“I KNOW FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE THAT FLORIST SCISSORS CAN TAKE THE TIP OFF YOUR FINGER WITH ONE SWIPE!”

Interview & illustration: Ed Smith

There are a number of different sources for the flowers and plants we sell at The Gated Garden. I have a wholesaler in Kent, I go to New Covent Garden market, and I also buy direct from Holland. I try to focus on the seasons: like fruit and veg, flowers are better quality and bigger when in season. They’re better value, too, which works for me and the customer. Come May, I try to work as much as possible with English flowers, turning to our suppliers in Essex. It’s nice to do that, but it also makes sense.

Our offer is a mix of cut flowers and pot plants. House plants are very popular at the moment – things that hang, things that grow up the wall, things that don’t need too much attention. I think it’s an Instagram-driven thing. We also make a lot of bouquets. And that means using four or five different tools to cut and strip the flowers so they’re ready to arrange, tie and wrap.

My bright yellow florist scissors, which I use to snip flower stems on a diagonal, are extremely sharp. I know from personal experience that they can take the tip off your finger with one swipe! I have two types of secateurs: the smaller, lighter ones for stems that aren’t too woody, and the ‘proper’ secateurs, with their thick, strong blades, for the big woody stems. Paper scissors are really important – and the most expensive of the lot – as you need a really sharp blade to cut a straight line through the wrapping paper, so the edges look good. And finally, although sometimes we’ll strip the leaves off the stems by hand, most often we’ll use a crafty little strimming tool, which speeds things up a bit.

It takes roughly 15-20 minutes to make a bouquet. We’ll take the flowers into the office and use a work table there. We’re constantly picking up scissors. It’s hard work and tough on your hands, even though your skin hardens. And we’re exposed to the elements through the day here, too. I can’t really work in gloves – they get in the way and I can’t feel what I’m putting together. I don’t sharpen the scissors; they’re very utilitarian and basic, so when they go blunt, I’ll just replace them. I’m not that sentimental about them – except for the paper ones, which are definitely my favourite. Overall, as long as they cut and they’re sharp, I don’t really think too much about them. That said, they have to be bright colours so that we can see them quickly. Not just so that they’re quick to grab, but because they’ve a habit of ending up in the bin, in among the ends of wrapping paper and raffia!

“THE QUALITIES OF THESE POTENT SPICES ARE INTERCHANGEABLE, YET THE FLAVOURS ARE NUANCED”

Image: Ed Smith

Either anise is the Marmite of the spice flavours, or Marmite is the anise of the yeast extract spreads.

By anise, strictly speaking I mean the compound anethole, which is the sweet, herbal, warm-yet-cooling flavour compound present in anise seed, star anise, liquorice and fennel.

Though divisive, these potent spices play a significant role in global cuisine. To an extent their qualities are interchangeable. Yet the flavours are nuanced, and so they’re all worth looking into in more detail.

Anise seed

Also known as aniseed, the seeds of the dill-like plant pimpinella animus are light green, near grey in colour and fairly flat; perhaps a cross between caraway and fennel seed in shape and size. It is the anethole compound in this spice that (traditionally) provides the flavour in so many digestifs (pastis, ouzo, arak, sambuca).

Indeed, the spice has been employed as a digestive throughout history and across continents: aniseed-flavoured cakes called mustaceoe were served by the Romans at the end of gluttonous feasts; and the seeds on their own are used in India for the same purpose.

Anise is aromatic and sweet, and though we can note things like menthol, the flavour is distinctly and characteristically, well, that of anise.

The seeds can be left whole for use in teas and infusions, but if adding to food, you’re more likely to toast the seeds to encourage a release of oils, and then grind into a powder – as you would with fennel seeds.

Spice Mountain sells both whole and ground anise seeds. As ever, the whole seeds will be good for around a year if kept in an air tight container. The powder is best used within a few months.

Star anise

Star anise is unrelated to anise so if you require anise seed in a recipe, it’s not a case of picking out all the little round balls in those woody stars and grinding them down.

That said, you wouldn’t be too far away in terms of flavour (because it is cheaper, star anise is often used as a substitute for anise in both baking and alcoholic drinks), it’s just you might find your dish evokes the Orient rather than the Mediterranean.

This seed pod is indigenous to China and is widely used across Asia – through Sichuan, Malay, Indian, and Vietnamese cuisine. It’s the dominant ingredient in Chinese five-spice powder, though it’s becoming more frequently used in the west, too – in part because of our increasingly global approach to cooking, but also in recognition of star anise’s ability to enhance the flavour of meat. Just a petal or two added to a braising stock adds a richness and fullness to red meats like beef, lamb and venison.

The woody stars are distinctive in both shape and smell. For the most part, they’re left whole and infused into braising and poaching liquor. It is a formidable tool; the longer the spice is left to do its work and the hotter the temperature, the more flavour is imparted. If the cooking process is slow, beware the recipes that demand more than two or three stars. However, star anise can also be ground to a powder and indeed is for many Indian masalas and for Chinese five spice.

Again, there’ll be plenty of flavour in whole star anise for around a year. It’s best to use ground star anise within a few months.

Liquorice

Liquorice is the sweet root of a small perennial legume that grows wild across Europe and the Middle East. Of all these anise-like spices, it could be argued that liquorice is currently the least utilised. Yet it has a strong culinary history, having been cultivated by the ancient Egyptians through to Dominican monks based in Pontefract, Yorkshire. Nordic countries and the Netherlands continue to enjoy both sweet and salted liquorice candies. Even so, the majority of liquorice is actually now used as a flavouring for tobacco products.

The root can be boiled and left to impart flavour into stocks and cream based foods, roast and ground to a powder and used directly as a flavouring (I suggest buying it in this form rather than break your grinder trying to create your own). or even chewed whole if you’re in need of a natural breath freshener.

Liquorice roots hold their flavour for a long time. The ground powder, however, drops in potency after just a month or two. Like star anise, the effect of liquorice root when infused depends on the length of time and temperature of the liquid. Note also that many sweet recipes requiring liquorice in fact demand the candy sweet, which will melt down, as opposed to the proper spice.

Fennel seed

Fennel seeds are the fruit of fennel bulbs where the herby fronds of those bulbs are left to shoot upwards and flower, and then those flowers left to drop. If you come across wild fennel towards the end of summertime, see if you can shake out some seeds to take home; the taste and aroma is far more pronounced than in cultivated seeds.

Traditionally fennel seed is seen as a Mediterranean spice, used widely, for example, in Italian cooking. Nevertheless, it has spread through the world and is common in the cuisines of Asia and the Indian sub-continent. Many Indian and Pakistani masalas rely on the addition of fennel seeds, and the seeds are often roasted and eaten at the end of a meal as a breath freshener and digestive.

The flat, oval, light green fennel seeds are often left whole as they seem less obtrusive or likely to sit in your teeth than seeds like caraway, cumin or coriander. That said, recipes will often instruct a cook to bash the seeds a little, or to fully grind them to a powder. Per usual, if you toast fennel seeds, their oils will be released and the flavour more pronounced in your food as a result.

As ever, the whole seeds will be good for around a year if kept in an air-tight container. The powder is best used within a few months.

Culinary uses

All these spices work particularly well with pork, lamb, beef and venison. Notably so when those meats have been braised or poached together with the spice.

Though some have particularly strong associations (pork and fennel seed; liquorice and pigeon; star anise and duck), because the anethole compound is common to them all, it follows that wherever one of these anethole spices pairs well with an ingredient, the others would most likely work well in its place.

It’s worth mentioning, though, that the notes of star anise are particularly vital in Chinese cooking (on its own and within Chinese five spice), and is often used with pork or beef. Dishes like red braised pork and beef tendon soup stand out. Also in Malay, rendang and Vietnamese, pho.

Fennel seed has forever been associated with Italian cooking, not least as a sweet spice to rub over pork loin and belly (including when making porchetta), within fresh sausages and cured and air dried finocchiona salami. Apparently, it may have been the case that the spice was originally used to disguise the flavour of rancid meat and the less noble cuts. One heck of a match, though.

These four spices are considered sweet spices too, so naturally sit in cakes and cream-based puds as proudly as cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice.

The flavour of anise adds elegance to French vin chaud, intrigue to coffee and coffee-flavoured desserts, warms an apple pie or pastry, and is a particularly strong match with citrus. A petal or two where you might otherwise have used candied ginger root works a treat as well (when poaching or roasting rhubarb or pears, for example).

Liquorice’s traditional culinary use is as a flavouring for sweet candy, with those Dominican friars making use of it in a biscuit.

Anise seed is generally sweet, rather than savoury, too. Spiced cakes and other baked goods, and sugar alcoholic drinks are the traditional uses of this spice.

Market spice heroes

It’s hard to look past the fennel seed loaf by Bread Ahead. It’s a true celebration of fennel seed, which sings out in every bite. Excellent with cheeses and cold meats, particularly if just toasted to release the aromas of the seeds.

See Ed’s recipe for lemon & star anise posset with liquorice & fennel seed biscotti.

“BLACK GARLIC HAS UNDERGONE THE WONDEROUS TRANSFORMATION KNOWN AS THE MAILLARD REACTION”

Black garlic

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

Smoked garlic

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

Solo garlic

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

Wet garlic

This young, immature garlic from Paul Wheeler Fresh Supplies is harvested before the cloves are fully formed and is sold ‘wet’ – meaning fresh, rather than dried. Milder and slightly sweeter than its older dried cousins, it can be eaten raw without it completely overwhelming the palate. Enjoy it stalks and all, sliced into salads or finely chopped and scattered over dishes as you would spring onion.

Wild garlic mustard

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

“CHIVES CAN PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE, ADDING ALLIUM AROMATICS WHEN AN ONION WOULD BE TOO POWERFUL”

Image: Ed Smith

This month we’ll be focusing on chives – those long, thin, oniony herbs which, depending on your preference, are either essential in, or the ruin of, an egg mayo sandwich.

Usually, I try hard to make the case for every herb’s ability to work as a main, superstar ingredient, rather than final flourish. But chives? Well, there’s no two ways about it: chives are just a garnish, aren’t they?

Which is not to say that chives are merely an afterthought, a frippery or an optional extra. Indeed, they can play an important culinary role, adding allium aromatics when an onion, or even a spring onion, would be too powerful.

Chives are a perennial, and so are available all year round. They’re also widespread across Europe, North America and southeast Asia, which means they make an appearance in a multitude of cuisines.

Keep chives in the plastic pockets you buy them in, or follow the generic storage guidance of this herb series. Whichever, the key things to do to ensure they last a reasonable amount of time in your fridge are a) prevent them from drying out, and b) keep them nice and flat, to avoid bruising.

You can dry chives and freeze them too. Though I hardly see the point. A better way to make the most of a bunch, if you don’t think you’ll get through it, is to make a chive oil.

Cooking tips

Chives lose much of their flavour when heated, so are added as a garnish at the end of a dish’s preparation.

The thin, green, grass-like chive is technically known as a ‘scape’. It’s the scape that we use most often, cut very finely into 1-5mm pieces – any longer and you’ll find it sticks between your teeth. Chive’s quality is flavour, not texture.

But you should also look out for chive flowers. As with the flowers of other alliums, the striking, round heads, made of many little buds, carry a similar flavour to the scapes and add great colour (violet) and flavour to a dish.

Classic uses

Chives are almost exclusively used as a garnish. In both western and southeast Asian cooking, the flavours it pairs particularly well with include:

— Eggs: From a British egg mayo sandwich, to a Vietnamese or Thai omelette, eggs and chives get on like a house on fire. I personally love a few scapes chopped into my sarnie, or over the top of some scrambled eggs on toast. But I don’t have to kiss myself afterwards, nor do I work in an office. Which may be a problem for others. Social issues aside, if you’ve had a Vietnamese herb omelette or summer roll, you’ll know that chives (which in Vietnam are much bigger), play a really key role alongside coriander, Thai basil and perilla. Their allium notes add real balance to the incredible, lively flavours.

— Cheese: Du vin, du pain, du Boursin? Oui. Well, actually, it’s possibly better to pick up a roule or another soft and creamy French cheese from one of Borough’s cheesemongers, rather than Boursin. But the point is that, as you well know, cream cheese and chives are a pretty sound match.

— Salmon: You’ll also know that salmon and chives get along famously too – sometimes in tandem with cream cheese, though it’s not necessary. In part, the two ingredients work because salmon, whether fresh or smoked, is relatively delicate, and chives are too.

— Crab, lobster and prawns: As with salmon, chives just add a soft, background seasoning to both of these seafoods.

— Potatoes: Particularly thrown at the last minute into a potato salad (much better than harsh spring onions) or very buttery mashed potato.

— Lettuce, peas, broad beans and asparagus: Always a good garnish for anything to do with these vegetables, but particularly for a summer lettuce and pea soup. — Vanilla ice cream. Joking.

“IT’S SLIGHTLY MEDICINAL, BUT IN A GOOD WAY – LIKE A WELL-MADE NEGRONI – AND THERE AREN’T MANY ILLS IT COULDN’T CURE”

My uncle and aunt were for many years the producers of the finest honey in all of Slough. That may not be the biggest of claims, given that Slough is a place associated less with wild flora and more with David Brent, Brutalism and Betjeman’s bombs, but it’s something. When I was a kid, we were never without a jar, delivered from a hive in the garden of their bungalow. No two batches tasted the same, and no other honey tasted even half as good.

Sadly, the supply shut down after my uncle was stung by a bee – a mundane event for a beekeeper, or so you’d think. While entering full-blown anaphylaxis, he found that he was one of the tiny percentage of adults for whom bee stings are potentially fatal, which goes to show that a) my uncle was both a lucky and skilful beekeeper and b) the universe has a twisted sense of humour. After being discharged from hospital, he decided that being the producer of the finest honey in all of Slough wasn’t accolade enough for lives to be risked in its pursuit.

For me, this has proved problematic – once you’ve tasted the ambrosia of the M4 corridor, where do you turn? The honeys of From Field and Flower, though, touch those heights. This one in particular. It is sourced from Piedmont, northern Italy, where the bees who make it feed from linden trees in the Alpine valleys of Valsesia. Linden trees are known in English as lime trees, and by coincidence (they have absolutely nothing to do with the citrus of the same name) the honey flavoured by their flowers has a distinct hint of limey sourness, offsetting all that glorious sugar. It’s slightly medicinal, but in a good way – like a well-made negroni – and there aren’t many ills it couldn’t cure. Valsesia is no Slough, but its honey is almost as good.

“OFFAL DOESN’T HAVE TO BE ABOUT EATING EVERYTHING FROM TROTTER TO SQUEAK; IT CAN BE A SCALE AND FIN THING, TOO”

Image: Ed Smith

There’s a certain die-hard meat eater connotation to the word ‘offal’. If someone says they have tried or like pig’s head, calf’s brains, or liver-heavy faggots, they may as well have put on a massive badge stating ‘I am a carnivore’. Yet offal doesn’t have to be about eating everything from trotter to squeak; it can be a scale and fin thing, too.

We’re probably even more guilty of wasting fish bits than we are of other animals. Think about it: despite the fact that a fish’s flesh accounts for just 50 per cent of its mass, it’s generally only the fillets that we eat.

Scandinavians are into cod tongue and throat; in China, fish lips are braised and the collars and heads of fish are prized; I recently ate a stew in Portugal containing braised cod swim bladder, which is similar to an intestine; and, whisper it, I once had cod sperm sac sushi for breakfast at about 5:30 in the morning on the edge of Tokyo’s fish market (a cold beer was necessary both for courage and to wash it down).

More common and easier to recommend than those things are fish livers and roe. Monkfish liver has never been out of fashion in places like Spain, Japan and Iceland, and is now bang on trend in Britain’s restaurants. Fish roes are everywhere: from pastes, dips, patés, and sushi, all the way to caviar.

What are these things you speak of, and how do they taste?

Liver

As with a human, a fish’s liver assists with digestion by producing bile, maintains the correct chemical composition of blood, and stores fats and carbohydrates, so effectively acts as a reserve for energy. Perhaps it’s the latter function that helps to explain why monkfish liver (in particular) is so damn tasty.

Its ‘foie gras of the sea’ label is deserved: it’s rich, buttery and decadent. It also has an amazing saline quality. Most often monkfish liver is cooked quickly in a hot pan, so the edge caramelises and crisps a little, then served with something sweet or tart – sautéed leeks, pickled gooseberries, stewed plums and so on.

There’s a crunch and then a silky, creaminess to monkfish liver and while you can eat too much of it, it is lighter and less cloying than foie gras.

Fish liver can also be used in sauces; melting into and lending a rich saltiness to a pasta dish, for example, without you really knowing it’s there.

How to prepare and cook liver

Monkfish liver is pretty intimidating to look at, but relatively easy to cook and use. Like a mammal’s liver, preparation is largely a case of removing any veins or residual fat from the surface. Some recipes suggest a light brine to firm it a little, and / or soaking it in milk to soften its fishiness.

The Japanese dish ankimo requires liver to be rubbed with salt, soaked in sake, and then steamed. Western recipes tend to slice it into two to three centimetres thick ‘steaks’, and sear on a very hot pan for barely a minute on either side.

Roe

‘Hard’ roe are the egg masses found within the ovaries of fish. Hundreds of individual eggs are produced and held in membraneous sacs, and are usually brightly coloured. They’re relatively seasonal, being much more voluminous around spawning periods. (You’ll occasionally see reference to ‘soft’ roe too which is, in fact, fish semen. This post is mostly about the female version.)

Depending on the fish, the size of their eggs and the consumers involved, fish roe are used in a variety of ways. Some, like the Italians, Spanish and Japanese, cure and dry whole roe sacs, later slicing or grating it as a salty, umami, heavy flavouring, with a certain bitter aftertaste.

Traditionally, we Brits are partial to herring and cod’s roe, again salted and sometimes smoked, but not air dried to harden. The result is a spread with an intense fishy flavour. We remain rank amateurs in comparison to Scandinavians, though, who can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s so popular it comes in squeezable toothpaste tubes and is as universal at breakfast as cereal is on our tables.

You have to look fairly closely at cod and herring roe sacs to see that, actually, they consist of hundreds of little round eggs. The roe of salmon and trout is more obviously separate. Round, reddy-pink balls – which almost look too perfect to be natural – they are often salted or kept in oil, and burst as you bite them, releasing a salty, oily slick. It’s an addictive if acquired taste.

The same is true of caviar. The intensely-flavoured grey-black sturgeon eggs are prestigious, though probably best when simply matched with a little piece of rye bread.

Personally, I find caviar to be overrated. The roe I prize highest is that of the sea urchin. Like bright orange, wobbly tongues, uni, as it is known in Japan, has an ethereal mouthfeel, and melts on the tongue while imparting the best bits of a rockpool in your mouth.

How to prepare and cook roe

Most roe is best when fresh and still raw, or simply salted. The exceptions are generally when the roe is fully cured and air dried or smoked, after which you can simply spread on toast, or grate or shave if it’s drier.

Because roes are universally salty and intense, they add a heady seasoning to toast, rice, pasta or fish dishes, warming through residual heat and imparting a muted but strong flavour to the rest of the dish.

I was hoping to get my hands on some monkfish liver for this post, but each of Borough’s fishmongers confirmed the same thing: it’s a difficult treat to get hold of! Which is not to say you won’t see it at the Market, just that it’s not often in stock. So keep your eyes out in case any of the monkfish tails came with an added bonus and snap it up if it’s there.

Still, Shellseekers Fish & Game had plenty of smoked cod’s roe, and I had a few people coming over for drinks – so whipped cod’s roe (i.e. taramasalata) was the order of the day.

This is something that’s been de rigeur on London menus over the last few years, mostly via chefs who have either worked with or are clearly influenced by the Henderson / St John way of cooking. Interestingly, though, there’s no recipe for whipped cod’s roe in his books, which made testing out the best way of making it and then providing a recipe here even more vital!

Most recipes I read suggested adding oil to the roe and using a machine to blend it into an emulsion, like a mayonnaise. I wasn’t convinced by the results of that method, though, and also felt it unnecessary – roe is so soft, whipping it up by hand isn’t too much of a chore. Two other variants I tried included combining with soaked stale bread, which is possibly more authentic Greek taramasalata, and with creme fraiche, which requires less planning.

I preferred the latter approach – partly because of the ease of buying a pot of creme fraiche over ensuring there are stale white bread crumbs at home, but mostly because I think the sharp, cooling tang of creme fraiche is particularly good paired with the smoky, salty roe.

Read Ed’s recipe for whipped smoked cod’s roe.

“IT’S THE SORT OF CHEESE THAT SERIOUS CHEESE LOVERS SEEK OUT WHEN THEY WANT SOMETHING SURPRISING AND NEW”

The place: an Alpine cheese parlour, high above the Maurienne Valley in the Vanoise National Park. Inside, the eerie, whimsical tinkle of cow bells sounds the end of milking, and the start – or rather, resumption – of making cheese. Catherine Richard doesn’t falter. A milkmaid at the age of six and a cheesemaker by 15, one imagines her veins are as blue as the unique mould that suffuses the bleu de Termignon, so easily does its making run through them. Now in her sixties, she is one of a mere handful of producers left making this “totally fascinating, totally awesome” cheese.

“It’s really unusual,” Max at Mons Cheesemongers continues. “She is working in a 700-year-old chalet – just in the summer months, when there’s no snow, because when the snow comes, you can’t reach it.” As soon as the snow melts, she and her small herd of 15 or 16 cows make the journey up Maurienne to the alpage – rich in luscious grasses and wild herbs: chives, white clover, daisies and other flora which, when the first, sweet wheels of the season are cut open, you can quite literally taste.

The cheese is made in stages, the morning milk strained and added to the previous evening’s yield before being renneted, heated and kept warm with a reflective mountain rescue blanket – yes, really – to create curds that, once drained, can be added to curds which have been acidifying in whey since they were made two days before.

“This gives the finished cheese a distinctively tart, acidic taste,” says Max. The whey in which the curds were sitting is topped up, and the curds replenished with fresh ones. Remarkably, in an age of blind, sweeping sterility, the whey in this bucket is never entirely replaced. What’s more, the equipment is all wooden at this stage in the process, helping to harbour the bright, indigenous mould which pervades this cheese in a mysterious, delicious way.

“Bleu de Termignon is a natural blue: the cheese is not pierced, or seeded with penicillin in the way most blues are.” Silently, stealthily, the mould creeps from the outside rind through. By pressing the curds by hand into the cloth-lined wooden cylinders, the mould can wend its way easily through their loose, rubbery texture as the cheese matures, left in the cellar, sometimes over winter, to age and fester under a thick layer of snow and ice while the cows return to the valley, to eat the hay and dried flowers Caroline spent the hours she wasn’t milking or making cheese assidiously preparing.

Only the cows are allowed the flora that grow in the Vanoise National Park; mere mortals can’t touch it. By the time the bleu de Termignon arrives at the Mons Cheesemongers maturing rooms in Bermondsey, its uniqueness has been set in a thick, grey, red dusted-rind, if not in actual stone.

“You can still see the red mould on the rind when we receive the cheese,” Max marvels. It’s the same mould which blankets the stone walls of Caroline’s chalet, and the mountainous crags overlooking it. Quite often, they as cheesemongers like to “age it up” by cutting the wheel in half and keeping it at 15 degrees for a few months, to allow the blue mould inside the cheese to diffuse a bit further through.

The taste is unlike any other: Max reaches for mushrooms and woody herbs, but it varies: “Last year they were more aniseedy – more fennel-y, really.” His colleague likens the texture to that of a Lancashire, but again insists on its uniqueness. “It’s the sort of cheese that serious cheese lovers seek out when they want something surprising and new.” It’s a cheese for cheesemongers, she continues: “The people who spend all day tasting and smelling cheese? This is the one that’s sufficiently amazing and interesting and fascinating for them to happily go home at the end of the day and to sit and eat more cheese.” Recommendations don’t come much higher than that.

“THE FAT IN NDUJA COMES BOTH FROM THE BACK OF HEAVY PIGS AND THE TRIM OF BELLIES AND SHOULDERS – AND IT’S DELICIOUS”

If you wanted to put together a varied Italian salumi platter, you could fill it, very, very easily, with crowd-pleasers from Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Lombardy: a coppa, some prosciutto or culatello, a couple of salami – a Toscana and a Milano, perhaps – and some mortadella. It would be a perfectly good meat board. World class, in fact (there’s more on those meats in last month’s post). Yet it wouldn’t represent the full scope of Italian salumi in either geography or style.

Two key regions of salume production represented at the Market are South Tyrol, or Alto Adige – a mountainous province in northeast Italy, bordered by Austria and Switzerland – and Calabria, which is all the way down at the opposite end of the country, in the southwestern ‘toe’. The styles and flavours of products in these regions are completely different to each other, and indeed to the regions explored last time. In part, this can be explained by their terroir and the other foods of each area.

Calabrian salumi

Nduja, probably the best-known type of Calabrian salume, is effectively a paste that consists of around 50 per cent pork fat and 50 per cent Calabrian chilli. The fat will have come both from the back of heavy pigs, but also the trim of bellies and shoulders (so there’ll be a few scrapings of meat in there), and, wow, it’s delicious.

De Calabria is the place to head for nduja. Theirs is both truly authentic and of a fantastic quality. You’ll see the fresh chilli is unevenly chopped (a sure sign of an artisan product!) and has infused the product with a flame-red colour. Spread it on biscuits or bread and drizzle with honey. Or use it in your cooking: under the skin of a roast chicken, stirred through a pasta sauce, in the middle of arancini or croquettes, or fry your eggs in a good chunk of it.

Do talk with the guys at De Calabria, though, as you’ll find they’ve a few other bits of salumi to offer – their nduja producer is also the farmer of the pigs, so makes use of all of the beast. There’s a chilli-spiced capocollo, chilli-spiced pancetta, chilli-spiced salame (soppressata), and a totally-porky, nose-to-tail pressed head terrine known in Calabria as gelatina. All fantastic.

Alpine salumi

If fresh, locally-grown chilli defines the cured meats produced in Calabria, then the ingredient that arguably defines and certainly makes meats from the South Tyrol stand out is smoke.

The reason for this, I’d posit, is that as we move north and uphill, the environment was (is) no longer suited to air-drying meats. Once up in the Dolomites (and then into Austria, Germany and into Scandinavia), the Romans and other early curers couldn’t simply leave a ham or neck muscle in a cave and return seven months later to collect the basis of their sublime meat platter, as they might have done in Tuscany. They found, however, that if you cold-smoke the meat once salted, then the bacteria that makes meat inhospitable for eating and storing could still be defeated. Smoke is now a key flavour of Alpine meats. Originally it would have been a necessity, too.

Next time you’re at the Market, visit Alpine Deli and have a chat with owner Thea, as you taste and buy her super products. The standout meat is speck Alto Adige. In one sense this is the same as prosciutto, but only in that it’s a ham made from the back leg of a pig. It’s also very different to those meats from Parma and San Danielle we discussed last time. In South Tyrol, the ham is de-boned before it is cured and dried. It’s also smoked over oak (again, before drying). Actually, there’s another similarity with the prosciuttos: speck is delicious sliced very thinly and savoured on a meat board. Thea tells me she also enjoys cooking with it – cubed in pasta sauces, or as a component of Alpine bread dumplings.

When you speak to Thea, you’ll notice that her Italian accent is, well, German. Most Italians from this province speak German rather than Italian and in many senses, we should consider the cuisine of that area as ‘Alpine’ (rather than Italian or Austrian). Other cured meat products that are distinct to the wider region are her ‘chimney sausages’ – small salamis that, originally, would’ve been smoked somewhere high up the chimneys of Alpine smallholders – and her venison bresaola, which of course reflects the fact that the mountainous terrain of the area is better suited to roaming deer than cattle farms.

“THE OLD LORE WAS THAT CIDER PRESSED IN AUTUMN SHOULDN’T BE DRUNK UNTIL THE CUCKOO SINGS, WHICH IS AROUND APRIL OR MAY”

Interview: Viel Richardson

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

We pick the fruit in the autumn when the weather is cooling. After blending the apples, we press them and store the juice in large vats for the primary fermentation. This process continues until some point in January. When the weather is right, we then move the juice – minus the sediment – into fresh vats, adding a bit of sugar. We don’t filter the fermented juice, so there’s still a little bit of yeast to feed on the sugar. We then seal the vat tight and leave it. The old lore was that cider pressed in autumn shouldn’t be drunk until the cuckoo sings, which is around April or May, when the weather really starts to warm up and the yeast in the cider starts feeding more actively, giving the finished drink a little natural sparkle.

What is your approach to cider making?

My West Country connections mean I have always gone for a very traditional type of cider, made with bittersweet and bittersharp apples. I was taught to make cider by a wonderful woman called Jean Noelle, over in Herefordshire. One of her mantras was: “You have to be able to look your customers in the eye and say that there were no ‘brook apples’ in my cider.” That means there is no water bulking out the volume.

How many different types of cider do you make?

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

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

Most of the time. Modern drinkers often find traditional cider a bit intense, so we try to create a blend that will have the feel of a very traditional cider but which has been tweaked a little for the modern palate. For example, I sometimes add culinary apples to the cider blend to bring some lightness to the drink. We do make one single varietal cider using the Kingston Black apple. It’s a bittersharp apple which, because the skin is high in tannins, is able to create a balanced cider all on its own. Compared to the other varieties we make, it produces a slightly stronger drink. It is a ‘vintage’ cider – a name reserved for single varietal ciders.

How do you create a blend?

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

Are great apples the key?

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

So, making cider is a real craft.

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

“THE AROMATICS ON THE NOSE, THE TONGUE AND THE PALATE ARE NUANCED, SOPHISTICATED AND EVER-CHANGING”

Image: Ed Smith

The throwaway line “season with salt and pepper” is one of the greatest crimes of modern recipe writing.

While pepper, like salt, brings flavour to a meal, that flavour is its own, not something in the food already that’s been emboldened and emphasised, in the way it might be by the addition of sodium chloride. In fact, a grating of pepper is akin to adding a dusting of paprika, or a sprinkle of crushed cumin seeds – it is very definitely a spice, and an ancient one at that.

Pepper has a fruity history and a defined, rather than generic, purpose. The aromatics of peppercorns received by the nose, the tongue and the palate are nuanced, sophisticated, and ever-changing. Our senses are stimulated by them. Certain varieties even numb and tingle.

To avoid confusion, I should note at the outset that I will use ‘pepper’ and ‘peppercorn’ interchangeably in this piece. Of course, in both instances I am referring to the spice, not the fruit of the capsicum plant (bell peppers, romano peppers etc).

There are many varieties of peppercorns (and some imposters too). Spice Mountain stocks nearly 20 of them. We can’t cover them all in this piece, so instead I’ll provide a potted history, before highlighting a few of the key varieties.

Peppercorns are the fruit of a flowering vine from the plant family piperaceae. Though native to India (particularly, the south), peppercorns grow across Asia and the Indian sub-continent and have done almost since records began. Vietnam is a huge producer. The main one, in fact. Though Indonesia, Nepal, China, Malaysia and of course India are major pepper players too.

We take pepper for granted, but it’s usually cited as the most or second most traded spice in the world (depending whether you count chilli as a spice), and until modern times was also one of the most valuable.

Black peppercorns

The most common type is the black peppercorn, though there are a number of varieties.

Black peppercorns are the blanched and then dried unripe ‘drupes’ of the pepper plant. They grow in a long bunch and are picked off once dried and blackened.

Their fruity, hot aroma is evident when crushed or ground, and they don’t require the kind of toasting that other spices do to refine and release their oils. Typical tasting notes include grassiness, a little citrus, and musty, dry heat.

It’s best to buy peppercorns whole and grind them only at the point of use, as it loses its aroma quickly. For similar reasons, it’s best to add pepper at the end of the cooking process. In fact, these tips relate to all colours of peppercorns.

As you can see from walking round Spice Mountain, we are spoilt for choice of black peppercorn. Celebrated varieties include the Tellicherry pepper, cubeb pepper, Sarawak pepper and Vietnamese peppercorns.

The Tellicherry pepper is regularly cited as the very best of the peppercorns. They’re grown on the Malabar coast in Kerala, southern India, and are notable for their size and pungency. Tellicherry peppercorns are over-ripened on the vine, so are almost bloated before being picked. They’re bright, sweet and fruity, and have a hint of pine freshness.

Cubeb pepper is from Indonesia. It’s quite easy to pick out from a normal black peppercorn because the stalk of the cubeb remains like a tail. Spice Mountain suggests using cubeb pepper in north African cooking, and I can see exactly why; there’s a touch of allspice and citrus note to it, which would go really well with food from that continent.

Sarawak pepper is from Malaysia. It’s bold and woody and warm and cracking over rich meats or in coconut-based curries.

Vietnamese peppercorns are probably the black peppercorns you have in your supermarket stocked grinder. Perfectly good for everyday cooking.

Green peppercorns

Though you may be disappointed to learn that pink peppercorns are a complete imposter and not a peppercorn at all, green ones are. In fact, these are the fresh ‘drupes’ of the pepper plant, which would become black were they to be blanched and dried. They’re technically unripe, and are often salted or brined to preserve them. Green peppercorns are a staple of Thai and Vietnamese cooking, though have also made themselves known in French cuisine. Delia Smith loves them too.

White peppercorns

White peppercorns are the seeds of the pepper fruits. They’re from the same plant as black and green peppercorns, but to obtain the seeds, the fully ripe and now red fruits are soaked in water until the flesh starts to decompose, allowing the seed to be revealed following a little rubbing. This is then dried out for use. White pepper has a very different flavour to black. There’s a musty and indeed mustardy-ness to it. Many Escoffier-style, French, cream-based or puréed potato dish relies on it to bring warmth without flakes of black spice. It’s also important in Chinese and Thai cooking.

Long pepper

Indonesian or Java long pepper is of the piperaceae family, but looks very different to all the other peppercorns. Rather than growing in a cluster of little berries, a long pepper is one, well, long pepper. Usually about two to three centimetres, it’s a tightly-packed fruit which is picked and dried in the same way as black peppercorns, and has similar hot and citrus characteristics. But it’s also a little bit like cassia bark, with a hint of eucalyptus. It’s really something worth seeking out, and then using as you would other peppers – ground over red meats or into rich stews and curries.

Sichuan peppercorns

Just to add one last element of confusion, Sichuan peppercorns are not technically peppercorns as they’re the fruit of a different family of plants in the citrus (rutaceae) family. Which explains the definite lemony-lime flavour to them, if not the numbing effect they have on the tongue, or their potent heat. There are a number of varieties, though red hulled ones, whole green ones and the Nepalese brown ‘peppercorns’ are particularly common. Be warned: once you’ve become accustomed to the wizardry of Sichuan peppercorns, it’s hard to turn back.

Culinary uses

Having written at the top that pepper is not a mere seasoning, I would like to backtrack a little and note that a scattering does, on many occasions, enhance a dish or ingredient.

Certain roots and tubers, for example, love a heavy grind of black pepper – in particular swede, turnips, celeriac, carrots and potatoes when boiled, mashed or gratinated. Ditto brassicas like cabbage and kale. Mushrooms seem to love pepper too, not least once they’ve been fried in butter. Beef is partial to a generous coating as well; I’m thinking on top of the charred crust of a just-cooked steak, into the rich stock of a beef bourguignon, or over slices of a roast rib joint. To my mind oily fish like salmon and trout go particularly well with the spice. Also, anything relating to melting cheese and white sauces benefits from the must of peppercorns; classically, it should probably be a pinch of white peppercorn, but black pepper is fine. And no pork sausage is a good pork sausage without loads of black pepper in the mix.

There are also a wide range of dishes that rely on peppercorns as a vital ingredient.

Prince of them all is cacio e pepe, the Roman dish which translates directly as ‘cheese and pepper’, because aside from pasta the only ingredients are (or should be) pecorino, pepper and a dash of the water in which the pasta boils. It’s a brilliant example of how commanding and flavoursome pepper can be.

Unsurprisingly given where peppercorns are generally grown, a number of Asian dishes make the most of them as a flavour. You will find multiple versions of black pepper chicken and tofu dishes across the various regions of mainland China. Similarly in India, chicken and paneer that have been heavily coated in black pepper are mainstays of tandoor and dry-style curries.

There’s barely a dish in Sichuanese cuisine which isn’t powered by the citrus tingle of Sichuan peppercorns. Both red and green peppercorns are essential in good hotpot restaurants (slowly infusing their heat and scent into the broth and indeed your clothes), and classic dishes like mapo tofu, kung pao chicken and dry fried green beans are all the better for the spice.

And it may surprise many to know that black pepper is a particularly good match with certain acidic fruits, and therefore it’s a spice you might encounter at the end of a meal. For example, there are multiple recipes out there that involve freshly grinding black peppercorns over strawberries, or pieces of pineapple and mango. Many more where the spice is added to a sorbet or ice cream of those same fruits. It’s a super match, again highlighting peppers as a spice with a unique and appealing flavour.

See Ed’s recipe for onglet with Tellicherry & long pepper sauce.