“IT IS THE HIGH LEVELS OF PROTEIN, FAT AND WATER WITHIN EGGS THAT MAKE THEM SO USEFUL IN THE KITCHEN”

Eggs were once a springtime delicacy, as widely anticipated by British cooks as the first strawberries of the summer. Birds, if left to their own devices, only lay eggs when there is sufficient daylight, be they domesticated ducks or wild gulls. Today, most farmers encourage hens, ducks and quails to lay throughout the year by lighting their barns in the dark winter months.

Until the mid-20th century, spring was marked by the arrival of myriad different types of eggs, ranging from rich-tasting boiled plovers’ eggs (now illegal to collect) served nestled in a bed of moss, to pretty fawn-coloured guinea fowl eggs coddled in a hot-water bath as a breakfast treat. Such seasonality ensured that everyone appreciated the joys of a fresh egg and much care was taken in the summer to preserve hens’ eggs for the winter months by cleaning their shells and painting them in gum arabic.

As ES Dallas wrote in 1877 in his fascinating Kettner’s Book of the Table, there is “nothing in the way of food more simple than an egg, and nothing so quick and marvelous in its manifold uses and transformations. There are said to be about 600 ways of serving an egg, over and above the uses to which it may be put in creams, custards, liaisons, sauces, and cakes.”

Today, the number of egg-dependent recipes available to British cooks must far exceed his 600 ways, given our access to ideas from around the world. No Victorian cook would have dreamed of serving her diners a delicate Italian stracciatella (egg-drop) soup, let alone a hearty dish of Moroccan fried eggs with tomatoes and cumin.

Modern cooks are far more likely to make Ottolenghi’s Turkish baked eggs with yoghurt or Sabrina Ghayour’s Persian herb frittata, than an old-fashioned butter-rich egg sauce or poached eggs with gravy, served on a crouton with a rich, clear veal gravy. In Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), Eliza Acton suggested that a young swan’s egg could be served this way – on a large crouton, or preferably on some spinach, “and sauced with highly flavoured gravy, or with tomata-sauce well-seasoned with eshalots”.

All these recipes rely on the unique properties of eggs. A hen’s egg white contains more than 10 per cent protein by weight, while the yolk contains nearly 20 per cent protein, including the emulsifying protein lecithin, as well as a high quantity of fat. Both white and yolk carry minerals such as iodine, phosphorus and selium, and vitamins A, D, B12 and folate. In other words, they’re very nutritious as well as delicious.

It is the high levels of protein, fat and water within eggs that make them so useful in the kitchen. The protein will set when gently exposed to heat, which allows the creation of all manner of wobbly custards, from coffee crème caramel to leek and bacon quiche. It also enables otherwise crumbly mixtures to be bound together once cooked, such as a buttery bread stuffing or a pork and spinach terrine.

Best of all, it allows cooks to create lightness in their dishes by beating or whisking air into the eggs or egg whites, which expands and sets when exposed to heat, for example in a cheese soufflé, fluffy lemon cupcake or fragile meringue.

The egg yolk’s fat ensures that the soufflé or cake has a moist, rich texture. In contrast, egg whites produce drier-textured dishes even when the meringue is poached, such as in floating islands.

The egg yolk’s fat also imbues sauces with an unctuous texture when their protein thickens a liquid, such as a vanilla custard or a rhubarb curd. It’s the protein lecithin within egg yolks that enables them to hold both water and fat to create a stable emulsion, regardless of whether it is submitted to heat, such as with a béarnaise sauce where butter is added, or kept cold in mayonnaise, for example.

The ability of egg whites to form an airtight coating around each bubble of air when whisked can also be preserved by setting with gelatine or chocolate. This is particularly useful for custard-based ice cream makers such as myself, who can use up all their excess whites by making orange flower water marshmallows and chocolate pots.

All of which makes me want to make some more egg-based dishes – anyone for saffron bread and butter pudding?

Bantam eggs

Half the size of chicken eggs, these are normally found through friends and family. Perfect for breakfast.

Duck eggs

These have a slightly richer eggy flavour than hen’s eggs. They are delicious scrambled, or used in classic unctuous egg dishes such as omelettes or custards. The egg whites form smaller bubbles when whisked, which gives meringues and whisked sponges a different texture. Available all year round.

Goose eggs

Goose eggs are traditionally sold from 14th February until the beginning of May, as domesticated geese very sensibly insist on only laying their eggs as the weather turns warm in the spring. A single egg can weigh anything between 180-200g. The yolks have a high fat content.

Gull eggs

Gull eggs are only permitted to be collected under license and are sold for a brief period at the end of April. As a result, they are considered a delicacy. They have an intense eggy taste and are usually served simply, for example, boiled with celery salt.

Hen eggs

Available all year round in a wide variety of shapes and colours, depending on the breed of hen. An average hen’s egg will weigh around 50g, although their size and weight can vary considerably. The colour of the yolk is dependent on the hen’s diet – free-range foraging in grass produces a rich yellow yolk.

Pheasant eggs

Due to their strong flavour, pheasant eggs are best served in salads, where their taste can be balanced with other ingredients. They’re in season from April until June but like guinea fowl and bantam eggs, are often hard to find. Oddly, they have proportionally more yolk to egg than a hen’s egg.

Quail eggs

Quails’ eggs have such pretty shells, you feel they ought to be made of chocolate and praline. Happily, they’re available throughout the year and, weighing between 15-20g, they’re perfect for canapés and salads.

“AGROFORESTRY TAKES CHANGES IN FARMING OVER THE PAST CENTURY AND COMBINES THEM WITH THE BENEFITS OF PERMACULTURE”

Words: Clare Finney

“What does it mean to call your product ethical?” muses Charles Tebbutt. “What does it mean to make that claim to sustainability?” As the inaugural subject of this new column, the founder and director of Food & Forest has thought long and hard about this question, and how his business of supplying nuts produced by a network of suppliers, all of whom use a method known as ‘agroforestry’, fits in.

“For me, there are two distinctive canons in this area. On the one hand you have Slow Food, helping to revitalise small scale producers. There is concern for the dignity and integrity of the rural community and environment, and support for an alternative to mechanised production.” On the other hand, he continues, you’ve a “utilitarian framework”: how, with exponential growth in global population, do we find production methods that are capable of feeding the world?

Agroforestry, Charles explains, combines the best aspects of both these canons. “By comparing how much an acre of land produces under various approaches to management, Cranfield University concluded that one hectare of agroforestry yields as much as 0.8 hectares of arable crops and 0.6 hectares of forestry. You’re getting 1.4 hectares worth of production from one hectare,” he smiles. “You’ve nailed the utilitarian argument.”

So how does agroforestry – the use of trees in arable farming – contribute toward the sustainability of rural areas? To answer this, it helps to imagine the farms in question: long avenues of grain, each around 30m wide, lined by flowering and fruiting trees. The aesthetic merits of mixing fields of otherwise monotonous arable crops with nut and fruit trees are obvious, but what is more significant is the contribution these trees make toward the fertility and yield of the farm, and its impact on the environment.

“In East Anglia, where there are few hedges, farmers see it as normal for the topsoil to blow away periodically – but the trunks help decrease wind speed,” Charles points out. Meanwhile, the deep roots of the trees further reduce soil erosion, thereby retaining its stock of nutrients as well as adding to it via leaf litter come autumn.

“Stephen Briggs, one of the leading proponents of agroforestry, talks a lot about the subsoil that cannot normally be accessed by arable crops,” he continues. “Because the tree roots go deeper, they suck up the phosphorous from the subsoil, which is recycled when the leaves fall. This means the nutrients reach the topsoil, without the need for excess fertiliser.” It’s good for the environment – less fertiliser is required so there’s less run off and river pollution – “but it is also conducive to large yields.”

The benefits don’t stop there. Because the ground crops utilise water, nitrogen and sunlight earlier in the year than the trees, there is far less nitrate loss overall. “You harvest that crop, and when you have harvested that, the tree crop starts coming. The time frames are complementary.” Any nitrogen that isn’t utilised by crops is subsequently captured by the roots of the trees.

As keen campers among you will have found, the ground temperature in woodland is invariably higher than in an open field. “There is evidence to suggest the presence of tree roots means the soil warms up sooner in spring and stays hotter for later in autumn. The roots trap the heat and insulate the soil,” says Charles – making life easier for crops as well as sleeping campers. In short, says Charles, “agroforestry takes the best developments in farming over the past century – the yields, the logistical efficiency and the use of technology – and combines them with the environmental benefits of permaculture.” In this way, it takes the ethical imperative to care for the environment and combines it with the ethical imperative to feed our growing population. This is ethics, every which way.

“BAKING IT IN A SALT CRUST IS AN OPTION, BUT POACHING IT GENTLY IN THE LAST FEW MOMENTS OF A STEW IS MUCH LESS HASSLE”

Image: Ed Smith

The gurnard may not be the absolute weirdest-looking creature of the sea, but neither is it the prettiest. You’ll often see it described as “pre-historic looking”, “distinctive” and “downright ugly” – and looking at the large-headed, wide-mouthed, big-eyed, jagged-finned, pink-skinned examples at Furness Fish Markets, it’s hard to disagree. Which doesn’t exactly make gurnard attractive to buy, cook and eat.

In his seminal book English Seafood Cookery, however, Rick Stein pointed out that gurnard “is an undervalued fish, mostly going as bait for lobster pots” and that it is excellent in stews like a bouillabaisse, and also when filleted and cooked simply. “Any recipe for filleted sole, turbot, brill or john dory would suit gurnard”. Did we actually heed Rick, though, or were we just reading and watching because his dog Chalky was so cute?

I worry it was the latter – it’s now nearly 30 years since that book was published, and I still don’t think gurnard is cooked enough. Stephen Harris, chef proprietor at the acclaimed Sportsman restaurant near Whitstable, wrote about gurnard for the Telegraph, not just bemoaning the fish’s bad reputation in general, but also noting his own reluctance to cook it (“I was never quite convinced”). The fact no one bought the gurnard dishes cooked at the Sportsman was nearly the final nail in the coffin for Harris (“even my brother couldn’t sell it”). It was proving even more wasteful to buy gurnard for the restaurant than it would be to let the fisherman send it to the lobster pots.

There is, thankfully, a happy ending. Harris found that by cooking gurnard on the bone it didn’t dry out, as it can do when filleted. He now salt-bakes the fish, serving it broken into large flakes on top of a bouillabaisse style sauce – and customers can’t get enough. Having eaten that dish at the Sportsman, I can vouch for its quality and, more pertinently, his assessment that the fish tastes “briny and sweet” and that “and the texture was enhanced by a slight stickiness that came from the gelatine in the fish bones”. Accordingly, I highly recommend gurnard as an easy to cook and great tasting, however odd it looks. Baking it in a salt crust (as Harris does) is absolutely an option. But simply poaching it gently in the last few moments of a stew is a pretty good, hassle-free alternative.

You will often see gurnard paired with peperonata, that sticky, intense, long reduced tangle of bell peppers, onions and tomato. A few weeks ago I cooked masses of peppers and onions with cumin and oregano, adding extra water and saffron once it was cooked so that it began to resemble a stew. I then added handfuls of sweet cherry tomatoes and let four whole gurnard nestle in amongst it all as if they were having a bath.

After some gentle simmering, just as it became clear they had poached perfectly, I lifted them out, turning the heat up for the broth to reduce a little while carefully pilling the fish into fillets. As Harris said, the resulting flesh was firm, sticky and sweet tasting, and worked brilliantly laid over the peperonata stew with a good hunk of warm bread, a glug of peppery olive oil and a scattering of parsley. Not such an ugly critter after all.

See Ed’s recipe for gurnard peperonata stew.

“COLLAR BACON’S PLEASING RATIO OF MEATY GOODNESS TO FATTY CREAMINESS MEANS IT CRISPS UP LIKE AN ABSOLUTE DREAM”

Tomahawk

A tomahawk cut can be taken from either a cow or a pig: beef tomahawk is usually a ribeye steak attached to the short rib (pictured above); ‘tomapork’, as it’s affectionately known at Northfield Farm, is a pork chop with the belly still attached. Both are great for sharing; the latter is exceptionally good on the barbecue, sealed till crisp and golden then cooked through for 20 minutes.

Collar bacon

While a highly traditional feature on the butcher’s counter, you won’t find collar bacon among the generic back and streaky in supermarkets. Taken from the fleshy part that runs from the shoulder to the neck of the pig, this is the closest bacon comes to being marbled. Its pleasing ratio of meaty goodness to fatty creaminess means it’s intensely flavoursome and crisps up like an absolute dream.

Scrag end

The traditional basis for scouse – the meat stew so popular on Merseyside it became a slang term for Liverpudlians – scrag end is taken from the lamb’s neck, but isn’t the same as the more familiar fleshy, fillet-like neck cut. This is a hard-working muscle, sold on the bone. It requires some attention when cooking, which should be done over several hours, but a little patience will reward both palate and pocket.

Onglet

Better-known in the United States as ‘hanger’ steak, onglet is found hanging (hence the American moniker) from the diaphragm. Don’t let the fact this dark red muscle has very little fat – and that it’s quite, well, fibrous – scare you out of cooking it: flash frying for a couple of minutes each side is all it takes. Serve with something punchy and strong-flavoured – it can certainly hold its own.

Venison barnsley chop

The barnsley chop is most closely associated with lamb, but it also makes for a tasty cut of venison. At Shellseekers Fish & Game, you’ll find it in the form of deep red wild sika meat, shot by owner Darren himself and butchered on site. Cook it in much the same way you would lamb, but be aware of its relative leanness. For maximum tenderness, ensure you allow plenty of time for the meat to rest before serving.

“IT’S NOT THAT YOU NEED TO MATURE BEFORE LIKING OLIVES. IT’S THAT YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG TO DISLIKE BAD ONES”

Images: Regula Ysewijn

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

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

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

The answer came when he ate a pizza topped with dull, briny, soapy, pitted black olives. Rather than wolf them down, he spat them out and ultimately rejected the pizza altogether. He did the same with some olives he’d commandeered at a party a few months ago, discarding the bowl and shouting “they’re yucky and disgusting”. It’s not that you need to mature before liking olives. It’s that you’re never too young to dislike bad ones.

All of which is a long-winded way to note that my horrendous foodie of a son, along with anyone else who chooses to source them, is spoiled by the quality of olives available from Borough Market. These are true taste bombs, ready-made to transform our meals.

Options include the Greek varieties from Oliveology: straight-up organic, handpicked kalamatas; others marinated in the heady aniseed of ouzo; and remarkable Throuba olives, that have ripened and matured on the tree, without salt. They’re uniquely sweet-bitter, and particularly good thrown over a tomato and feta salad or chopped into a tapenade.

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

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

See Ed’s recipe for paprika & sherry short ribs with deli olives.

“THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN BREAD JUST HAS TO BE WHITE: A BACON SANDWICH, A ROSEMARY FOCACCIA OOZING WITH OIL”

Batch cooking is a great habit to get into. There are certain ingredients and recipes that just make sense to cook in large quantities and then stow away as building blocks for quick after-work suppers, packed lunches or just adding the special touch to a simple weekday meal. It often takes no longer to cook a double batch, so you’ll be economising on time, effort and energy too.

If you’re not a regular baker, then making a couple of loaves from scratch can seem quite a faff – doubling your dough mixture with twice the rewards really makes sense. There’s no need to create a production line of identical tin loaves, either: it wasn’t until I began working with French baker extraordinaire Richard Bertinet that I started considering a dough as a blank canvas that could evolve into any number of different breads, rather than each loaf requiring its own recipe.

Olive oil dough is the starting point for almost all my desert-island home bakes (along with sourdough, but that requires an entirely different level of dedication. Or perhaps just a trip to the Market to snap up a loaf). I know that both nutritionists, and good sense, point us in the direction of all the brown varieties – the wholemeals and granaries – but there are moments when bread just has to be white: a bacon sandwich, a rosemary focaccia oozing with oil, and there’s quite simply no discussion when it comes to a pizza base.

It’s important to create a really loose, wet dough if you’re after light bread, so I’m afraid that old school recipe that you bounced around the kitchen surface is out. A stickier mix may be more difficult to handle, but the proof of the (bread and butter) pudding is in the eating, so do take the plunge and have a go at this master bread recipe. I usually make a double batch, giving me plenty of options. Once the dough has risen to about twice its size, you can turn it out onto a very lightly flour-dusted surface and divide it using your scraper as a cutter. Making a variety of different breads will mean that you don’t require a huge oven: some dough can be frozen, some slowed by proving in a cooler space while the first batch bakes. 

Raw dough does freeze but never seems to have quite such an effective second rise once thawed, making it ideal for crisp, thin pizza bases. I always keep half a dozen balls of dough in the freezer, ready for individual pizzas. Shape 250g pieces of dough into balls and freeze in individual sandwich bags. Once required, you can pop these in the fridge to thaw while you’re at work for the day or, if pressed for time, just dunk them into warm water in their sealed bags while you’re busying yourself with the tomato sauce. Flatten (rolling pin, or more dramatic flinging and slinging, that’s your shout), top, and bake in your hottest oven.

Tin loaves are great for sandwiches and then perfect for toast as the bread ages. You’ll want a 450-500g quantity of the dough for a small greased tin (often still sold as a 1lb tin – about 20cm long). Flatten the dough into a rough square, roll up like a swiss roll and place in the greased tin. Cover with a tea towel and leave to prove (the second rise) until doubled in size and then bake at 220C for about 25-30 mins, until it slips out of its tin and has formed a good crusty bottom.

Bread rolls shaped into balls from about 75g dough each are great for packed lunches and once proved, will bake in about 10 mins at 230C. Focaccia, the dimpled Italian flat bread with herbs, salt and lashings of extra virgin olive oil, is perfect for using any random quantities of dough. You’ll find the recipe here. So, the question is, why would you ever want to make one loaf when you could create a feast or stock up the freezer?

“IF TREES CAN BE SO CONNECTED TO THEIR ENVIRONMENT AND THEIR COMMUNITIES, SO, SURELY, CAN WE”

It’s entirely normal to be connected these days – it has become an integral part of the way we live. Most of us are connected to everything all of the time, and the more connected we become the more desperately we feel the need to connect.

This is quite different to the way things used to be. Much of what we now do, we do without even moving. From a table at home, we can work and shop and make friends. We can even do it from a plane or from a train. It now takes little more than a few taps or a couple of clicks to fill the fridge or put a meal in front of our children.

These days it doesn’t matter if someone we love is on the other side of the world, they can still be in our kitchen in pixels. We can send any amount of information to anywhere, instantly, and if we want or need something, at any time, anything at all, we can get it, just like that. Sometimes, when I stop and think about this it scares me.

In light of all this connectivity, isn’t it strange how disconnected we can be from some of the other things we used to have in our lives? Like the ocean, like the honeybee, like our woodlands, like the seasons, like our communities.

In the spring, sugary sweet sap rises from the roots of trees towards their limbs. Eventually it finds its way through the more delicate branches to the young buds. The sap gives the buds life. It’s possible to tap the sap from some trees to make a delicious wine. Tapping sap has been done for thousands and thousands of years. Amusingly, when you type ‘sap’ into a search engine it takes you to a software company.

I only mention the trees because I love them, they are a miracle, and in terms of connectivity they lead the way. Did you know trees are able to communicate with one another, as well as other plants, through an intricate subterranean lattice of mycelium into which their roots connect? Mind blown, every time. They also provide us with delicious fruit and nuts and, most importantly, oxygen. If trees can be so thoroughly and productively connected to their environment and their communities, so, surely, can we.

One of the best ways to really engage with the place in which you live (apart from hugging trees) is to shop locally and cook seasonally. I know it sounds simple, but it’s true. The choices we make when we buy and make food can have genuinely positive effects on us as people and on the world around us.

Adopting a more mindful approach to food can end up connecting us in ways we hadn’t thought possible. Some of my closest friends, I’ve met through food. I’ve got to know the beautiful landscape that I live in and found myself closer to a community of people who work really hard within it to make a living, growing food in an ethical, sustainable and respectful way. It’s opened my eyes to the seasons, how they change so gracefully, and what that means to the people whose lives are hardwired into them. The good news is that our modern ways of doing things, of communicating, learning and sharing, can actually help us connect with the natural world and the amazing bounty it provides. Key the name of your local market into a search engine, and take it from there.

“ITALY IS BLESSED WITH JUST THE RIGHT HUMIDITY, HEAT AND WIND FLOW TO AIR DRY MEAT”

Words: Ed Smith

In Britain, most of us refer to cured meat as ‘charcuterie’, which is the French word for meaty things (more on them in a few months’ time). In the context of European cuisine, however, there’s a strong argument that it’s the (Roman) Italians who originated, perfected and codified the craft of cured, air-dried meats – and so perhaps we should refer to sliced hams, belly meats, back fat and sausages as they do: ‘salumi’.

I once spoke with a British charcutier who said there wasn’t much he could learn from an Italian about curing because if he followed their instruction, leaving his meats to dry in caves set into the hills in Monmouthshire, he’d end up with mouldy meat. Italians in the belt of northern Italy that runs through Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany and Lombardy are, on the other hand, blessed with just the right humidity, heat and wind flow for the cuts of meat they cure with salt to be turned into delicious salumi.

Break it down

Italian butchery has evolved to ensure all parts of a pig can be cured. This is because the original purpose of curing was to preserve meat as a protein source in times when refrigeration and freezing were not an option. Whereas traditional English and American butchers would remove the shoulder of a pig, Italians ‘harvest’ a muscle known as the ‘coppa’ or ‘capocollo’ from the top of the neck so it can be cured in one cylindrical piece, rather than slicing through it.

Other defined parts of a pig – the loin, belly, and the back leg or ham – are separated for curing into ‘lonza’, ‘pancetta’, and ‘prosciutto’ (though in Zibello in Emilia Romagna, the ham is separated into ‘culatello’ and ‘fiocco’ as the air is too humid to successfully cure a whole leg). The remainder, including much of the fat, is minced to make sausages, known as ‘salami’.

At a very basic level, that’s it: a pig is broken down into its constituent parts, salted, fermented and air dried over a period of time, and you end up with either a muscle meat or a salami to slice.

Variety comes from the breed of the pig, its diet, the terroir and atmosphere of the relevant area. Indeed, in Italy, many (most?) meats are labelled to reflect either the specific regionality of the product (IGP – Indication of Geographic Protection) or that the salumi has been produced, processed and packaged in a specific geographical zone and according to tradition (DOP – Protected Designation of Origin).

The legs

A good example of how the same cut of meat can be a different product depending on regional variations is Italian cured ham, or ‘prosciutto’. You can explore this in real time at Borough Market by comparing prosciutto di Parma and prosciutto di San Daniele at The Parma Ham and Mozzarella Stand.

Parma ham, from Emilia-Romagna, is the highest profile air dried Italian meat. Though it is ultimately sliced into thin sheets, you will see it at the stall, hung still in its guitar-shaped thigh form. The legs are salted, then larded and hung to dry for up to 18 months. As a result, the flavour is deep, nutty, salty, slightly musty, and there’s masses of umami.

Though there are stipulations as to where pigs used to make Parma ham must be farmed, not all Parma ham is created equal. As owner Philip Crouch explained to me, one crucial difference is that the top, reserve-grade producers get first choice of the hams after slaughter, choosing them on the basis of age, fat ratio and size. Industrial-grade Parma hams are often made from pork that has been frozen, which seems to yield a lesser quality product. From Philip’s experience, it’s important for an importer to have a good relationship with the producer, and over time build a trust that ensures a consistently high-quality product.

An alternative is prosciutto di San Daniele. It’s the same piece of meat, but Italians will tell you that the taste is very different: sweeter, softer, more delicate. Perhaps because the drying (or maturation) time is shorter – around 13 months. Though the pigs can be from one of 10 regions, the ultimate production of the hams must be within a relatively small area in the commune of Friuli in Udine, northwest Italy. It has a unique microclimate which is influenced, it is suggested, by salty winds blown in from the Adriatic. Philip’s producer’s family has been producing the meat for hundreds of years, and “there’s an alchemy and experience and skill that they have in spades” that comes through in the eating experience.

Don’t take the tasting notes as definitive, though – try them both for yourself when next at Borough Market.

The fatty bits

Fat is a vital component of cured meats. Think of the marbling running through a piece of coppa (or jamon Iberico, for that matter); of the chunks of varying proportions distributed through salami, or of that ribbon of fat running over the top of a silk sheet of prosciutto ham or loin. Those bits are not there as something to be torn off and left on the edge of the plate. They provide a luscious texture, carry and enhance the qualities of the meats round your mouth, and have a flavour all of their own.

With that in mind, perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that there’s a whole genre of salume that’s basically just salted and cured fat. When it comes to lardo, guanciale, pancetta, and even pressed head (a brawn-like item called gelatina, coppa di testa and soppressata, depending where you are in Italy), fat is not the supporting act but the star.

The king of this genre is lardo di Colonnata: blocks of back fat taken from above the loin, salted and laid for months in marble boxes in a Tuscan hamlet. Unless you’ve a slicer of your own, buy it in thin strips and keep it very cold. Remove the lardo from its paper while still cold, but then wait until it’s at room temperature to relish it as antipasti, as you would any other salume, or lay it over warm green vegetables, potatoes and so on to enjoy the best salty seasoning of them all.

Look out too for guanciale and (proper) pancetta. Contrary to once-popular belief, pancetta is not the same as bacon. Instead, the kind you’ll find at The Parma Ham and Mozzarella Stand and Gastronomica is fully cured and ready to eat (again, slice thinly), though you can cook with it if you wish. Alternatively, consider cooking with guanciale, created from the cheek of the pig – The Parma Ham and Mozzarella Stand has a couple of options, one of which is the base ingredient for a proper carbonara.

Other salumi stars available at the Market

— Salame finocchiona: a sausage of finely ground pork belly, black pepper, chianti and fennel seeds.

— Salame Toscana: a sausage of relatively coarsely ground pork and large cubes of back fat, plus black pepper and red wine, sometimes garlic too.

— Salame Milanese: finely ground pork shoulder, with flecks of fat obvious throughout. Often quite large, yielding wide slices.

— Mortadella: a large sausage made of finely ground pork meat, blended (or ‘emulsified’) with a specific ratio of fat and spices, and cooked. True mortadella is from Bologna, the capital of Emilia-Romagna, and should be very thinly sliced.

— Coppa (or capocollo): a cylindrical muscle from the hard-working shoulders of a pig, so it’s dark and intensely flavoured, and marbled with intramuscular fat. Should be thinly sliced by machine. Coppa is a common cut across Italy – variation comes from the breed of pig and spicing in the cure. A number of IGP and DOPs exist, for example coppa di Piacentino and coppa di Parma, which must be made from pigs reared in those specific regions, be bagged in a pig or beef casting, and dried for at least 60 days.

— Lonza or lombo: cured pork loin (picture the larger part of back bacon or a pork chop). The leanest cut of salumi, though Italians leave a larger amount of back fat on the muscle than the Spanish do with their ‘lomo’. Must be sliced thinly.

— Pancetta: the belly of a pig. Can be left as one flat piece of fatty pork or rolled (‘arrotolata’). Often flavoured with lots of herbs and though it can be and often is cooked, in contrast to British bacon, pancetta is fully cured and if sliced thinly, ready to eat.

Where to shop for salumi from these regions at Borough Market

Bianca Mora has a concise selection of very pure and unadulterated cured pork from Emilia-Romagna; at Gastronomica you’ll find a wide spread of cured meats from across Italy (look out for their Tuscan finocchiona salami); The Parma Ham and Mozzarella Stand stocks all the classics, sliced to order.

“RATHER THAN AN OVERLY SCIENTIFIC RATIONALE, OUR SYSTEMS ARE BASED ENTIRELY UPON ‘BECAUSE WE LIKE IT’”

Interview & illustration: Ed Smith

In 1978, when Anita Le Roy opened her first Monmouth Coffee shop, the business was purely a roastery that sold beans. There was, however, a sampling room upstairs, where people could taste the coffee and decide which variety they wanted. We used a filter because it’s quick and clean. Here at Borough Market, you can still taste a filter-brew coffee before buying your beans. Or if you’re having a cup of filter coffee, you’re welcome to select which bean variety we make it from. In a way, it’s how we’ve always done things.

Rather than an overly scientific rationale, our systems are based entirely upon “because we like it like that”. This includes the type of filter cones we use. You’ll see eight to 10 ceramic pouring cones racked up towards the front of the service counter. They’re based on a shape that Anita liked and had a ceramicist friend recreate. A Japanese colleague recognised them as being similar to ones made near her home, and we’ve been importing cones from Japan ever since. They have a squared-off base rather than the pointed tip that some brands have.

Originally, the measurement of beans we used for each serving was “a handful”. That translated to 20-30g, depending on the size of the hand. Around 15 years ago we made it a more formal 25g serving. We’ve tried everything from 14g to 30g, but we keep coming back to that 25g amount. The way we pour is unusual. We dampen the grinds briefly to wake them up, make one big concentric pour, let that sink down, then add another. There’ll still be water dripping through when we take the cup away, which means coffee is still being extracted, so it’s ultimately quite a punchy coffee. We’re not trying to buck the trend. It’s just how we like it.

“DRIED BEANS ARE NO GOOD FOR A LAST-MINUTE FORAGE, BUT THEY CAN INSPIRE WHOLE MEALS TO BE BUILT AROUND THEM”

When I moved into my then-girlfriend, now-wife’s flat, I brought with me just two bags of clothes. Oh, plus multiple boxes of cookbooks and kitchen utensils, tonnes of crockery (“just in case I start a restaurant”) and a similar weight of dry larder items. Most of my chattels (edible or otherwise) duplicated things she had already. And there was barely any room for the additional bits until more shelves were put up, or gaps found underneath beds. Let’s just say the beginning of our new chapter was a little fraught.

Kitchen cupboard space was (and is) especially limited. Certainly, there was no obvious place for my eight different types of dried beans, seven of rice, three of lentils, fine polenta, rough polenta, spelt, wheat grains – you get the idea. The solution was to buy a batch load of Kilner jars, fill them with said ingredients, place on top of the cupboards and, well, neglect them.

Dried beans are no good for spontaneous cooking, are they? The need to soak them for multiple hours before simmering for a couple more removes them from midweek “what’s in the fridge?” territory. As a result, these staples are constantly glaring at me as I reach, once again, for something much quicker to cook, like pasta or noodles. But their visibility does from time to time prompt a necessary flip of the menu-planning process: yes, they’re no good for a last-minute forage, but they can inspire whole meals to be built around them.

Butter beans push me to poached chicken broths laced with kale or charred courgettes; cannellini beans are cooked as a sloppy side with garlic and sage, sometimes puréed, always excellent with pork; and the pale green, thin-skinned flageolet beans from Le Marché du Quartier prompt me to braise lamb, every time.

Is it the viridescence of flageolets that does it? Does that make me think of grass, mint sauce and other green things suggestive of sheep? Suffice to say that the delicate taste and texture of this particular pulse both suits and soaks up rich, fatty lamb juices.

Flageolet beans are immature haricot beans, harvested before they’re ripe and dried in the shade to maintain their green tint. Theoretically, they can be used more off the cuff than other dried beans – their youthful shell apparently requiring only a couple of hours’ soaking in just boiled water, but I’ve found an overnight soak leads to a swifter simmer.

The same evening, I left the beans to soak, I rolled a couple of lamb breasts and braised them with onions. Next morning, I simmered the soaked pulses for two hours before heading to work. Which meant that, perhaps ironically, the final effort of portioning the meat, tumbling in a few tomatoes, and browning it all in the oven took only a brief effort and 45 more unattended minutes in the oven. Quick and simple, if not wholly spontaneous.

See Ed’s recipe for braised lamb & flageolet beans.