it rhymes with greedy – and some of the swathes have been here since my dad’s time. I’m really pleased about that, because underneath perennial pasture you develop more organic matter, and those deep-rooted plants reach down into the soil and bring up nutrients.

You were at the forefront of a move away from intensive farming methods. What prompted that?

I’ve been on a journey. When I first came into farming, we had these thoroughbred animals that produced lots of milk. But it wasn’t right for our cheese. We thought, what’s missing? Grazing. But our pedigree cows didn’t really like grazing outside, so we crossed them with fresian, Swedish red, montbeliard and a teeny bit of jersey.

The farming method we use now is called extended grazing, which means the cows do all the work: they make their own beds, get their own feed, spread their own manure. It means when we work with the cows, we’re working with the animals, not with a machine. I don’t want to knock other systems, but for us, when we were producing higher yields and the cows weren’t doing as much grazing, the cheese didn’t taste how I wanted it. But it does mean the cows produce a lot less milk. There’s an argument that you should be producing as much milk from each cow as possible, from a carbon footprint perspective, because cows produce methane. But on the other hand, our cows are living longer so a lower percentage of their time is spent rearing and a higher percentage producing milk for the dairy. A grass-fed cow also produces less methane.

After years of crossbreeding and testing, do you feel like you’ve perfected the recipe?

Never! I’ve got this picture in my mind of the flavour I’m after, and I’m forever pursuing it. There’s so much to learn – chemistry, biology, physics. Milk is such a complex thing and it can go down thousands of different pathways, depending on countless factors. You couldn’t possibly know everything there is to know about cheesemaking. The complexity of the soil, breeding, the starters, what’s happening within the cheese when you make it and what’s happening on its rind. It’s glorious. That’s what’s so inspiring – you’re sitting on top of this incredibly complex, beautiful machine that you couldn’t ever possibly fully understand. It blows my mind. Yes, we’re trying to produce milk with a particular flavour, but there’s so much involved in finding the best cheese that’s sitting within it. It’s why we are constantly taste testing – often hundreds of cheeses within a few hours. We taste them at three months, six months, 12 months, to work out how long we should age each one. When is it going to be at its best? It’s a bit like Michelangelo looking at a block of marble: there’s a statue in there, and we’ve got to find it.

Explain what you mean by ‘heritage starters’.

A starter is a complex mix of microorganisms, with lots of bugs that operate in different ways, and each makes a stamp on the cheese. Our starters were collected from the best cheese dairies of the sixties and seventies, by somebody called John Lewis – nothing to do with Waitrose. Most industrial dairies use cultures that have a maximum of three strains of bugs and are much simpler in profile – for example, very sweet or very sharp – so the cheese they produce is the same every day. We use several cultures and because of that, there’s more variability. A winemaker has a vintage once a year; we have a vintage every day.

Our starters were actually almost discarded, at one point. They’d ended up in the hands of a French yeast-making company, who couldn’t make any money out of them, so they went to get rid of them. Fortunately, an amazing man, a microbiologist called Ray, stole them and brought them back to Somerset. To think – all those years of development. Those exquisite, complex flavours. You wouldn’t be able to replicate that. It’d be like destroying history or music or art – it’s no surprise they’re called cultures. They’re integral to the cheese. He rescued them.

Last year you set up the Cheese Academy. What was your intention?

One of the really fun things I get to do is go to America every year to judge cheese. They’re really interested in all the nerdy stuff, and so embarrassed by their dreadful sliced cheese – though they are now making some truly awesome cheeses over there, it’s a real challenge because the great bulk of people in America don’t know the first thing about cheese.

To address that, the American Cheese Society that runs this competition also set up something called the Certified Cheese Professional. Initially I thought, don’t be so Henry James. But then I saw all these young people getting so excited about cheese. Most people who find their way into cheesemongering get a job after school because that’s what’s on offer, and it just captivates them. But their knowledge doesn’t have any status. Getting a certification gave them honour and recognition. Not only that, it gave them confidence. I thought that was just amazing. I was unhappy with the certification we have here – which is only one level, for professionals, and you don’t even do any tasting – so I wanted to bring that to the UK.

The other thing is, while there are an awful lot of cheeses in this country and that’s really exciting, we need to create that pull of people wanting to buy it and sell it and serve it in their restaurants. The plank of Slow Food is, it’s got to be good, clean and fair – part of it being fair is being able to make a sensible living out of creating these amazing products. And you can’t do that if people don’t understand it. Why am I paying that much for cheese, when I can get it for a fiver a kilo in the supermarket? We need to be able to say, here’s why, this is the story, these are the flavours, this is what you’re getting for that money. The impact of the WSET Master of Wine programme in the seventies was crazy – now all sorts of wine has a place in the sun. We want to do that with cheese.

The dairy industry is known these days for being male dominated. Do you think that’s changing?

Certainly, in terms of cheddar-makers, I think I am the only woman leading a business. It wasn’t always that way. In all the old cheesemaking books, the cheesemaker is always a ‘she’. They were dairy maids. A lot of the traditional cheesemaking recipes fit in around child-rearing. Mechanisation really changed the field of dairy. Once it went outside the home and you had a machine to do things, suddenly men were interested! The irony is, mechanisation makes things easier for women: the standard weight you’d need to be able to carry 100 years ago was around 100 kilos, which is seriously heavy. Even when I started working it was about 50 kilos. Now nobody lifts anything. We’re not limited by the fact that women, in general, are a little less physically strong than men. While there are lots more women coming into farming, there’s still the sense that it’s a masculine thing to do. But really, it’s about knowledge and being thoughtful with it – which absolutely isn’t more suited to either gender.

“WHILE MALE CHEFS ENJOYED CELEBRITY, THE SETTINGS IN WHICH WOMEN COOKED WERE GIVEN LESS ATTENTION”

Interview: Ellie Costigan

There has long been a strong cultural association between women and food. And yet, when it comes to public status, there has also been a very clear gender imbalance. At the highest end of professional cooking, males have tended to be very much on top, with women largely confined to the domestic space – although that distinction is now finally breaking down.

While big male chefs, from Auguste Escoffier on, have enjoyed fame and celebrity, the settings in which women traditionally cooked – usually ones that garnered little or no pay – have been given much less public attention. Most of the writers who have addressed that domestic space – the preparation of food, the feeding of the family, the everyday labours associated with cooking – have also been women, and they too have often been overlooked.

Perhaps not surprisingly, this imbalance is clearly reflected in the content of Wikipedia – one of the modern world’s most important sources of information. In conjunction with the British Library and The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, a group of us have been working on a project to improve the site’s coverage of women in food. We found there were some really surprising omissions.

One of our most striking discoveries was that the 18th century cookery writer Hannah Glasse, whose influence on British cuisine was enormous, had an entry of about four lines. Many amazing food writers, historians, scientists and cooks, past and present – the likes of Diana Henry, Judy Rodgers, Patience Gray, Eliza Smith – were either missing entirely or did not have the coverage you would expect.

Around three-quarters of Wikipedia editors are male, and this has perhaps compounded the gender bias, but the problem goes far beyond that – the site is a reflection of cultural and social attitudes that have led to women being less accounted for in almost every sphere. The beauty of Wikipedia, though, is that anyone can become an editor, so we have the power to put this right.

It is important to remember that Wikipedia is relatively new, and exists in a constant state of renewal and expansion. Our work is a reflection of some wider shifts: in recent years, there’s been increasing recognition of the importance of understanding food, and its connection to culture and history, so a lot of forgotten women are being rediscovered. A real audience has developed for all these brilliant female food writers and cooks, whose work is now being published, read and celebrated. While the gender division remains stark, I don’t feel bleak about it. The exciting thing about food is, there’s always more to uncover; it’s a rich seam, and one we will keep on mining.

“I HAVE A BRAIN AND TWO HANDS, SO WHY CAN’T A WOMAN CARVE HAM JUST AS WELL AS A MAN?”

Interview: Viel Richardson / Images: Orlando Gili

Have you always wanted to be a jamón carver?

As far back as I can remember, my mother and father carved jamón legs at home, so seeing jamón being carved has always been part of my life. It seems very natural to me. I started to train here about three years ago and loved it from the beginning. In Spain, being a ‘cortadora de jamón’ is seen as a respected career. At every wedding, christening, celebration and festival event you will find someone carving jamón.

Is the sense of tradition important to you?

Yes. I am a proud Spaniard, and this is a very traditional Spanish craft. It makes me feel good to be doing something that connects so deeply with my cultural heritage. But this has traditionally been a job reserved for men, and there were definitely some men who did not approve when I said I wanted to become a cortadora de jamón. One even said: “Are you sure you’re a woman?” My answer to them is that I have a brain and two hands, so why can’t a woman carve ham just as well as a man? Luckily that is changing and there are more female carvers in Spain now. I believe anyone should be allowed to see if they have the skill and passion you need, not just men and not just Spanish people. The man who trained me is Colombian and a very gifted carver.

What is the main aim of the carver?

Achieving the perfect slice on a consistent basis in a way that gets the most out of each leg. Each jamón leg is different, so it is not a case of simply following a set plan. People think the jamón slices have to be as thin as possible, but that is not the case. Each slice needs to be about the depth of a credit card, around two fingers’ width wide and at most two inches long. This is the size that allows you to experience best the combination of flavours and textures.

Is a jamón leg complicated to carve?

Yes, you really need to understand the structure of each leg, where the different muscle groups are located and what their different properties are. The same leg can have four or five different flavours. The part of the leg called the ‘jarrete’ is close to the hoof and doesn’t have a lot of meat. This means as the salt penetrates the leg during the curing process it develops a more intense flavour than other parts. My favourite part of the leg is the ‘caña’. It’s by the tendon. The texture is not the best, but for me the flavour is amazing. Then we have the ‘maza’, the ‘punta’, the ‘babilla’ – all these areas have different textures and it is my job as a carver to present each one at its best.

So there can be a variety of experiences for the customer?

Yes, there can. When I make a plate of ham at the start of each shift at Brindisa, or for events, I like to include slices from all the different areas of the leg so the people can experience the different flavours and textures. Of course, once you have started carving you cannot get to all areas at the same time, but I always get a minimum of two of the cuts in each serving and when I’m making up packets I try to get two or three cuts in each one.

You talk about the jamón with real reverence. Why is that?

Out of respect for the animal and the producers. A jamón leg takes time and care to make well and you need to respect the time and skill involved. You do this by doing your best to get as much product of each leg as possible while maintaining the quality of each slice. Nothing is wasted. Once we have taken off all the slices, we cut the rest of the meat into small cubes. These are full of flavour. You can eat them on their own with beer or wine. You can cook with them – making croquetas, for example – or you can add them to soups and stews.

Is it hard work?

It is physically demanding. I went to the doctor to ask about a lump I noticed on my hand and he said it was simply muscle that had built up through carving for several hours a day. Carving has actually changed the shape of my hand. I had no idea that I had a muscle there!

Do you need any special equipment?

Your most important tool is your knife. While there is no ‘official’ length, it has to be long and flexible. As a cortadora de jamón, you have to keep your knives extremely sharp. You also have to understand the different parts of the knife very well and while carving you will use different sections of the blade to carve different parts of the leg.

What is the most important aspect of the actual carving?

Keeping the blade parallel with the floor – this is critical for getting slices that are the same thickness all the way across. Wherever you are on the leg you have you make sure the knife is parallel, this can sometimes be tricky as the leg is a shape full of slopes and curves. Sometimes you have to cut away a piece of the leg to get the knife into the parallel position. You also have to be very aware of where the knife will go if it slips. Positioning your body, arms and hands is extremely important for safety. The knife is very sharp and a warm jamón leg can get a bit slippery.

What other qualities do you need?

To do this job well, I believe you also need a love of people. Yes, you can carve without it, but a cortadora de jamón is so often part of a celebration. Carving ham has some theatre about it. Engaging with the people you are carving for can make the occasion so much better. This is one of the things I love most about my job. You can see the joy it brings people and the interest it generates about your culture. People are so interested in the jamón: what breed it is, where it came from, how long it was aged for, the best way to enjoy it. For me, that connection is priceless.

“WHEN MARKETS THRIVE, PEOPLE EAT WELL, FAMILY LIFE REVOLVES AROUND THE TABLE: THAT IS WHAT A GOOD LIFE IS ABOUT”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Portrait: Orlando Gili

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.

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 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 post-industrial. 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 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.

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.