“AT BOROUGH MARKET, KING CHARLES IS JUST A FOOD OBSESSIVE, CHATTING TO HIS FELLOW FOOD OBSESSIVES”

1. Support small, sustainable food producers

One of the hardest things about being the British monarch must be how tight-lipped you’re expected to remain on any topic deemed even vaguely political. And it must be particularly difficult if you have as many impassioned opinions as King Charles III.

Thankfully for him – and us – his time as Prince of Wales afforded Charles the opportunity to enjoy several decades as an outspoken participant in the public forum before the protocols of monarchy kicked in. Through his speeches, articles, interviews and letters to ministers, we know a lot about his thoughts and passions, which cover a wide range of topics – architecture, conservation, education, medicine. And one of the subjects he’s had most to say about is sustainable food production.

Take this statement from 2021: “To me, it is essential that the contribution of the small-scale family farmer is properly recognised – they must be a key part in any fair, inclusive, equitable and just transition to a sustainable future. To do this, we must ensure that Britain’s family farmers have the tools and the confidence to meet the rapid transition to regenerative farming systems that our planet demands.” That could very easily be a direct quote from the Borough Market Food Policy.

Or this from 2019. We should, he said, be celebrating “products that tell a really good story, emphasise the importance of native breeds, support family farms and put soil health and fertility at the centre of the entire process”. It’s a description that fits so much of what Borough Market sells, from the unpasteurised Sussex milk of Hook & Son to the colourful chard of Hickson & Daughter, to the cured meats sourced from small Italian producers by The Parma Ham & Mozzarella Stand.

2. Chat to a trader

It’s because of this sense of alignment with the values of Borough’s traders that the new King and Queen have been regular visitors to the Market. They were our guests of honour in November 2005, marking the 250th anniversary of Borough Market’s current incarnation. They returned in February 2013 when the magnificent new Three Crown Square hall was re-opened after years of building work on the overhead viaduct. They were here again in December 2017 to show their support in the aftermath of the terror attack. On each occasion they spent several hours talking, shaking hands and tasting eagerly presented samples. Nothing about the royal couple’s engagement with the traders, their stories and their products felt cursory or staged. Here, Charles is just a food obsessive, chatting to his fellow food obsessives.

3. Examine some architecture

The King loves architecture. Or at least some architecture: the historic type. Borough Market is full of plenty of that: a mélange of eras and styles from the past two centuries or so. There’s the beautifully ornate Floral Hall portico, which was built beside Covent Garden market in the 1850s and transposed to Borough less than 20 years ago but looks as though it’s been here forever. There are the striking Art Deco gates on the high street, which were first opened in 1933. There are even nine bollards and a lamp post in the Green Market, all of which have a Grade II listing from Historic England. Come for the incredible food, stay for the bollards.

4. Enjoy a taste of the West Country

“I have put my heart and soul into Highgrove,” the King has said of Duchy Home Farm, his organic farm on the Highgrove estate. “All the things I have tried to do in this small corner of Gloucestershire have been the physical expression of a personal philosophy.” As a West Country farmer, he’s always been active in promoting the region’s culinary gems. Borough Market is home to many of these: the cured meats of Capreolus, the cheeses of Bath Soft Cheese and Trethowan Brothers, the seafood and venison of Shellseekers Fish & Game, and the meat and other local produce sold at Wild Beef.

5. Buy some rare breed meat

When you read through his long list of food-related patronages, it’s clear that one of the King’s abiding passions is rare breed farm animals: the traditional, slow-growing, regionally distinctive breeds that were almost wiped out during the 20th century rush to engineer bigger, meatier, blander-tasting animals that reach maturity much more quickly. As well as being patron of the Rare Breed Survival Trust, he lends his support to just about every breeders’ association working to sustain our native livestock. Borough Market is a haven for these delicious traditional meats. Among many others, you’ll find Welsh Black and Devon cattle at Wild Beef, White Park cattle and Hampshire Down sheep at Northfield Farm, and Lincoln Red cattle and Tamworth pigs at Ginger Pig.

6. Volunteer for Plan Zheroes

One of the major themes of the coronation is a drive to encourage people to volunteer in their communities. If you’d like to make a difference, we have a great option. Twice a week, the Plan Zheroes organisation collects surplus food from our traders. This food, no longer perfect but still good to eat, is given to more than 20 charities to help feed vulnerable people across London. Plan Zheroes relies on volunteers. If you’d like to help combat food waste while supporting your fellow Londoners, sign up now.

7. Explore the flavours of the Commonwealth

Across much of the Commonwealth, important discussions are currently taking place about the inseparable ties between monarchy and colonialism and whether to follow the likes of Barbados and Trinidad in embracing a republican future. But for now at least, King Charles is head of state of 15 countries spanning the globe. As a result, this year’s coronation is an event whose significance reaches far beyond these shores. Borough Market has two stalls that bring some of the flavours of the Commonwealth to London. Doreen at De La Grenade imports beautiful jams, jellies and pepper sauces from Grenada, a Caribbean island famous for its nutmeg and mace, while the sauces, seasonings, chutneys and dressings at Dawn Smith’s Pimento Hill stand provide a vivid taste of Jamaica.

8. Pick up a tea towel

At times of great ceremonial importance, what is it that we do as a nation? We buy commemorative tea towels. Head to The Borough Market Store for a classic example of the genre.

“THE BEST INGREDIENTS ARE THOSE WITH STRUCTURAL PROTEIN THAT CAN WORK IN A SIMILAR WAY TO GLUTEN”

Although no single alternative will ever fully replace wheat flour, there is an alchemy to creating flavoursome, gluten-free bakes using a combination of different grains. The best ingredients are those with structural protein that can work in a similar way to gluten by binding the mix together.

Sorghum

An important flour for gluten-free baking on account of its high protein and fibre content, and its sweet flavour. When mixed with a couple of other flours, sorghum is particularly good for light bakes.

Teff

Used in Ethiopian cuisine to make injera, the country’s staple flatbread, teff is available in dark and light versions. The light version is good in cakes, such as victoria sponges. The dark version works in crackers, biscuits and pastry.

Rice flours

Brown rice flour, which is bland and has a slightly gritty texture, is a staple base flour. White rice flour has higher levels of starch and works extremely well in flour mixes, as it not only aids the binding process but also holds in moisture.

Buckwheat

Buckwheat isn’t actually wheat – it comes from the rhubarb family. It has a nutty, slightly bitter flavour and a high protein content. In France, it’s popular in savoury pancakes called galettes, and in biscuits. Make sure you’re buying certified gluten-free buckwheat.

Oat flour

Oat flour is a great source of protein and fibre. When fine, it adds a softness to bread dough; when not so fine, it produces a really good texture in biscuits. Look for certified gluten-free oat flour or else buy porridge or whole oats that you can grind yourself.

From Borough Market: The Knowledge with Angela Clutton (Hodder & Stoughton 2022)

“WHEN PRODUCED BY RESPONSIBLE FARMERS, RAW MILK CAN BE A COMPLETELY SAFE AND HIGHLY NUTRITIOUS PRODUCT”

Interview: Viel Richardson / Images: Joseph Fox

“I just think it’s better milk,” says Steve Hook, owner of Hook & Son, describing the unpasteurised, unhomogenised milk he produces at a small dairy farm on the edge of the Pevensey Levels in Sussex and is now selling from an impressive new stand in Borough Market’s Three Crown Square. Having built a loyal following among Borough customers over many years, Steve’s business has moved to a bigger space to accommodate a larger range of his farm’s products. These include milk, butter, buttermilk, ghee, cream, crème fraiche, yoghurt and – for the first time at the Market – dairy beef and rose veal from his single herd of pasture-fed cattle. Milk may be the farm’s primary product, but the range is designed to ensure that as little as possible is wasted from the lifecycle of the animals.

Steve argues that his raw milk has a richness and depth of flavour far removed from the pasteurised milk found in supermarkets – a reflection of the natural diet eaten by his herd. His cows roam on wild meadows, rushes and marshes and choose what they want to eat, and their varied and highly localised diet is reflected in the distinctive flavour of the milk, which changes with the seasons. This offers a stark contrast to industrially produced milk, which comes from multiple cows from multiple herds that have been fed a diet of soy and grains designed to maximise yields and in which even the slightest hint of character is quickly killed by pasteurisation (sterilising by heating) and homogenisation (breaking down the milk’s fats through mechanical processing).

“We’ve always drunk raw milk from our farm,” he says, “although the thought of selling it didn’t occur to me until the price we were being offered for pasteurised milk fell so low you just couldn’t make a living.” The problem with selling raw milk is that, for historical reasons, it is one of the country’s most arduously regulated foodstuffs. Over the years, Steve’s decision to do so has resulted in surprise inspections, legal battles and even undercover officers filming his retail sites. 

Pasteurisation was made mandatory in the UK in 1924, when a significant proportion of commercially produced milk had become too risky to drink. The problem was twofold: milk from dairy herds infected with tuberculosis or brucellosis could pass the diseases on to people, with devastating consequences, while bad practice and poor hygiene during milk storage and transport allowed the development of other dangerous bacteria such as salmonella, E. coli and campylobacter. But although pasteurisation has undoubtedly saved many lived, it destroys much of the milk’s flavour, and kills all the good bacteria too. 

When produced by responsible farmers, raw milk can, Steve insists, be a completely safe and highly nutritious product. “The problems are caused by poor farming practises and bad milk handling processes, both of which are entirely solvable without pasteurisation,” he explains. “Our herd, for example, was established in 1959 and has always been clear of TB and brucellosis. Our cows are milked in extremely hygienic environments using advanced milking equipment that is kept sterile. We also pay fantastic attention to hygiene throughout our milking and milk handling processes. This means we easily pass the stringent plant inspections and bacteriological tests regularly conducted by the Food Standards Agency. In this way, our milk retains all the benefits of the good bacteria, without the risk of encountering the bad.”

By law, raw milk can only be bought directly from the farmer who produced it. More and more people are now discovering the joys of doing so. “Our first milk round selling raw milk was 12 litres delivered in my dad’s Volvo estate to local customers. I think on the UK about 300,000 litres of raw milk a year were sold,” Steve says with a smile. “Now there are over 200 farmers selling three million litres a year to the public.” With his milk now sold from a big stand in a prominent position in the country’s best food market, that figure is only going to rise.

“ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT SHOPPING AT A FOOD MARKET IS THAT IT’S EASY TO BUY THE EXACT QUANTITY YOU NEED”

If you love cooking and you’re on TikTok, there’s every chance you’ve already found yourself hypnotised by Lagom Chef and his high-energy mission to keep good food from being thrown away. For the uninitiated, Martyn Odell – as he’s known in real life – is a self-described ‘food waste disruptor’ who’s been harnessing the extraordinary power of social media to help millions of people save money and reduce their environmental impact. With an approach that favours fun and creativity over po-faced moralising, his videos provide flavour-packed recipes and practical advice, all of which result in a full stomach and an empty bin.

When Martyn joined us to record a special episode of the Borough Talks podcast, alongside fellow campaigner Chloë Stewart of nibs etc., we asked him to provide his top tips for reducing food waste.  

Here’s what he told us:

1. Think of your kitchen cupboards as a dry store where you keep all the ingredients that are the backbone of the meals you make. We’re talking tinned foods, pulses, grains, pasta and rice. A few key herbs and spices. Then, you have the basis of a huge range of nutritious, home-cooked meals and can add in fresh ingredients as and when you need them. Not only is it economical but reduces waste in a huge way.

2. If you’re tight on storage space, stick to some key flavourings to pep up your cooking. My top suggestions for a super-versatile spice cupboard with maximum flavour are smoked paprika, cumin seeds, coriander seeds, Aleppo pepper, fennel seeds and smoked salt. Flavour-packed store cupboard heroes like miso, different vinegars, gochujang and harissa also give you an incredible jump-off point for a recipe.

3. Don’t feel pressure to fill your fridge with loads and loads of fresh ingredients. Try to only buy what you need. One of the great things about shopping at a food market is that buying the exact quantity you need is much easier, as very little of the produce is pre-packaged. If all you need is a single egg or a one small onion, someone will sell them to you.

4. If you have a surplus of fresh ingredients in your salad drawer, don’t panic! You can usually turn it into something that will be an incredible versatile base to freeze. For example, if you have loads of tomatoes, cook them down into a really intense tomato sauce. Add in any combination of grated veggies and you’ve got a great base to make a whole range of meals including shakshuka, soups, stews or curries.

5. You can freeze more than you think. Grated ginger freezes really well, as do yoghurt, milk and bread.

6. Ask the experts. Traders at Borough Market know better than anyone how much you need to buy, how soon their produce needs eating and what to do with it once it’s a little bit past its best, so don’t be shy about picking their brains.

7. And finally, enjoy the process of cooking and eat what you love.

“I THINK THIS IDEA THAT CURED MEAT IS A MASCULINE FOOD IS A PERCEPTION THAT ISN’T TRUE ANYMORE”

Interview: Clare Finney

I had always thought of charcuterie as being something that men were more likely to be drawn towards, but I’m not so sure that’s the case these days. I think this idea that cured meat is a masculine food is a perception that isn’t true anymore. At Alpine Deli, there are so many female customers who love cured meat and buy it for themselves, not for their husbands or boyfriends – and I love to see that.

In fact, I think the gender balance of my customers at Borough Market is pretty even. That is also completely normal in Spain and France – and Italy, where I come from. I grew up with cured meat products. The hams, salamis and sausages I sell are all from my hometown in South Tyrol, in the far north of Italy. My dad was a farmer and had a restaurant in the village, so I’ve always been close to the food industry. One thing led to another, and in time I ended up bringing produce from back home to sell here in London. 

My customers are very mixed, but the making of charcuterie does remain male-dominated. That is slowly changing, though. I find there are more and more female butchers. Just look at Wyndham House Poultry in the Market, which is mostly female, and at Ginger Pig – there are female butchers there, too. There is no reason why that shouldn’t be the case. Meat can be interesting to anyone; it is life, after all.

As for the world of being a market trader, I don’t think that’s a particularly male or female thing. There are loads of women working at Borough Market now, selling brilliant produce. I certainly wouldn’t say I’ve faced more challenges on account of being female. The job itself is tough, regardless of who you are and what you’re selling. You have to be quick and resilient to deal with different people and different situations. If something breaks, you have to know how to fix it, or find a solution to quickly replace it. It’s physically tough, setting up the stall and being on your feet all day. And let’s not forget the weather conditions: the cold, the wind and the rain.

I’ve been at Borough Market for 13 years now, and every year I’ve found myself with more customers and more regulars. Maybe it’s a me thing, maybe it’s a woman thing, I don’t know, but I see this as me doing something I’m passionate about, and I think that’s the reason I’ve been successful. I’ve put everything into it and I’m always here, so I’m a familiar face. That said, I’ve been very lucky in having a lot of support. I would not have been able to do this on my own, without the people around me. I was a girl from the Italian mountains, coming to a big city in a different country. Step by step, with plenty of encouragement, I’ve achieved something I’m proud of.

“WOMEN AND GIRLS ARE WORKING MORE AND DOING MORE. THEY RECOGNISE IT’S THEIR TIME. IT’S OUR TIME.”

Interview: Ellie Costigan

I’ve always been a foodie. I don’t know any Caribbean woman who isn’t – we do love our food! The inspiration for my company, Pimento Hill, was born out of that. I wanted to be independent, do something that gave me pleasure and stretched me a bit – and I haven’t been disappointed. I’m proud to say I’ve been at Borough Market for more than 12 years now, and I feel I’ve made my mark.

The food I produce is the food I grew up eating in Jamaica. I never thought I’d end up making it; I always saw myself more as the end user! I started making jerk seasoning because I thought I could do it better than what was available in the shops. The rest is just based on what I like. One of my favourite products is my marmalade. I’m a marmalade girl. I was raised on it. Before my mum passed away, there was a lady at the church she went to who would always make a pot of marmalade for her to take home for me.

In Jamaica, women don’t normally play a huge role in commercial food production. Back in the day, women took care of the kids and the household, and the men went out and worked. However, over the years mechanical and tech developments have meant farming has become a whole lot easier, physically, so women are now taking on that role. Young women are going off to agricultural school and learning not just how to grow food but understanding the economics behind the food industry. It’s a coming of age for us. This generation of women and girls are working more and doing more. They recognise it’s their time. It’s our time.

That’s not to say there aren’t still inequalities in the food industry, both in Jamaica and in the UK. Ageism is a problem: there’s a big focus on young people, yet there are so many older women out there who would love to start their own businesses. We’re losing out on all that experience. These women need more support.

There are lots of women working here at the Market, but there are still fewer female traders than male – and there are not a lot of black women. Having an awareness of that makes you operate differently. It’s a lot of pressure. I’d like to see that change, and I hope it will. Hopefully, I’m inspiring other black women to do the same as me and start their own businesses.

“LOTS OF MY WHOLESALE CUSTOMERS ARE FEMALE-LED OR FEMALE-OWNED BUSINESSES. THERE’S A LOT OF LOYALTY THERE.”

Interview: Ellie Costigan

I was brought up helping my mum and grandmother in the kitchen – they were both amazing cooks. We’d prepare meals together, dry and preserve things, make jams and molasses. Food has always been a really big part of my life, so it was natural to want to work with it.

When I came to the UK to study, I really missed Greek food. Finding the ingredients of my heritage was difficult, so I’d bring everything back with me. My mum would stuff my suitcase with olives, honey – even tomatoes and lemons, it’s crazy! I was upset that Greek products were really underrepresented outside of Greece. Starting Oliveology was a way of bringing me closer to my heritage and childhood. All of the things I have learned, experienced, cooked and tasted, I can pass on to others.

I am very passionate about organic farming and very interested in how farmers grow things. Interestingly, a lot of the producers I work with are women. In Greece women still commonly run the household, but things have started to change and more women are becoming involved in farming. My herb producer, who works with semi-cultivated, semi-wild land, is a woman. My truffle supplier is a woman. My honey is produced by a couple: the husband does the beekeeping and the wife runs the business. All of my producers are really small scale and the whole family is usually involved.

I am close with a lot of women in the Market, too. We support each other. We go through similar things, so we compare experiences and share tips. Lots of my wholesale customers are female-led or female-owned businesses, which I don’t think is a coincidence. There’s a lot of loyalty there.

Everyone who works with me is similarly passionate about our food and its provenance. We want people to value the quality of the food they put on their plate and understand why it matters – how your shopping choices affect your body, the farmers, the land, everything. For me, that’s more important than the financial aspect. Even if I lose money, I will never compromise. It’s quite an emotional approach. Maybe that’s to do with the fact that I’m a woman – or it might just be my personality.

I think that becoming a mother has shaped the way I approach my business, and food generally. When you own the company, there’s no maternity leave – you can’t take a year off – so it’s been hard. But you learn to adapt, and you keep going. I bring my son Harry along to everything. He has been part of my team from a very young age! Luckily, everything I sell is perfect for a child – what I would advocate for adults to eat I also want for my own child.

We’ve always done cookery classes and food workshops for adults. Now, we’ve started doing kids’ cooking workshops too. I want to inspire children to try different things from a young age, explore different textures, learn where food comes from and what real ingredients look like. I think it’s really important. I get Harry involved a lot in preparing and cooking food and I’m trying to inspire other mums to do the same.

WELSH FOOD CONTAINS A SMALL YET ENVIABLE PALETTE OF INGREDIENTS, THE REFLECTION OF A UNIQUE TOPOGRAPHY

If there was one thing about Wales that everyone in Tudor England knew, it was that the Welsh couldn’t get enough of toasted cheese: a dish known in Wales as ‘caws pobi’. In The Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam, a collection of stories attributed to the writer Andrew Boorde, a good laugh was had at this particular culinary obsession.

St Peter, so the story went, found himself in deep trouble with God for letting too many Welshmen into heaven. Standing outside the pearly gates, St Peter “cried with a loud voice, ‘Caws pobi! Caws pobi!’, that is as much as to say, ‘Roasted cheese!’ Which thing the Welshmen hearing ran out of heaven at great pace… And when St Peter saw them all out he suddenly went into heaven and locked the door! And so appeared all the Welshmen out!”

The fact that the Welsh could be tempted out of eternal celestial bliss by something as mundane as a cheese toastie says something quite profound about the history of Welsh food. In most countries, the story of the national cuisine is told through tales of great feasts, of palace kitchens, of exotic imports and elaborate dishes. In Wales, the food that defines the nation’s culinary history – including that addictive caws pobi – is the food of the poor, of the pastoral Celts, of the peasantry, passed down through a rich oral tradition.

Think of a classic Welsh foodstuff and it will be almost certainly be the product not of fancy, well-equipped kitchens but of humble fireplaces; cooked in a single large pot or baked on a bakestone. Think of cawl, one of the most famous of Welsh dishes, a simple broth of vegetables and meat (usually bacon) but with a thousand regional and local variations. After potatoes were introduced to Wales, their starchy bulk became integral to many of these hearty soups, but otherwise a cawl dished up today would be much the same as any produced by a medieval farmer’s wife, cooking over an open fire. Welsh cakes offer a similar echo of domestic simplicity, baked on a stone or a griddle rather than in anything as highfalutin as an oven.

The history of Welsh food is one of a small yet enviable palette of ingredients, a reflection of the nation’s unique topography: mutton, lamb, pork, beef and dairy from the hillside pastures; barley, oats and rye from the upland farms; leeks, brassicas and root vegetables from the fields; mackerel, herring and cockles (pictured top) from the sea; salmon, brown trout and sewin (Welsh sea trout) from the rivers. And salt, lots of salt.

The Celts were big believers in the culinary and preservative miracles possible through the heavy use of salt, and archaeological evidence of salt-making abounds at Iron Age sites throughout Wales. As well as being used in the preservation of meat, salt was – and still is – central to the production of Welsh butter. In this dairy-loving nation, butter was for centuries the only viable way of bringing luxurious fats and flavours to an otherwise frugal peasant diet. Proper Welsh butter still contains enough salt to make a cardiologist weep. Delicious though.

Cheese, too, was both popular and, for centuries, heavily salted. A clause in the medieval Welsh legal code known as the Laws of Hywel Dda suggests that cheese was commonly soaked in brine. According to the law, while the cheese was still in the brine it belonged to the wife, once out of the brine (and therefore presumably ready to eat) it belonged to the husband. Lucky old wife.

While we’re on the subject of cheese, let us address the sticky subject of Welsh rarebit. Caws pobi is Welsh, but Welsh rarebit categorically isn’t. The word ‘rarebit’ is a corruption of ‘rabbit’, and most likely has its roots in a racist English joke. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, the English used the epithet ‘Welsh’ to mock things for being a bit crap: using a ‘Welsh comb’ meant brushing your hair with your fingers, a ‘Welsh cricket’ was a louse. Welsh rabbit was a dish containing absolutely no rabbit, eaten by poor people who couldn’t afford anything as luxurious as meat. Cheese on toast wasn’t known as Welsh rarebit because the Welsh ate it (although, as we’ve seen, they clearly did); it was known as that because the English, who were equally partial to a spot of melted cheese, liked to be horrid about their Celtic neighbours.

One terrible irony for the Welsh was that, for all their enjoyment of toasted cheese, the very best cheese for toasting was made across the border in England. The acidity of Welsh soil has always made Welsh milk better suited to the production of soft cheeses, meaning that West Country cheddar – the epitome of sharp, melty loveliness, much coveted by lovers of caws pobi – was consumed in large quantities throughout Wales.

Thankfully, Welsh farmers had the perfect asset for trading at Somerset markets, enabling them to buy as much hard cheese as they needed: Welsh sheep. Mutton and lamb from the Welsh hills was much prized, so the trade in this most meltingly tender and flavoursome of beasts was a rich one. Most of the best meat was, however, destined for wealthy English tables, leaving the Welsh diet short on meat and long on cabbage, leeks and one less widely used green vegetable: seaweed.

Plentiful and hugely nutritious, a type of seaweed known as laver has long been plucked from Welsh beaches, boiled for several hours, then chopped or pureed into a soft, evenly textured paste known as laverbread (‘bara lawr’ in Welsh). Edmund Gibson’s 1695 translation of William Camden’s Britannia contains a description of “a kind of alga or sea-weed” being made into “a sort of food call’d lhavan”: “Having gather’d the weed, they wash it clean from sand and slime, and sweat it between two tile-stones; then they shred it small, and knead it well, as they do dough for bread, and make it up into great balls or rolls, which some eat raw, and others, fry’d with oatmeal and butter.”

Served with bacon and cockles, laverbread became a central part of the Welsh breakfast, fuelling the back-breaking work of mining communities, and it remains one of the most unusual and distinctive of Welsh dishes. Whether or not it’d be enough to drag a Welshman out of heaven is a matter of conjecture.

“JUST BECAUSE WE CAN’T SLIDE AROUND ON THE RIVER LIKE FROST FAIR REVELLERS DOESN’T MEAN WE CAN’T EAT AND DRINK LIKE THEM”

A major appeal of the Frost Fairs – the spontaneous festivals that erupted on the frozen Thames between the 16^th and 19^th centuries – was the party food sold by traders out on the ice. Climate change means that the river will probably never freeze again, and even if it did, we can assume that modern standards of health and safety would prevent any such revelry. But just because we can’t slide around on the river like Frost Fair revellers doesn’t mean we can’t eat and drink like Frost Fair revellers – and to do that, Borough Market is the perfect place to start.

Beef

A Frost Fair simply wouldn’t have been a Frost Fair without large hunks of meat roasting over open fires. Whole pigs and sheep were fairly commonplace, but the real star of the show was usually an ox, driven down from Smithfield Market, dispatched with great ceremony by a butcher wearing “a laced cambric apron, a silver-handled steel, and a hat and feathers”, then spit-roasted whole for days on end – an incredible spectacle and proof of the extraordinary solidity of the ice. Borough Market isn’t the place to come for either a live ox or a whole beef carcass, but at Wild Beef, Ginger Pig and Northfield Farm you’ll find magnificent roasting joints large enough to feed a multitude. Most importantly, the animals they come from will have lived a happy life grazing on pasture, much like those of yesteryear.

Gin

Let’s be honest: the Frost Fairs, while also a venue for shopping, sport, music, theatre and dance, were largely an excuse for Londoners to get completely lashed. “As many tuns of ale and brandy flow / Above the ice, as waters do below,” wrote one wit. In contemporary sources there are mentions of beer and ale, purl (ale infused with wormwood), canary and sack (two names for sweet Spanish wines), brandy and rum. This being London, though, gin was the thing. Imagine Hogarth’s famous Gin Lane print, but with the steps of St Giles replaced by an ice sheet. Borough’s East London Liquor Co. is among the finest of London’s current crop of gin makers and while theirs is a drink markedly less rough than anything that would have been sold on the ice, it’s no less capable of fueling a party.

Gingerbread

From first until last, gingerbread was a staple treat of the Frost Fairs. In 1814, it was among the three consumables (together with gin and beer, inevitably) that one observer noted as having “a plentiful store” among the event’s vendors. Sweetened with honey or sugar and packed with candied fruits and exotic spices, the gingerbread of the past would have been deeper, denser and more cake-like than the biscuits we now associate with the name. The Cinnamon Tree Bakery has produced a special gingerbread to mark the Frost Fairs, emblazoned with an elephant illustration in honour of the (almost certainly mythical) appearance of an elephant on the ice. Handmade in Camberwell, these beautiful biscuits are flavoured with the same wintery spices that the Frost Fair bakers would have employed in their craft: nutmeg, mace, cinnamon and cardamom as well as ginger.

Coffee

If the weather’s cold enough to freeze the Thames solid, you’re definitely going to want a hot drink. Coffee was a regular staple of these impromptu festivals, as were tea and hot chocolate. At the time of the 1684 Frost Fair, coffee was incredibly fashionable. London’s very first coffeehouse had opened in 1652, sparking a surge in demand for this bitter Arabian decoction. In 1675, Charles II made an ill-fated attempt at banning its sale, believing that cafes were magnets for political malcontents, but when the King appeared at the Frost Fair nine years later, the drink was all the rage. Within a century, coffee’s popularity would be overtaken by that of tea, but it has recently regained its status as London’s chosen source of caffeine. Borough Market is home to the very best of this magical bean’s importers and roasters, including Monmouth Coffee Company, The Colombian Coffee Company and Change Please.

Cheshire cheese

In accounts of the Frost Fairs, there are several mentions of bread and cheese being sold – and specifically Cheshire cheese. In the 17th and 18th centuries, cheesemakers from Cheshire absolutely dominated the London market. Cheshire was the English cheese, in the way that cheddar is today. But whereas once the northwest was home to hundreds of producers of raw milk, clothbound, farmhouse Cheshire, today there’s just one: Appleby’s. Sold by Neal’s Yard Dairy, Appleby’s Cheshire has the same juicy acidity and characteristic crumble that ice-bound Georgian cheese lovers would have enjoyed, if they could really taste anything after all that gin.

Pies

The pie has been one of the cornerstones of English cuisine since long before the Frost Fairs. Filling pastry with meat or fruit is something we can’t help but do as a people, like playing ball sports and drinking to excess. Just as it was absolutely inevitable that drinking sessions and games of football would break out on the ice (“And football playing there was day by day, / Some broke their legs, and some their arms they say,” wrote one poet in 1684), so too was it completely assured that piemakers would find a brisk trade among the revellers. The very same would no doubt happen today. Pieminister’s Kate and Sidney pie, filled with generous amounts of steak, kidney and ale – a proper cold-weather soul warmer – would be the perfect place to start.

“THE FREEZING WINTER WAS A TIME OF GREAT DISTRESS FOR MANY, BUT DOWN ON THE THAMES A CHEERIER MOOD PREVAILED”

It was Monday 6^th February 1814, the early hours of the morning. For a full week, an extraordinary esplanade of ice had spanned the Thames between Blackfriars and London Bridge, but signs of structural distress were starting to appear. It had rained heavily on the Sunday evening and the groan of cracking ice was clearly audible. As one observer put it: “In short, this icy palace of Momus, this fairy frost work, was soon to be dissolved, and was doomed to vanish, like the baseless fabric of a vision – but leaving some wrecks behind.”

Among the wrecks in question were nine men who, despite the obvious danger, had chosen to spend yet another night out on the rigid river, drinking gin in a booth owned by the landlord of the nearby Feathers pub – one of many such constructions. Around 2am, the section of ice hosting their drinking den was shorn off by the tide and propelled along the Thames “with the quickness of lightning”. Responding to the crisis with a predictable lack of dexterity, the drinkers added to their peril by accidentally setting fire to the booth’s tarpaulin. Against all the odds, they managed to find refuge in a small boat that was freed by the thaw, but this was immediately dashed to pieces against one of the piers of Blackfriars Bridge. By some miracle, no one was killed.

The next day, these nine men weren’t the only Londoners left feeling sore. “Thousands of disappointed persons thronged the banks; and many a prentice boy and servant maid sighed unutterable things at the sudden and unlooked for destruction of the Frost Fair.” This was it. The 1814 Frost Fair – a spontaneous festival of food, drink, music, sport and shopping – had finished. There’d been many such events in the preceding centuries, and they’d all ended in a similar way: suddenly, disappointingly, dangerously. But this would be the last ever Frost Fair. The party was over.

Knowing the Thames as it is today, it seems incredible that this huge, fast-flowing river could have frozen sufficiently solid for thousands of inebriated revellers to dance on its surface for days on end. For this, our forebears were indebted to the climate of the Little Ice Age, a period of cooling in the North Atlantic region which extended from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The topography of the river also helped. Before steep embankments were erected later in the 19^th century, the Bankside section of the Thames was a wider, shallower and slower-moving monster than it is today.

As a result, any long spell of sub-zero temperatures could turn the river into a rink. This happened in the winter of 1564-5, when New Year’s Eve celebrants out on the ice “plaied at the football” and “shot at prickes” (less alarming than it sounds: a prick was a type of archery target). Over the next few days, people “went on the Thames in greater numbers than in anie street of the Citie of London”. January 1608 saw more prick shooting, together with bowling, and dancing. Booths were set up by resourceful market traders, including “fruit-sellers, victuallers that sold beere and wine, shoemakers, and a barber’s tent.”

One of the biggest of the Frost Fairs came in 1684, in the coldest winter ever recorded in England. This was a time of great distress for the nation. “It was a severe judgment on the land,” observed the diarist John Evelyn, “trees not only splitting as if the lightning struck, but men and cattle perishing in divers places, and the very seas so locked up with ice, that no vessels could stir out or come in. The fowls, fish, and birds, and all our exotic plants and greens, universally perishing. Many parks of deer were destroyed, and all sorts of fuel so dear, that there were great contributions to preserve the poor alive.”

Meanwhile, down on the Thames, a cheerier mood prevailed. There were “sleds, sliding with skates, a bull-baiting, horse and coach-races, puppet-plays and interludes, cooks, tippling, and other lewd places.” It was, concluded Evelyn, “a bacchanalian triumph, or carnival on the water”. And Restoration London was very good at bacchanals. After periods of civil war and repressive Puritanism, the city – now under the louche leadership of Charles II – had been relearning how to party. As Londoners took that learning out onto the ice, even the King joined the fun.

We know that the royal family partied at the 1684 Frost Fair because their presence was marked by a commemorative print produced out on the ice. Printing would remain a lucrative staple of the fairs, with printers dragging their heavy typesetting equipment down to the river to fire off posters, poems, personalised gifts and even entire books. One of the best sources of information on the 1814 event is a heavy tome called Frostiana, most of the sections of which were seemingly churned out at the fair.

Visitors may have left with souvenir prints, but they came for the food and drink. One poem from 1684 described a “cheating, drunken, leud, and debauch’d crew” feasting on hot codlins (cooked apples), pancakes and all sorts of roasted poultry, washed down with sack (Spanish fortified wine), all procured from hastily erected booths, many of which featured hilarious signs (“The Flying Piss-pot” being a notable example). There were venders of coffee, tea and cocoa – alluringly exotic drinks only recently arrived from Arabia, China and the Americas respectively. Mostly, though – Brits being Brits – everyone got stuck into the booze. As one anonymous poet put it: “As many tuns of ale and brandy flow / Above the ice, as waters do below; / And folk do tipple, without fear to sink, / More liquors than the fish beneath do drink.”

In January 1716, the booze booths were back, peddling what one reporter described as “exhilarating liquors”. That same year, the Protestant Packet newspaper described sellers of port, Rhenish (a sweet German wine), bohea tea (the cheapest tea on the market), tobacco, Cheshire cheese and the “whitest Brentford peas” (a rare example of anything vaguely healthy being bought on the ice). At every Frost Fair, there was always plenty of gingerbread and at least one spit-roasted ox. In 1739-40, a man called Hodgeson claimed the privilege of ceremonially killing the ox, which was brought down from Smithfield Market. This was, he claimed, a family tradition, “his father having knocked down the one roasted on the river in the Great Frost of 1684”.

All this eating, drinking and entertainment played out in a spirit of exhilarating anarchy. Unlike an official marketplace, there were no license fees here. No sheriffs, no weighing beams, no fixed start and finish times. In 1789, the London Chronicle described a booth with a sign stating: “Beere, wine, and spirituous liquors without a license!” A gingerbread seller delivered a similar happy message: “No shop tax, nor window duty.” The only vaguely authoritative presence came from burly boatmen rendered unemployed by the ice. Robbed of their income, they charged a toll to allow people onto the river. In 1789, these muscular entrepreneurs smashed up the ice close to the shore so that no one could sneak in without paying. To their credit, they did in return spend a lot of time saving the lives of those unfortunate souls too drunk, reckless or unlucky to avoid falling into the frigid waters.

There were plenty of these. In one little tale from Frostiana, “three prim young Quakeresses had a sort of semi-bathing, near London Bridge, and when landed on terra firma, made the best of their way through the Borough … amidst the shouts of an admiring populace.” Others, however, suffered a fate far worse than wolf whistles. In his poem Trivia (1716), John Gay told of the gory death of an apple-seller known as Doll: “The cracking crystal yields: she sinks, she dies, / Her head chopt from her lost shoulders, flies; / Pippins, she cried, but death her voice confounds, / And pip, pip, pip, along the ice resounds.” In 1814, “a plumber, named Davis, having imprudently ventured to cross with some lead in his hands, sank between two masses of ice, to rise no more.”

Such tragedies aside, the Frost Fairs represented the purest distillation of collective joy – and 1814’s week-long party meant they ended on a high note. “There were fires blazing, sausages frying, fiddlers tuning, horns blowing, and groups of dancers in incessant employment and requisition,” summarised the Illustrated London News. It all kicked off on 1^st February with the familiar eruption of booths, ornamented with streamers, flags and signs, offering food, drink and entertainments. “Among the more curious of these was the ceremony of roasting a small sheep, which was toasted, or rather burnt, over a coal fire, placed in a large iron pan,” wrote the author of Frostiana. “For a view of this extraordinary spectacle, sixpence was demanded, and willingly paid. The delicate meat when done, was sold at a shilling a slice, and termed ‘Lapland mutton’.”

By the following day, a “grand mall” stretched from Blackfriars Bridge to London Bridge, “lined on each side with tradesmen of all descriptions.” As has been true of every public event in the history of Britain, a lot of what was sold was tourist tat: “Every day brought a fresh accession of pedlars to sell their wares; and the greatest rubbish of all sorts was raked up and sold at double and treble the original cost. Books and toys labelled ‘bought on the Thames’ were seen in profusion.”

While the entertainment was plentiful, it seems to have been a little less bloody than in previous years. “Skittles was played by several parties, and the drinking tents filled by females and their companions, dancing reels to the sound of fiddles, while others sat round large fires, drinking rum, grog, and other spirits.” For a change, there was no mention of fox hunting, bear baiting or bull fighting. No animals other than roasted oxen were ripped to shreds on the ice.

There is a prevailing legend that the 1814 fair featured the most extraordinary of all Frost Fair animals: an elephant, paraded around on the ice. While I would love this to be true, I haven’t found a single contemporary reference. Apparently, none of the event’s reporters deemed the appearance of a massive pachyderm sufficiently noteworthy to warrant inclusion in their accounts. Frostiana, for example, tells of “four donkeys, which trotted a nimble pace, and produced considerable merriment”, but remains tellingly silent on the matter of elephants.

The elephant, then, is almost certainly a myth, but it’s one we might still choose to believe. With so much adrenaline, anarchic joy and Old Tom gin coursing through the Frost Fairs, stranger things certainly happened. We shouldn’t let facts spoil the fun.

Mark Riddaway is the author of Borough Market: Edible Histories, available now in paperback