“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.

“THE BIGGEST ISSUE IS ACCESS TO FOOD. WE PRODUCE ENOUGH FOR EVERYONE IN THE WORLD, THEN THROW HALF OF IT AWAY”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Images: Orlando Gili

Deidre Woods, known to all as Dee, co-founded the Granville Community Kitchen cooperative in Kilburn as a hub for serving her local community: from growing veg in the community garden, to teaching cookery skills, to laying on big, healthy, sociable dinners for those who need them most – a role that led to her being named BBC Food and Farming Cook of the Year in 2016. If that weren’t enough, Dee also sits on the London Food Board and Food Ethics Council, is a visiting research associate at Coventry University, and was named an ambassador for Slow Food in 2016. When I ask how she possibly manages to fit it all in, a broad grin spreads across her face. “I was told by a friend recently that I need to give something up. I said, ‘Okay, you’re right.’ So, I’ve decided to give up housework.” Sounds like a good compromise to me.

Has food always been a big part of your life?

I was born in London, but moved to live in Trinidad as a child. My earliest memory of living in London is my parents having lots of parties, bringing the Caribbean community together and cooking traditional foods. Then, in Trinidad, I was amazed by the variety of foods – I remember my dad taking us around the island and showing us all the different fruits and nuts and vegetables. I still have my first cookbook from when I was about seven. I use it during cookery classes with children. For me food is more than nutrients: it’s social, it’s cultural, it’s spiritual, it is all these many amazing things. It connects us to the earth and the cycle of life and death.

What sparked the Granville Community Kitchen?

My background is in youth and community work, but the impetus for me starting the Granville Community Kitchen was my own experience with household food insecurity, but also recognising it within our community and with other families and people. I recognised that a food bank isn’t the answer; that coming together and sharing our skills and our knowledge would be much better. We teach cookery to children, young people, all ages. We also volunteer in schools. We teach growing – from seed, to plate, to composting, all organically. I think it’s crucial. We have a generation of people who are disconnected from where their food comes from and I think understanding what goes into your food makes you value it more. Which is important, especially as we have so much household waste in the UK.

The main feature of the centre is our Friday night community meal. We partner with another charity: they generally cook but I sometimes cook with them. We just have this big community dinner where everyone comes together. The last couple of years we have been taking surplus food from local stores and using it for cooking and cookery classes. The excess we redistribute. We now have three sites, but it should be four soon, as we keep getting approached by different community groups and organisations who are looking to start a garden.

How important do you think these sorts of local initiatives are in terms of addressing issues within the wider food system?

For us it’s about modelling an alternative: alternative exchange, distribution, and even thinking about food differently. Our next phase is to develop a community farm, a local market and a micro-bakery. But we’ve gone about it very, very slowly. It’s taken work to get to this stage – rather than just doing it when it’s not something people want, we’ve been very clear that this is participatory, this is for the community. It isn’t a charity. It’s people-centred, people led.

Often, stigma is a big issue. A lot of these voucher schemes, for example – people don’t want to have to show up to a shop or a market and have to present them, because it says, “I’m poor”. With the mini market that we’re hoping to set up, we do want to take on vouchers but in a way that is more dignified. There’s the wellbeing benefits as well. We attract people from all around, many with mental health and social needs. A lot of people say: “I don’t need the food, I don’t need to come here, but I am lonely and I look forward to this on a Friday night.” It is enriching for a lot of people; it is a lifeline for a lot of people – just to feel a part of something and belong to a community. 

There’s a lot of talk about the need for a more ‘fair and inclusive’ food system. What would that look like to you?

I’m on the London Food Board, and when we were drawing up the last food strategy, a few of us were intent on that being a big part of it, which is why there were so many focus groups and events. We’re hoping to have some sort of forum where people can keep feeding into food policy – at that local level, but also in terms of local authorities developing their own food policies. It’s important to have proper input from everyone.

We are the country that sparked the global food system as it is – occupying land, taking resources, using mainly black and brown bodies so that people here could have everything they wanted on the table. It was a class thing, it was a racial thing, it was a colonial measure. And here in the UK we’re not even really beginning to have those conversations. It’s about agency: people should be equipped to have agency within a system and right now, the majority of people are disempowered. But food is a great connecting tool, across class, ethnicity and culture. You can have amazing conversations because of it – the community kitchen started just from conversations over food and coffee and tea. We need to be involving everybody in those conversations.

Do food markets have a role to play in creating a more equitable food system?

If you look at pre-fifties Britain, what did we have? Local shops. We had markets. We’ve lost the high street to the big supermarkets and chains. Farmers’ markets are now something that are seen as elite – until I bring people to Borough Market and show them otherwise; that they’re something anyone can shop at. It is about recreating some of those things that happened in the past. Markets are also important for knowing where your food comes from. When I come to Borough, even if it’s produced elsewhere in the world, I am able to find out where that food is coming from. I avoid supermarkets like the plague – there is a superstore five minutes from me, but I would rather trek. Markets are also about building your local economy. That’s one of the things we had in our vision for the community kitchen – that we would equip people with skills so that either they can start their own small micro food business or go elsewhere and work.

What is the biggest food-related challenge we are facing as a city?

There’s a lot of hidden hunger. At the kitchen we’re getting a lot more asylum seekers and homeless people. These are people who are often totally unrecorded and who cannot even afford basic human rights: they have no food, no access to medical services, no housing, no work. That’s not right. I think the biggest global issue today is access to food. It’s shameful that we produce enough food for everyone in the world and then throw half of it away.

We need shorter food chains – not necessarily more local food, but more localised. I think people get confused with the terminology: localised means you’re still connected to the global and in that way we’re more inclusive, particularly when you have a diverse city such as London. It means you can still bring in food from elsewhere, but you’re doing it in a way that’s fair to whoever produced that food. Most people don’t even think about the consequences of their choices. Even the rise in veganism has caused some major impacts on other parts of the world. We’re in the middle of a climate crisis. We need to think, what are we growing, going forward? What are we eating going forward? We drastically need to change what we eat, and it might take a crisis to change it.

It looks like that crisis might be occurring, if national politics are anything to go by. What changes would you like to see?

One, a national food policy – which is in the works. Hopefully that will involve consulting ordinary people, through citizens’ assemblies. Second, someone responsible for food – there is no one solely responsible for food in this country. We need a minister for food. Third, the right to food needs to be enshrined in legislation – the right to good food and nutrition, and culturally appropriate food. We’ve signed up to all these things at UN level, but we’re increasingly in violation of them. So many people in this country are going hungry.

Why do you think that is?

Part of the issue is, our food system is dominated by mega-corporations. It’s about money and profit, not people. For example, we now have big companies who patent seeds and control them so that you cannot replicate them. You have to buy their seeds, buy their chemicals. Seed sovereignty is the crux of any food system: if the farmers can’t control the seeds, which they had done for millennia, they can’t control the food system. All this power is concentrated among a small group of people who are profiting and who are not changing anything. They’re greenwashing. They say, “Oh, we’re all for corporate social responsibility,” but at the end of the day they are still making mega profit, while there are farmers supplying them who work for less than a pound a day.

And still, people can’t even afford the cheap processed food these corporations are producing – some can’t afford anything at all, by the time they’ve paid rent and everything else. Food is now a commodity, something to be bought and sold. Whereas if we value food for what it is – something that gives us life, as something that’s part of this universe and this earth, something we are connected to – then we will think differently.

Do you think it’s possible to address these overlapping issues with a national food policy?

Food is very difficult and complicated because it’s a planning issue, it’s a transport issue, a health issue, an environmental issue, you name it. And it is the most important aspect of our lives. Without food, we can’t do anything. That’s why we need an integrated food policy: we can’t have environment talking here and public health talking there, and they’re at odds with each other. People need to be talking to each other and that’s why we need a separate ministry for food and somebody responsible for overseeing all of that.

One of the things I don’t like is this dissection and hierarchy of poverty: there’s period poverty, there’s child poverty, food poverty, all these various poverties. No. It’s just poverty. The only way to get around that is to ensure people are paid proper living wages, end zero-hour contracts, and put a proper welfare system in place so that those who cannot be part of the work world and who need that support have it. Elderly people and disabled people and children and the most vulnerable in society are being targeted by austerity policies – come on!

You often describe yourself as a food ‘actionist’ rather than activist. What do you mean by that?

Even as a child I was always questioning things. A lot of people talk and they’re on frontlines and they’re doing various things, but they’re not actually effecting any change. For me, that is important. That’s why I got involved in food policy, because that’s where we make change. Lately, I have become involved in research and writing, which is quite hard as a non-academic. But if we’re talking about shifting power and more equity, then we need to hear different voices and value different types of knowledge, and not just academic knowledge and voices. I feel like I need to start making a stand because there are certain things that really aren’t being discussed: race and gender are the main ones. We need research and analysis around those things. How are we going to change anything when we don’t know who is being affected? My eighties feminist self has re-awakened!

“A MEAL IS A SHARED EXPERIENCE. FOR PROSPECTIVE COUPLES, IT’S ALSO A DANCE OF COURTSHIP AND A MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION”

Though well known for coining the phrase, the late, great Julia Child can’t have been the first person to recognise that people who love to eat are always the best people. No sooner had I ‘discovered’ boys than I realised how and what they ate is one of the most reliable ways of sorting the wheat from the unnecessarily gluten-free. Slow eaters were out; ditto unethical consumers, caffeine eschewers and, I’m afraid to say, vegans. No disrespect to their principles, but I can’t love anyone who can’t share a bubbling vacherin mont d’Or with me on a winter’s evening. ‘In’ was, well, pretty much anyone with an appetite, an open mind and eating at Noma as a serious life goal.

Equally telling of course – for me, as much as for my date – is how I ate in front of them: whether I picked or tucked in with gusto. The first dinner date I ever went on I was 16 and, naturally, loathed every inch of myself. My date, meanwhile, was a rugby lad and a joker, popularly considered to be “a solid eight out of 10”. Inevitably, by the time I got to the restaurant, I felt sick with nerves. “Chicken caesar salad, please,” I whispered. “Without the, um, chicken. Or bread.”

“Is that even a thing?” my date asked, perplexed, ordering himself cheesy garlic bread, pizza and dough balls. Needless to say, a second date never occurred – and while I can’t be sure that my comprehensive rejection of sustenance was the reason, it probably didn’t help. “Just don’t order a salad. Ever,” my brothers advised me afterward – wisdom I have followed to this day. 

Dating at university proved mostly foodless, the only edible measure of someone’s affection being cheesy chips and their capacity to share them. True love was giving someone first dibs on the hottest, cheesiest chip in the tray; true selfishness, to my mind, was smothering the entire pile in curry sauce. It was there, outside one-armed Jane’s chippy in Durham, that I started to develop my condiment theory: the idea that what a person added to their food could prove a reliable indicator of our compatibility. I wouldn’t go with curry sauce any more than I think chips do, but I would have mash with wholegrain mustard (preferably from Fitz Fine Foods) and Ginger Pig sausages.

Looking back over my disappointments in love, I see now that the warnings were written in the sauces: kisses thick with garlic mayo, coruscating obsessions with chilli and, worst of all, the man who couldn’t resist squeezing the jelly-ish mustard you get in those yellow bottles in insalubrious pubs directly onto his spoon.

Naturally, the headiest moments of my romantic life so far have had food at the heart of them. Pistachio gelato from an old Italian ice cream parlour on Eastbourne seafront; a BYO, blink-and-you’d-miss-it Thai place in Kentish town; a brown bag of pink, pert radishes from Elsey & Bent shared by the river. That any man could demonstrate an appreciation for something so small and honest as a fresh, seasonal radish blew my mind almost as much as the radish itself. Later, the same chap would make me gravadlax, fragrant with dill and blushing with beetroot: reader, I should have married him. Instead, I got cold feet and ended it a few weeks later for no good reason beyond his being a bit too perfect, and my own insecurity.

I spent the next five years trying to win him back. Gin, young goat’s cheese, ripe vine tomatoes, Bread Ahead focaccia, St Lucian chocolate: if you can find it in the Market, chances are I bought it in pursuit of his affection. But if the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, his was on a diverted bus route. My caraway seed loaf fell on stony ground. My venison prosciutto was lost on him. “Once bitten, twice shy,” he explained, like he himself was an Alpine deer. That said, the experience did prove to me just how inextricably linked love is with the giving and receiving of food.  

The more relationships I went through, the more I realised mealtimes were the fulcrum of my daily life – and by extension, any life I hoped to share with a partner. We need breakfast to plan our day, coffee to make it happen, tea and cake to chew our problems over, and wine to spin dreams out of. To not care deeply about those things, as has often been the case on dates, to me implied a blatant disregard for ‘us’ as a whole.

“It might be ‘just milk’ to you my friend,” I’d think furiously as an ex reached for the cheapest bottle in the supermarket, “but for me it’s commitment, trust, bovine welfare and the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture.” To care where and who your food comes from is to care not just for your wellbeing and that of those you love, it is to care for producers, traditional, ethical practices, and for the planet as a whole. The man who had eaten dog, whale and “wouldn’t say no to cat” was a write-off from the moment he said so, despite his good looks and intelligence. The man who waxed lyrical about the ecological benefits of biodynamic viticulture, however, had me at natural pest control.

This is not about pretension. It’s not even about luxury. Indeed, the worst date I ever had was in a three Michelin-starred restaurant in Venice. I couldn’t tell you what we ate, but I can recall in vivid detail every word my partner said as he coldly assassinated my character over successive plates of intricate food. As we left, I remember wondering that such a quality meal could prove so tasteless, purely on account of how I felt. No wonder one of the most common symptoms of sadness is lack of appetite.

A meal is above all else a shared experience, whether it’s a takeaway pizza or plates of pig cheeks and judión beans and pink fir potatoes with tarragon butter at Elliot’s. For prospective couples, it is also a dance of courtship – “Here, try some of this.” “Can I try yours?” “You have the last piece.” – and a medium of communication. To feed somebody, to buy and prepare food for them, is to express a universal and elemental urge.

You want them to live. You want them to live and to thrive because you love them, and feeding them is the best way to ensure this. You want to share your life with them in the same way you share a fresh loaf of sourdough and hot pumpkin soup ladled from a gleaming tureen. It didn’t work out with the pizza man, which on reflection I should have guessed – favourite condiment? salad cream – but I’m optimistic about the future.

However you feel about Valentine’s Day, do eat something delicious with your loved ones. And if you see any eligible bachelors lurking around the wholegrain mustards at Fitz Fine Foods, please send them my way.

“ACCORDING TO WILLIAM SALMON, WRITING IN 1710, POTATOES ARE ‘SPERMATOGENETICK’ VEGETABLES WHICH ‘PROVOKE LUST’”

Words: Mark Riddaway

Southwark resident and likely Borough Market shopper William Shakespeare once suggested that music might be the food of love, but real food of love is, well, food. Since time immemorial, people have been eating and drinking in the service of courtship and romance. Many of the ingredients sold by the Market’s traders have at various points in history, in different parts of the world, been perceived as having romantic or aphrodisiac qualities – some of which are quite surprising. Here’s a Borough shopping list for anyone with loving on their mind.

Chocolate

Ever since chocolate first arrived in Europe in the early 16th century, brought back from Mexico by Spanish conquistadores, it has carried about itself a hint of carnality. It started with ribald tales of the Aztec emperor Montezuma downing gallons of drinking chocolate before entertaining his hundreds of wives and concubines; stories which fired the imagination of repressed Europeans. By the 17th century the drinking of hot chocolate was a widespread and rather fashionable pursuit, especially among women, but that sense of naughtiness never went away: Casanova spends a large proportion of his memoirs “taking chocolate” and trying to persuade women to take chocolate with him. The first chocolate bar went on sale in 1847, with boxes of candied chocolates in production by the 1860s. These were quickly assimilated into the rituals of courtship and have remained so ever since.

Potatoes

In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff, dressed as a stag and massively over-excited at the prospect of having his way with the comely Mistress Ford, cries out: “Let the sky rain potatoes.” To a modern audience, that’s just confusing. But to an Elizabethan audience, it would have made perfect sense. Potatoes, now the most mundane and everyday of vegetables, were for a while the essence of risqué exotica. According to William Salmon, in his 1710 Botanologia; or the English Herbal, potatoes are “spermatogenetick” vegetables which “restore in consumptions, and provoke lust”. It’s fair to say that they’re considered somewhat less sexy these days.

Turnips

Surely the least-likely aphrodisiac in the world – more so even than potatoes. According to Pliny the Elder, there was some debate about the true nature of the turnip: “Democritus entirely disapproved of the turnip as a food on the ground that it causes flatulence,” he wrote. “Diocles, however, praised it highly, maintaining that it is also an aphrodisiac. Dionysius agrees, holding that its effect is greater when it is seasoned with rocket.” Taking into account what we’ve just learnt about potatoes, this puts the Scottish penchant for tatties and neeps in an entirely new light.

Onions

Definitely the nuclear option among food-based aphrodisiacs, particularly when consumed by men. The first century Roman poet Martial summed it up nicely in one of his typically lewd epigrams: “If your wife is old / And your member is exhausted / Eat onions in plenty.” The decidedly filthy 15th century Arabic sex manual The Perfumed Garden by Muhammad al-Nafzawi is filled to the brim with onion recipes and contains a poem that begins: “The member of Abou el Heiloukh has remained erect / For 30 days without a break / because he did eat onions.” In France, this apparent quality is still put to good use: newly-weds have traditionally been served onion soup the day after the wedding in an attempt to reinvigorate their ardour.

Asparagus

Some foods have been ascribed with aphrodisiac qualities thanks largely to looking a little, well, phallic. This is true of celery and carrots, and especially of asparagus. According to the English botanist Nicholas Culpeper, in his Complete Herbal of 1653, asparagus, when boiled up in wine and eaten in the morning, “stirreth up bodily lust in man or woman, whatever some have written to the contrary”. This belief, which dates back to antiquity, reached the Arab world as well. Back to The Perfumed Garden: “He who boils asparagus, and then fries them in fat, and then pours upon them the yolks of eggs with pounded condiments and eats every day of this dish, will… find in it a stimulant for his amorous desires.”

Oysters

A further subset of aphrodisiac foods contains those we can politely call ‘yonic’ – the female equivalent of phallic. Oysters have plenty of that going on, as well as being saline, slippery and impossible to eat in a dignified manner. They have been associated with love and sex since antiquity, as illustrated by these words from Juvenal about the love goddess Venus: “Does Venus care about anything when she’s drunk? / She no longer knows the difference between head and tail, / She who laps at giant oysters, long, long after midnight.”

Casanova, who had a similar penchant for food and romance, ate a staggering quantity of oysters with two young women, Emilie and Armelline: “We ate 50 oysters, and drank two bottles of sparkling champagne, which made my two guests eruct and blush and laugh at the same time.” They ate a further 50 “for dessert”, accompanied by a rum punch, spicing things up by sucking oysters from between each other’s lips. The polar opposite of Casanova was Nehemiah Wallington, a 17th century Puritan from London, who attempted to dampen his lustful inclinations by abstaining from “eggs and oysters and wine and many other things which I loved very well”.

Bay leaves

A correspondent to the Connoisseur journal in 1755 provides a lovely description of an old British Valentine’s Day tradition: “Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and, the night before, I got five bay leaves and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow and the fifth to the middle; and then if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out.” She goes on to explain how she made absolutely sure of success: “I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk, and filled it with salt; and then I went to bed, ate it shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it.” Delicious.

Basil

With its heart-shaped leaves and sweet scent, basil is a symbol of love in several European countries. In Romania, on the day before the feast of boboteaza (epiphany), there is a similar tradition to the English bay leaf one, with sprigs of basil being left under the pillow to inspire a future marriage. One of the colloquial names for basil in Tuscany is amorino, meaning ‘little love’, and in Italy these fragrant leaves have been used in a number of romantic traditions. Or, at times, not so romantic: in some parts of Italy the presence of a pot of basil on a balcony was meant to symbolise that the owners had a daughter of marriageable age under their roof and that they would happily listen to offers from suitors.

Wine / beer / spirits

Absolutely no evidence needed for this. In the immortal words of American poet Ogden Nash: “Candy / Is dandy / But liquor / Is quicker.” Wine has provided the petrol in the engine of romance since the first time some slightly off grape juice was shared by an increasingly giggly couple long before the invention of writing. Still the only aphrodisiac that actually works, hence the fact that single people go to parties with bags of bottles, not barrels of oysters.

Mark Riddaway is the author of Borough Market: Edible Histories, a book filled with epic tales of everyday ingredients.

“SMOKED GARLIC IS MELLOWER THAN THE AGGRESSIVE ALLIUM WE’RE USED TO, OFFERING A LESS INTENSE HIT OF FLAVOUR”

Smoked garlic

Hung by a string from ceilings in large, airy rooms and hot smoked over oak chips for up to two days, this smoked garlic is mellower than the aggressive allium we’re used to, making it great for dishes that require a slightly less intense hit of flavour. Use it to stuff a roast chicken, add depth to stews and casseroles, or let its subtlety shine through in a simple garlic sauce or mayonnaise.

Smoked anchovies 

Fished using small ‘ceco’ nets from day boats in the small fishing port of Zumaia, Basque Country, these anchovies, available from Brindisa, are processed and tinned the day they’re caught. Once gutted, washed and brined, the fish are cold smoked over beech wood, resulting in a delicate flavour and moist, melting texture – unlike any anchovy you’ve ever eaten. Best enjoyed with nothing but a simple green salad.

Chipotle chilli 

This wrinkly, prune-like capsicum from Spice Mountain is a jalapeño that has been smoked over wood to infuse it with a rich, chocolatey flavour. They’re sold whole, flaked, powdered or in tins of adobo (the hot, smoky, Mexican sauce). The whole chillies need to be rehydrated in warm water before use. Once brought back to life, blitz them up into a paste and stir into any dish that would benefit from an injection of smoky heat.

Ricotta affumicata

Produced in Trento using a blend of sheep’s and cow’s milks, ricotta becomes a different beast altogether after smoking. Noticeably drier than its unsmoked counterpart, ricotta affumicata has a burnished brown exterior and a crumbly texture, yet the flavour retains some of its ricotta-like creaminess. Buy some from Gastronomica then crumble over gnocchi, grate onto caponata, or shave onto winter leaf salads. 

Smoked Darjeeling second flush

Harvested from lower-lying plants in June each year, this tea comes from the second wave of the Darjeeling harvest. Once handpicked, the leaves are roasted over timber fire, infusing it with a mild smoky taste that’s less assertive than the likes of lapsang souchong, with a ‘clean’ taste to the finish, but leaving a distinctly earthy flavour and a smell like wet woodland. Sold at Tea2You.