“RATHER THAN A NEST OF FINE HAIR, THE STRANDS OF FIDES PASTA APPEAR DELIBERATELY BROKEN AND SHORT”

Image: Ed Smith

It’s good to take the time to look into the corners of the Market, to go beyond the superstar ingredients that initially gain our attention. So often, it’s in the nooks and crannies that the best larder ingredients lie – those that sit quietly in support of the headliners, both on the stalls and on the plate.

Head, for example, to Oliveology, an emporium of superb Greek ingredients. Its signature product (deservedly) is a range of organic extra virgin olive oils, all pressed from one variety of olive grown on an estate in Sparta, and all of which display a remarkable variety of flavour profiles and characteristics.

Tucked away towards the rear of the stall, however, are a couple of shelves laden with dried pastas, grains and pulses. Some – bulgur wheat, chickpeas, favaki (a mix of split peas and lentils), giant white beans – are to be expected, but evidently, there remain gaping holes in my knowledge of Greek cuisine, as the remaining packs surprise me.

One, labelled ‘trahana’ (sour), contains a pale, grain-like substance, similar in appearance to finely ground oats. It is, I discover, a mix of milk and yoghurt and either flour or cracked bulgur wheat, kneaded into a dough before being dried in the sun then broken into granules – a way of preserving dairy and providing a source of protein through the year. It can be eaten like a porridge, or perhaps mixed into a tomato or red pepper-based soup, adding a satisfyingly sour quality to your meal. I bought some and will experiment.

Next to the trahana is a trio of dried pasta shapes, all relatively different to common Italian varieties. ‘Hilopites’ are tiny little squares – a shape that’ll tumble pleasingly over the tongue. I imagine it working particularly well when cooled immediately, bathed in extra virgin oil, tossed with fresh herbs – perhaps some olives, sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts too – and placed in the middle of the table for everyone to dig into.

I like the look of ‘kritharaki’, too: similar to orzo, but with flat rather than curved edges. I picture this run through with a tomato and squid ragu, or perhaps giant prawns, fresh cherry tomatoes, fennel and a splash of ouzo. It’s the kind of thing you could use to make a risotto or paella, provided you don’t mind offending the Italians, Spanish and Greeks in one reckless move.

The final shape is described as ‘fides’ (angel hair): a thin, vermicelli-like pasta, made from durum wheat flour, semolina, water and salt (no egg). Rather than a nest of fine hair, the strands appear deliberately broken and short. You could treat fides as you would fine spaghetti, but I imagine it would become clumpy and dense – better to use it as the Greeks do, thrown into ‘kotosoupa’, a chicken soup, or mixed with rice to make an interesting pilaf-style side (‘ryzi me fithe’). You could, I suspect, also use fides as a direct substitute for the Middle Eastern pastry known as ‘kataifi’ or ‘kadaif’, which looks like out of control shredded wheat and is baked for both sweet and savoury dishes.

It’s the rice idea that calls to me, though, when I get home and spend a few minutes with my gaze oscillating between angel hair and thin air. The traditional way to cook such a dish is to brown the pasta in oil first, before cooking with rice and enough liquid to be absorbed into the pasta and grains. I’ve seen recipes use chicken or vegetable stock (and I imagine the results are good), but water was more than adequate – the browned pasta adding such a good, savoury bite to the rice, that I bought another pack straight away to add to my larder. It’s excellent next to lamb or chicken, not least when there’s a cooling salad and the sharp salty hit of feta cheese nearby.

“BOROUGH MARKET’S PRIMARY ROLE IS TO FEED US – BUT IT IS ALSO TO EDUCATE, AND TO SERVE AS A ROLE MODEL”

Stale bread. Soft biscuits. Oxidised wine. Vegetable leaves. ‘Deformed’ fruit. It’s amazing what you can find at Borough Market. You might not know it of course: you might think you’re just buying some chutney for your cheese, a cake for your coffee, or a fruit shrub as a soft aperitif before dining at Elliot’s – and you are. But you’re also helping Borough Market’s increasingly environmentally aware traders reduce their individual and collective food waste.

Some initiatives are Market-wide: Plan Zheroes, which helps food businesses easily and safely donate their surplus food to charities and community groups, collects surplus produce from a wide variety of traders. “I hate food waste,” says Kath Dawson, whose stall Ted’s Veg has been involved with the scheme since its inception. “Why chuck good food away, when it can go to someone in need?” Plan Zheroes works with local homelessness organisations as well as charities that support the elderly and people with mental health or substance abuse issues – for which meals are a core part of their service. Serve someone a hot meal and you can sit down and start talking to them about their issues, providing mental as well as physical nourishment.

Less obvious – to the traders as well as the customers – is Entocycle, though like Plan Zheroes this initiative operates just around the corner. To describe it as an insect farm is to do it something of an injustice, though that is its role in essence. “We have built very specialist, cutting edge technology using computer vision and automation to do the complicated egg production, then we use relatively simple equipment to do the fattening of the insects,” says founder Kieran Olivares-Whitaker.

The insects grow fat on food waste procured from the Market: vegetable leaves, fruit peel, stalks and so on. After 12 days they are dried and turned into protein flour, which is in turn made into animal feed. “Insect protein is a sustainable alternative to soy or fishmeal, which are both having catastrophic effects on biodiversity and the health of our planet,” says Kieran. The fact this protein helps to mitigate another of our biggest environmental issues, food waste, is an added bonus. The hope for the Market, and for Entocycle, is that their partnership grows more and more fruitful. “You guys produce food waste; we recycle food waste. We’re 150 metres away. It’s an ideal partnership,” Kieran continues. “We hope it will be a stepping stone to bigger things.”

Plan Zheroes and Entocycle are big-picture projects; pioneering initiatives with the potential to change lives on a large scale. So too is Biobean, which collects old grounds from the Market’s coffee traders and transforms them into ‘coffee logs’: briquettes for wood burners and open fires. But the journey to zero waste can start with a single banana loaf and the efforts individual traders are making to repurpose their surplus should not go overlooked.

Ask for a soft drink in Elliot’s and you’ll be offered not a cola or a lemonade, but a shrub: a soft drink brewed with surplus fruit and wine-turned-vinegar (pictured top). “Any wine we have left over that can’t be served is oxidised and turned into drinking vinegar, and we use seasonal produce from the Market to infuse it. We have no other soft drinks or mixers, which also reduces our waste,” explains general manager Candice. They love pickles and ferments – as does Turnips, one of the Market’s greengrocers, for which waste reduction has become a core part of the business: what Turnips has dubbed a “two seasons” mentality on the stall. “Especially when we’re coming to the end of a season, when we get a big pile of, say, plums or peaches,” Gino at the stall tells me. “We can’t sell them all fresh in time, so we take some into the kitchen and turn them into ferments or sauces.”

Turnips started out making smoothies, pizzas and mushroom risotto to use up produce that “doesn’t look as nice or that’s gone slightly past its best – that’s still good to eat, but we can’t sell on the stall or to restaurants,” Gino continues. Mushrooms are cooked slowly in a large pan before being added to spelt risotto. Any left at the end of the day are made into a duxelle paste and used on their sourdough pizzas, which are also a vehicle for less-than-perfect tomatoes, onions and other seasonal veg. “By chopping up the tomatoes and dehydrating them for pizza bases, they can last at least an extra week,” Gino observes. The stall’s juices do the same for any fruit that’s too ripe to sell.

Of course, it’s not just fruit and vegetables that have the potential to be wasted. According to the food waste app Too Good to Go – an app that helps businesses sell food that’s ‘too good to go’ to customers at a reduced rate – bread is one of the most wasted foods in the country. Each year we throw away 900,000 tonnes of bread – the equivalent of 24 million slices every day. Borough Market bakers Bread Ahead and Karaway Bakery have set their hearts and hands on reducing this, by both offering their wares via the app and otherwise transforming leftovers into higher value items such as bread pudding for Bread Ahead, and rye fries in the case of Karaway: a crunchy, salty, garlicky fried snack that simply cries out for a cold beer or glass of bubbly.

“Rye fries are a traditional snack in Lithuania, where we have them with drinks and often on picnics,” says Doma of Karaway Bakery. By frying their leftover rye bread and selling it, their hope is not just to reduce their bread waste but encourage us to do likewise. “We hope to show our customers that they too can easily make use of bread that has gone stale.”

Borough Market’s primary role is to feed us – but it is also to educate, and to serve as a role model. It’s testament to how seriously its traders take this responsibility that so many have reduced their own food waste through initiatives that I, for one, will be trying at home.

“KNOWN AS THE ‘DEVIL’S SUPPOSITORY’, BOULETTE D’AVESNES HAS BEEN AROUND SINCE THE 15TH CENTURY”

Words: Clare Finney

“You can taste it for days,” warns Matthew of Une Normande de Londres, looking fearfully at the fiery orange ovoid in front of us. We can believe it: the cover has only been off two minutes and already we can smell it: musk, spicy heat, a not unpleasant dampness, and herbs.

It looks like hell; and from the sound of it, tastes not dissimilar. In a good way. Known as the “devil’s suppository”, Boulette d’Avesnes has been around since the 15th century – and the taste, if you don’t eat it while it’s young, will linger for almost as many years again.

This is cheese curds that have been crushed, rolled in parsley, pepper and tarragon, shaped by hand and rubbed with paprika – hence its vibrant volcanic shade. During the course of its three-month maturation in a damp cellar (itself probably unchanged in six centuries) the rind is weekly washed in lashings of beer.

It’s made of bits of under-ripe or less-than-perfect maroilles cheese – for which the region, Nord-Pas-de-Calais, is famous – which itself developed as a way of using up leftovers from making butter. Though by no means a mild cheese to start with, the supposed ‘fact’ that maroillles was created by a monk in the 10th century shows how far, with the addition of a bit of beer and paprika, a cheese can come.

The miners who once populated this region and whose legacy can be seen in the now grassy mounds which litter the otherwise flat landscape, loved this weirdly beautiful suppository. “They would impale it above their windows to dry it out”, making it even stronger. It’s the thought of this that prompts his warning about its aftertaste.

“When it’s young it is delicious – perfect with just some bread and white beer – but old it is very, very strong, and sharp,” he crinkles his nose. It loses its complexity: there’s a lot going on in this small, fierce dome, from herbs to spices to the inimitable flavour of a fine, artisanal cheese, and it loses some of its texture, which should be creamy teetering on the edge of crumbly, dense and firm.

We do as Matthew suggests, and tentatively tuck in to the cheese with a baguette from Olivier’s Bakery. In the other hand we clasp a glass of cold beer to steady ourselves and quench the thirst.

The impact is intense: like retreating to a sauna from a chilly outdoors. Spicy, smoky, deep, yet enriched by herbs, this is the cheese answer to Marmite, were Marmite laced with paprika; and a powerful reminder of just how narrow, when it comes to taste, the line is between heaven and hell – the Boulette d’Avesnes is definitely the former.

“WE ARE FOCUSED ON GIVING PEOPLE THE ABILITY TO BE SELF-DEPENDENT, NOT RELIANT ON HAND OUTS OR DONATIONS”

Words: Clare Finney

The numbers are staggering: 320,000 recorded homeless. More than 4,000 people sleeping rough each night. But you don’t need statistics, if you live in London, to see that rough sleeping has doubled since 2010. You just need to walk five minutes down a busy street.

To say this is unacceptable is a gross understatement. It is an outrage – one which, in 2015, Cemal Ezel decided he could no longer ignore. He set up Old Spike Roastery in Peckham and, some months later, Change Please: bright, brilliantly coloured mobile coffee carts staffed by homeless people-turned-baristas. He provided training, therapy, financial advice and a step onto the rental market. Most importantly of all, he provided what he calls ‘patient employment’: a job in which those who had spent months, perhaps years on the streets, often as a result of great trauma, could build their confidence, make mistakes, and learn.

“I think the main thing for us is that we offer a ‘job-first’ model. It is purely focused on giving people the ability to be self-dependent, as opposed to reliant on hand outs or donations.” One of the most important aspects of this is the living wage: “If you can pay the living wage of the city – so in London, that’s the London living wage – that person can rent, eat and determine their own future.” The old adage “teach a man to fish” could be described as Cemal’s founding principle: “With £3,000 we could afford to give 300 people sleeping bags. The same amount of money will help less people with our initiative, but the impact will be far bigger.”

The goal, he says, is to enable them to seek employment elsewhere, “so they are no longer dependent on us,” he explains. Some of their staff go on to be baristas or roasters – but they also have alumni working in graphic design or marketing. “We try to understand what their hopes are, recognise what their talents are, and work with them,” says Cemal. One man might struggle with brew times, but produce a beautiful blackboard. “We have had some great artists. We’ve had people go on to set up their own coffee carts,” says Cemal proudly. Their current head roaster, Sebastian, was formerly homeless, and is now responsible for training, roasting and quality assurance of the beans.

Change Please breaks the cycle of poverty not just by giving its employees money and shelter but by giving them a life; a helping hand “out of poverty and into society”. They have to work for it, Cemal continues: “Our criteria aren’t hard and fast, but we do need people to be in the right head space for employment, who want to help themselves. People who are looking to receive money from the council will be begrudging about working,” he says – but their lives will be changed from the moment they are accepted onto the scheme.

Change Please pays a deposit on housing – a deposit being one of the key barriers to the homeless getting back onto the rental ladder in the first place. They underwrite the rent and spend the next six months paying it direct to the landlord by deducting it from their employee’s pay. They then transfer responsibility for rent payments to the tenant, and within another six months he or she has a reference and credit history: the golden ticket to loans, jobs, future rental and phone contracts, and all the other qualifications demanded by the 21st century. Equipped for the outside world, they are encouraged to apply for other employment, beyond Change Please. The cycle is broken, and the work of Change Please is complete.

The potential of Change Please is enormous: the average Londoner drinks two cups of coffee every single day. Yet Change Please is powerless without clients, customers and partners like Borough Market, who champion not just the social aspect of the business, but the quality of their coffee. “Being somewhere like Borough Market is so important, because it’s all about quality and provenance here. You can’t sell here without a minimum standard.”

Customers care about the homeless and social enterprise, of course, but when you’re downing two coffees a day, quality and pricing will always be your priority. “The biggest problem we have is customers assuming the quality of our coffee is compromised because it’s a social enterprise. There’s a deep suspicion of social ventures.” They could not be further from the truth, Cemal argues, pointing to their numerous contracts and awards, granted purely on the basis of quality. “We are actually overcompensating because of this stigma, ensuring our branding focuses less on the social side, and more on the quality of the product we are trying to sell” – that is, single-estate, directly traded coffee, hand roasted by beneficiaries who are trained and mentored day-to-day by fully qualified coffee industry professionals.

We don’t need to taste the coffee at Change Please to know it’s a good one. We can sense it: the aroma, the sound of laughter and the warm feeling of hope which emanates from the stall.

“I CAME FROM PEOPLE WHO HAD PRETTY LOW INCOMES, BUT THEY KNEW HOW TO COOK AND THEY KNEW HOW TO SHOP”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Portrait: Orlando Gili

Sheila Dillon has worked on BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme for more than 20 years. In that time, she has explored the best and worst of the food industry, both at home and abroad, and become one of the country’s most admired broadcasters and journalists. Her soft Lancastrian vowels have become part of the soundtrack to Sunday lunchtimes – and she’s been a regular at Borough Market since its inception.

Growing up in a Lancashire village, what were your formative experiences of food?

We had wonderful food. It’s more marginal now, but that area is still a fairly big producer of potatoes, asparagus, cabbages and so on, so a lot of the stuff we ate was from the region. I worked on the local farm, in the dairy and collecting eggs, so I knew about farming. My mum was a good cook, even though she worked full time from when I was four – she was a weaver in a cotton mill. She was a great food enthusiast. She and her friend Mrs Worrall would go mushrooming, we picked berries – it was all immense fun. People had gooseberries and blackcurrants and rhubarb in their gardens. I’m making it sound romantic – it wasn’t romantic, it was ordinary. I took good food for granted.

My dad, on the other hand, wasn’t remotely adventurous. I remember when the first Chinese restaurant opened in Preston and my mum and I went for lunch. We came back and told him we’d had rice. Rice? He could just about countenance it in a pudding, but rice with meat? Horrified.

When did you first develop an interest in the politics of food?

It wasn’t until much later. It’s one of the great oddities of my life: I was quite serious about food, so how can I have been so unaware for so long? We moved to New York from Edinburgh in 1977. I was working as a freelance journalist, mostly writing about women’s and feminist issues, when I had a baby. There’s a famous potato-growing area in Long Island and it turned out that a pesticide they put on the potatoes had seeped into the aquifer and people were getting sick, so they closed down the wells and were tanking water into these communities. I remember thinking, if it’s in the water, how much is in the potatoes? I’d been mashing potatoes to feed my son. That led me to the library, looking at pesticides. I was deeply shocked. I thought, who’s writing about this? And the answer was, not a lot of people. I got a job at a magazine called the Food Monitor – a wonderful magazine covering food politics and policy all over the world. It was a very, very good education. And that’s how I began.

How did you end up as the presenter of The Food Programme?

When I came back to the UK, I heard Derek Cooper on The Food Programme. I thought, god, this is good – this is where I need to work. I looked up the producer and I wrote to her. She was a bit dubious, but I came up with some ideas and ended up doing some freelance work for them. I applied for a job and didn’t get it, but amazingly, the woman who did get it dropped out, so they offered it to me instead. Isn’t it funny, the serendipity of life?

As someone who has lived in and reported from a wide range of countries, how do you think the British food system compares?

When I first got involved in The Food Programme, I couldn’t believe it – here we have Britain, a mixed farming economy, and rather than looking to France, Italy, Spain or Greece and saying, “People there aren’t obese, those cultures seem to have something right,” we instead follow the United States. The States has a disastrous food system. It’s disastrous for people’s health, disastrous for the environment. We started manipulating our food – lowering fat and all that rubbish. I found it almost incomprehensible: that our close relationship with America somehow led us into this disastrous copycat nonsense.

I think the European Union has a better model. We have been kept from our worst desires by the EU. It respects food quality and has a much better, stricter food safety system. It is in no way perfect, but it’s lightyears away from the American system. I go to the States a lot because my son, the baby that changed my life, lives there now and what I see is that if you are middle class, you can buy yourself into a decent food system. You needn’t take part, hardly, in the awfulness. It’s one law for the prosperous and one law for everybody else and I think that’s utterly horrible. It’s certainly a contradiction of everything The Food Programme’s about, which is based on the Derek Cooper – the Bollinger Bolshevik – idea of “Bolly for all”; the idea that good food is a democratic right.

How much has the food landscape changed in all your years of writing and broadcasting?

Some things have improved. We do now have a quality food system; this idea of a ‘foodie culture’. For the Food and Farming Awards, we get thousands of nominations. There’s a bakery in Barrow-in-Furness, a town with one of the highest rates of drug-related death in the UK – but it has this fantastic, affordable bakery. I was judging the food producer category with Andy Oliver, and just looking at bakeries, there were about 150 to 200 entries – and not every good bakery in Britain was nominated. We were going: “Yes, sourdough; yes, school visits; yes, local – and what else do you have to offer?” Ten years ago, how many great bakers were there in Britain? And all of them were concentrated in London, Edinburgh, Devon. Now, having a good bakery is becoming more ordinary.

On the other hand, you’ve got the giant food corporations conglomerating to be even bigger. As Michael Pollan pointed out in one of his books, we say that poor people need cheap food, but we have a system that doesn’t pay people enough, which is why we require it. Supermarkets and other food companies employ people on minimum wage, and then those people require universal credit to supplement their income because they’re paid so little. We pay for that out of our tax budget. What I take heart from is that these issues are more widely understood now. When I came to The Food Programme, this sort of thing was the province of very few specialists. Organic food was seen as muck and magic. It takes a long time to turn things around, but it is being talked about. The forces against change, though, are huge and powerful and have big PR budgets.

What do you think is the biggest issue we’ll be facing over the coming decade?

It’s difficult to say. Things are all tied up. What we’re facing at the minute is health problems that are immensely costly, both in terms of people’s lives and economically – it’s the consequence of eating a highly processed diet, and that’s spreading globally. We made a programme in Mexico a few years ago, covering the World Trade Organisation meeting, and we went to see the director of public health. The North America Free Trade Agreement had been signed a few years earlier and one of the many things that changed as a result of that was, it became a free market for the beverage producers – Coca Cola, Pepsi, all the rest. They’d done this massive marketing campaign in rural Mexico and consumption of sweetened beverages had gone up dramatically. What the chart behind his desk showed was that deaths from diabetes and stroke had rocketed, in line with the increased consumption of these things. Many people in the food industries say the intensive system of mass production has brought cheap food to everyone; it’s brought disease and death as well.

In Britain people often say, “Well, it’s alright for you, you’re middle class” – certainly I have become middle class, but I didn’t start out that way. I came from people who had pretty low incomes, but they knew how to cook and they knew how to shop. They ate well and took pleasure in food. What frustrates me is, we look at France and say, this food is wonderful – these long stews made with cheap cuts. Well, what’s that but poor food? Why in one culture is it greatly lauded as marvellous, romantic and lovely, but if we say cooking that kind of thing would be good to learn here, it’s somehow degrading?

Are there any experiences you’ve had with The Food Programme that have particularly inspired you?

There are things that really opened my eyes. I once followed a farmer around Ethiopia. We went to this part of the Great Rift Valley – the area that had terrible famines. I saw – and I hope people listening did too – that one of the causes of these terrible famines were the hybrid crops that had been pushed onto these farmers by development experts. These varieties needed quite a lot of water, so when you had a series of droughts, you got famine. The soil was completely denatured. But from the bottom up, they had been rebuilding the farming system. They’d gone back to rotation and created big plots of three layers of crops – papaya, coffee, vegetables – whose root systems go down to different levels, so you can grow all three in the same space. Some were cash crops, some they used to feed themselves.

To see people in circumstances we could barely imagine – they’ve watched their children die – having to rebuild a system, you see how stupid conventional opinions often are. You have to think for yourself – for the food system as in life. When food becomes a business, margins are what counts, rather than feeding people.

You started out writing about women’s issues. How have you been treated, as a woman working in food?

I’ve been incredibly lucky. Certainly Radio 4 has always been very supportive of The Food Programme – although generally in news and current affairs, food is treated as a soft subject; it’s seen as feminine. If you’re a woman working in food, that’s a double whammy. There are people who still think The Food Programme is about making cakes. Sometimes on news and current affairs programmes, I’ll listen to someone talking not very knowledgeably about something to do with food and the environment or economics, and it hasn’t occurred to them to call up The Food Programme and say, “What do you know about this?” There has been, I think, a slight contempt for food as a subject and there is a sexism about that.

This is a very broad brush, but until recently a lot of the most successful chefs have been macho guys – big, tough, angry, four-letter-words, a lot of posturing, as though that overcomes the fact they’re somehow involved in this dainty little profession. There’s still this gap between that and what is considered ‘women’s work’. But women in this industry are – and need to be – getting together. And I think that’s very important.

Has your involvement in policy and politics had an effect on the pleasure you get from food?

I love food. Sometimes I eat rubbish, but mostly I don’t. If you can cook, and I can, why wouldn’t you make lovely food? It’s not a hardship to buy and eat nice ingredients. I’ve always eaten good food – by that I mean ‘proper’ food: hot pots and things. Last night we had this silly thing my husband who doesn’t cook much makes. He calls it ‘Roman cauliflower’ – I don’t know where he got it from. You parboil a cauliflower and then you drain it, fry it in olive oil with a lot of garlic and some tomato paste and then you put parmesan or cheddar on at the end. It’s great! You sit there and think, this is really good. It’s just a cauliflower.

What do you think is the role of food markets?

I think food markets are utterly key. I was there at the beginning of Borough Market. I remember taking my mother one November and it was raining and cold. There were hardly any customers because the weather was so filthy, and I remember thinking, these people have real fortitude. The conventional wisdom was that out-of-town supermarkets were the future and markets were old fashioned and dead and of no advantage to the consumer. But suddenly people were fed up. There was no fun in it. And what you saw when you walked around Borough and the other markets that began to revive – because people were given energy by the success of Borough – was people smiling. People were happy.

Borough Market was profoundly important, because it showed people what could be done; that there was an outlet for small farmers and producers, that there was a desire to buy that kind of food. It showed the possibility for regeneration through food. We take it for granted now, but it is so important.

“THE FIRST PINT HAD THE FLAVOUR PROFILE OF A CORPSE-STREWN ENGLISH CIVIL WAR BATTLEFIELD. THE SECOND WAS OKAY”

Years ago, when I lived in Bristol, some of my friends rented a flat above a tiny backstreet cider pub, which became our second home. The house cider was an extraordinary thing: murky, acrid and utterly lethal. Drinking it was like jumping into an ice-cold sea: shockingly unpleasant at first, with a fair bit of liquid needing to be ploughed through before the shivers subsided and immersion became bearable. The first pint had the flavour profile of a corpse-strewn English Civil War battlefield. The second was okay. The third was ambrosia.

Enquiries as to the cider’s strength would be met with a one-word answer: “Depends.” The effects were more psychedelic than alcoholic. No sane person could drink more than three (and if they did, their sanity wouldn’t fully survive the experience). At £1 a pint, you’d stagger out filled with mayhem and pork scratchings, still with change from a fiver. On reflection, they can’t have been paying any alcohol duties. On further reflection, it may not have officially been a pub.

It felt weird when, a few years later, I moved to London and cider suddenly became fashionable. Cider here was something that tasted less of decomposition and more of ice cubes, bubbles and advertising. Cider drinking was a lifestyle statement rather than a problem. Confused, I committed myself to beer instead. Now, The Cider House has started to win me back round.

Made in the village of Burley in the New Forest, these are real ciders, with body and soul – a world away from the sweet, insipid fizz of mass-produced brands. They taste of apples, and not just any apples: identifiable cultivars from the stall’s own farm and a couple of other traditional orchards. They vary significantly from style to style, and minutely from batch to batch. And, unlike those of my past, they definitely weren’t brewed in a black plastic bin out the back.

“THE HEADLINE EVENT INVOLVED COMPETITORS RACING WITH 12 WICKER BASKETS STACKED PRECARIOUSLY ON THEIR HEADS”

Every year on Shrove Tuesday, Borough Market plays host to a pancake race – frenetic, eccentric fun, but hardly an athletic event of any great note. There was a time, though, that this great London institution was responsible for putting on grand sporting occasions, none of which involved hot batter.

For many years, the Borough Market Sports – an annual sports day for Market porters held at the Herne Hill Athletic Grounds – had a huge public profile, drawing crowds in their thousands. Its foundations were laid in 1904, when a cricket match was arranged between the Market’s fruiterers and salesmen. According to one report, “the fruiterers beat the salesmen in hollow fashion”, but a good time was had by all. The next year they gathered for a more general sports day, which became established as a genuine annual event in 1906.

In 1908 it took place in Herne Hill and by 1911 it had moved to Crystal Palace. Unfortunately, just as the sports day was becoming a regular fixture in the calendar, the First World War began and the event was seemingly consigned to history.

One of the main organisers of the sports day had been a fruit and veg trader and secretary of the Borough Market trustees by the name of William Blackman. By the late 1920s, he had begun to toy with the idea of reviving the tradition, no doubt encouraged by young porters in family firms who were sick of hearing their dads’ endless tales of athletic glory.

Blackman set about raising funds and inspiring publicity for a Borough Market Sports revival, scheduled to take place in September 1930, by writing piles of letters to newspapers, businesses and celebrities.

His hard work paid off when, on 27th June 1930, a letter was sent from the Hollywood offices of Charlie Chaplin, whose impoverished childhood had been spent on the streets of Southwark. Chaplin’s manager announced that yes, the actor would love to contribute to the sports day and so enclosed a cheque for £20. A famous name has always been PR gold, and with probably the most famous man in the world on board, Borough Market Sports suddenly became a matter of genuine national interest.

The headline event – partly because it was such a brutal test of strength, speed and balance and partly because it was the one that Chaplin’s prize money supported each year – was the half-bushel basket carrying handicap, which was open to all-comers and involved competitors racing around the stadium with 12 wicker baskets, each weighing almost 2kg, stacked precariously on their heads.

In 1930, this was rendered particularly tough by strong winds – a comic scene captured on the day by a Pathé News crew. “I can’t tell you ‘ow ‘appy I am to win this event for the Borough Market chaps,” the bashful-looking winner tells the reporter at the end, clearly shattered by his exertions. From the back of the crowd of jostling porters, all wearing flat caps and big suits, a voice shouts out: “Now give ‘im a pint!”

A similar event involved the carrying of 10-bushel baskets. Also fiercely contested, from 1933 onwards, was the inter-market relay race, in which the champion athletes of other London markets sought to spoil Borough’s big day. Many of the events were open only to staff of Borough Market and South London Fruiterers – as well as conventional cycling and running events, these included the obstacle race, sack race, band race, boot race, tilting the basket and novelty cycle race.

In 1933, Chaplin’s contribution included “two valuable prizes” for a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition. According to the South London Press: “Borough Market has among its porters a number of clever amateur actors, and they were practising ‘making up’ behind piles of potato sacks to impersonate the famous film star.”

Although 10 entries were received, only five cane-wielding little tramps turned up on the day. “One would not think numbering bashfulness among the traits of a Borough Market porter,” wrote the Daily Telegraph. Ever the joker, in 1935 the actor stipulated that, as a consolation prize, £2 10s of his contribution should be presented to the wife who had endured the misfortune of being married to an unsuccessful competitor for the longest time.

Some competitors found fame of sorts. A feature in the Evening Standard in 1938 included an interview with Alfred Hardy, 19, who worked on his father’s stall in the Market. As the winner of the half-bushel race, he had walked away with the Chaplin-sponsored prize of a suit, an overcoat and a gold watch. How did he train? asked the reporter. “Well, I gave up smoking for a month and practised carrying 18 baskets in short runs round the Market after work.”

Borough Market Sports raised thousands of pounds for charity. The main recipient was Guy’s Hospital, but lots of other charities and benevolent funds also benefitted. It is a crying shame, then, that the event came to such a sudden end.

The event scheduled for 6th September 1939 was set to be the biggest yet, with the BBC apparently preparing to broadcast highlights. The posters had been pasted up and a chunky 64-page programme had been printed. Then, on 1st September, German tanks poured across the Polish border and the battle for the half-bushel basket carrying cup was cancelled for a contest of a far more brutal nature.

“HESTON BLUMENTHAL’S MIND WAS BLOWN BY THE FACT THAT CLASSIC FRENCH TECHNIQUES WERE NOT GROUNDED IN TRUTH”

Interview: Ellie Costigan / Images: Anna Warnow

Harold McGee is a highly influential American author who writes mainly about the science of food and cooking. His seminal book, On Food and Cooking – a hefty, encyclopaedic compendium of “the science and lore of the kitchen” for the everyday cook – was first published in 1984. A significantly expanded and revised version, which was published in 2004, influenced a move towards a form of high end cookery grounded in food science, championed by the likes of Heston Blumenthal, Ferran Adria and Thomas Keller. Harold wrote a column, A Curious Cook, in the New York Times for five years. He is now a visiting lecturer at Harvard University and trustee of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery.

When did you first develop a fascination with the science of food?

It was in the mid-1970s. At the time I was a graduate student in literature, writing a dissertation on John Keats and also teaching at the university, but it was clear already then that a teaching career was probably not going to materialise. I think it’s perpetually the case that more people want to teach literature than there are classes to teach. I tried for a few years to get a full time job and didn’t, so began to cast around for other possibilities. I had been, as an undergraduate, a science major and my mentors in literature said, “You know, that really distinguishes you, you ought to do something with that,” and so I began to think about it.

I had a friend who was a biochemist who, for fun, taught a one-off afternoon course on the thermodynamics of crystal formation, as applied to fudge making. It was a huge success. Everyone was able to eat their experiments and something about that resonated with me. I had other friends who enjoyed getting together to cook and eat food and drink inexpensive wine. At one of those dinners, a friend of mine had his wine glass knocked over. The tablecloth was white and someone said, “Throw salt on the stain. That’ll take care of it.” I thought, that’s interesting, I wonder why that is? The same friend who had his wine glass knocked over asked the group why it is that human beings have a limited tolerance for beans, why after a certain point they begin to give you… uncomfortable feelings. I thought, I wonder if there’s an answer to that question? I went to the science and agriculture section of the library and that’s where I discovered food science. I spent hours there. I found the answer to his question, and that’s what gave me the idea that writing about the science of food and cooking – not for professionals, but for people who are just interested – would be a project that I could do that no one else seemed to have done at the time. That’s what sparked On Food and Cooking.

Did you do much practical testing in the kitchen while writing the book?

I felt obliged to test out everything that I could test. Food science has for its whole history been involved mainly with industry, not with cooking, so many of the books ignored a lot of issues that are important to cooks. I had to extrapolate from the food science literature and try to interpret it to make sense of what happens in the kitchen. For those areas especially, I would spend time in the kitchen, making sure that I wasn’t leading myself astray. But that’s the part I really enjoy: there’s a piece to this story that’s missing, where am I going to find it? This, of course, was long before the internet, so it would also mean burrowing in old journals and following bibliographic leads to try to come up with the missing link – I love that stuff. The actual setting it down and making it clear, that’s not so much fun.

The second edition of On Food and Cooking, published 20 years later, is markedly different. Why is that?

The first edition came out in 1984 and it really was written just for enthusiasts. Then, after a decade or so of it being on the market, it was clear it was being used in culinary schools, because nothing quite like it existed – there were plenty of textbooks on food science for food scientists, but nothing for cooks. When I saw that, I began to think about the second edition in a much more formal and structured way: what is it that a professional in the kitchen should know about his or her materials and methods? And so the second edition came out very differently.

Had the appetite for this sort of book changed?

It was received completely differently. In the late seventies, early eighties, when I was writing On Food and Cooking the first time around, food was not a ‘thing’ in the States. There were no specialty coffee shops, olive oil was unknown in the American kitchen. We had our barbecue and wonderful American traditions and people enjoyed eating food, but it was not a very outward-looking approach. Then, somehow or other – I think it was a mixture of getting far enough away from the end of the second world war and, certainly in England, the end of rationing, as well as the arrival of jet aeroplanes, travel, tourism and television – all these things combined to make people see that food was way more interesting than they’d realised. Young Americans became interested in having restaurants. But they were not content to do a 10-year apprenticeship, starting with prepping potatoes. In the 1990s, I started to hear from young American cooks who had ambitions and would ask difficult questions of the mainly European-trained chefs, who would tell them, “Don’t ask questions, just do it,” or would make things up for the sake of coming up with an answer. So these young chefs would write to me with their questions. They were really the ones – these young, ambitious, impatient American chefs – who helped give my book some visibility.

You developed relationships with some very high-profile chefs. How did that come about?

Heston Blumenthal read the book and his mind was blown by the fact that classic French techniques such as ‘sealing in the juices’ of meat, for example, were not grounded in truth. The first contact I had from him was a long email about cooking beans. He had tried something 10 different ways but was uncertain about the results. It was clear from that initial email that his mind was firing on all cylinders, all the time.

There are two ways to get to a very high level of proficiency in cooking. One is just doing it a zillion times and in the course of doing that, you get so much practical experience. You do it a little bit differently each time, get a different result, and register what changed. You begin to understand things, but on a very different level to if you understand what something is made from and why it behaves a certain way in a particular circumstance. Once you have that understanding, you can then predict how an ingredient might behave if you treat it in a way you haven’t tried before, which might give you an interesting result.

This scientific approach to cooking was, as a movement, labelled ‘molecular gastronomy’. You have publicly taken umbrage with that label. What is it that you believe is misleading?

Cooks have always embraced many different approaches depending on the materials and resources available to them and what they were trying to do: feed people, impress people, amuse people. There have always been those elements, cross-culturally. While I was writing these books, there was this avant-garde movement in Spain which all of a sudden, in the space of a decade, burst into prominence on the international scene. The leader of that, Ferran Adrià, would come up with new menus constantly, always innovating, never wanting to repeat himself. A lot of his dishes at that time looked like science experiments and he talked openly about the use of food science. He was using ingredients and tools that had previously been used in industry but would have been heretical in a high-end kitchen. Food science of a certain kind, in the service of innovation, became important in the restaurant.

But to do that well, you really have to understand things in tremendous detail. The thing that Heston, Ferran, Thomas Keller and I were concerned about – and were compelled to make a public statement about – was that while young chefs should learn about the science of cooking, they also need to learn to cook. The term ‘molecular gastronomy’ became associated with an experimental approach to cooking, but missed the point that good cooking in restaurants requires a depth of practical knowledge and know-how. That foundation is really important, because if you only focus on novelty – which became the exciting, cool thing to do – and you don’t have that foundation, you’re going to make a lot of novelties that are horrific and give the whole field a bad name. That sort of approach doesn’t make a real contribution to the culture of the kitchen.

Industrialisation and globalisation have triggered enormous changes to the way we produce and consume food. What has been the impact of that?

I think what’s happened in food has happened with human culture in general: we’ve been going full steam ahead and not noticing what we’re leaving in our wake. Now, we’re finally waking up to the consequences. For example, we can’t dismiss concerns about the influence of animal agriculture on the climate by saying people are just trying to scare us. This is a real issue and one that needs to be addressed.

The founder of Impossible Foods, which makes plant-based meat substitutes, said that his mission is to put animal agriculture out of business totally. But I love meat and I respect the farmers in Scotland and France and many other places where animal agriculture has been an integral part of human culture, forever, so when I hear him say that, it bothers me. It seems to be so cold and unwilling to confront historical reality. On the other hand, I think what he’s doing is great because it gives us one more option to deal with a huge problem. We’re going to need dozens of approaches to begin to address these issues. It’s important that smart people, whether they work in Silicon Valley or anywhere else, are thinking about it and doing what they can. People should start out by recognising that they don’t have The Answer – capital T, capital A – and that the more people who are seriously engaged with the issue, the better.

Do you think the way that we now produce food has had an impact on food quality as well as the environment?

I think it’s difficult to generalise, because the effects are different on different things in different places. Rachel Laudan is a historian who happens to write about food. She wrote a book called Cuisine and Empire and she’s the closest thing we have to a voice of reason on these issues. Her book is about the history of cooking, from the earliest days to now, and the point she makes is that before industrialisation, food production meant a terrifically hard life for anyone involved. I think she makes a very compelling case that the industrialisation of food has been a boon for people who have lived in the last century or two, for that very reason – that it frees them from spending hours a day over a grindstone making flour. It’s very easy to say that the quality of food has declined, that the variety that we can enjoy has declined and that there are all these negatives, but there’s a huge counterargument about the quality of life, which has improved.

What will the future of food look like?

I’m not a prophet, so I really don’t know – except to say that it’s probably going to become yet more diverse and yet more self-conscious, and those are mostly good things. What strikes me is the fact that there are now dozens of people who were previously never involved in food who are looking at these problems and seeing what they can do to make a difference. They’re applying their skills to food, which I think is unprecedented. And that’s exciting.