Jimi’s journey

“AS A CHILD, MARKETS MEANT SQUISHED TOMATOES ON THE PAVEMENT, RANK SMELLS AND STULTIFYING BOREDOM”

Words: Jimi Famurewa / Images: Tom Miles, Orlando Gili

As a restaurant critic and inveterate food obsessive, there are few places I love more than a produce market. The vibrant, heaped displays of vegetables, fruit and glinting fresh seafood; the constant thrum of bodies and laden, twist-tied paper bags being passed from one hand to another. The lively traders calling out through the commingled waft of fresh herbs, ripe cheeses, and fried onions drifting from a street food stall. These days, whether it’s the bountiful, organic sprawl of Borough Market or a local gathering of a few fruit and veg carts, a market will always make me smile.

But when I was growing up, things couldn’t have been more different. Market day meant my mum hauling me to Woolwich or Deptford on a Saturday – an interminable fetch-quest of grocers, butchers and bakers, when all I wanted was to be planted on the sofa watching cartoons. The market to me was squished, overripe tomatoes on the pavement, unfamiliar, rank smells and stultifying boredom as adults haggled and nattered for what felt like an eternity. None of this was especially out of character for me. As I have detailed in my new book, Picky – a memoir about eating, identity and how I went from fussy, junk-addled kid to adventurous, professional gourmand – my childhood was one where the messy realities of fresh food tended to inspire fearful squeamishness rather than excited curiosity.

My allergy to open-air costermongers was very much par for the course, then. But you would expect someone who earns their living as a food producer and market trader to have experienced a markedly different trajectory. So it’s a surprise, to say the least, for me to learn that even some of Borough Market’s most respected traders once regarded markets with a similar youthful trepidation. “I grew up in Kingston, Jamaica and early on Saturday morning my grandmother would take me to a place called Coronation market,” says Dawn Smith, founder of Pimento Hill, a beloved purveyor of vibrant Caribbean sauces, seasonings and preserves at Borough since 2010. “It was fresh food and fresh gossip, and I hated everything about it. The handcarts, the people shouting, the smells and the noise.”

Though Coronation’s grisly assault on the senses was especially challenging for Dawn (“When they’d bring that bit of meat for my grandmother and just wrap it in paper, I’d say to myself: ‘I am so not eating that’”), it was also the social exchange and whisper network of the adult world that she struggled with. “My grandma would be catching up with gossip and, as a child, I just had to stand there and keep my mouth shut,” she says. “I couldn’t even pretend to be interested in the conversation, because I’d be told: ‘Why are you listening? Nobody’s speaking to you.’”

This bewilderment at the grown-up interplay of markets was also felt by Stephen Hook – Sussex-raised farmer and owner of trailblazing unpasteurised dairy business Hook & Son – when he first experienced markets with his father. “These were livestock markets and so I’d be seeing all these characters,” he says. “They’d be bidding in their own particular ways, with a wink, or a tap of the nose or whatever.” By the time Stephen started selling raw milk direct to consumers – first at a farmers’ market in Hailsham and then at Soho’s short-lived Foodlover’s market – he found he was still acclimatising to the, um, colourful nature of market life. “I think we had a massage parlour just behind us when we were in Soho and a lady who worked in there would come out to buy milk from us,” he says, with a chuckle. “Then there were actors and actresses in theatreland coming out to buy our stuff. It was a totally new experience.”

Any sense of overwhelm was soon replaced by a realisation that markets afforded opportunities for connection and custom. And, given that much of Stephen’s business involves evangelising the benefits of the raw milk products derived from his herds of free-roaming cows – namely, dairy that retains all its unhomogenised flavour, character and beneficial microflora – it suited him to directly share his gospel (not to mention abundant taster sips) with all manner of people. “Compared with being a bit braindead at a supermarket till, a farmer’s market is such a high-quality buying experience,” he says. “I love talking about farming and what I do. And so we really thrived in that environment.”

For Dawn, much of the joy of her early experiences at Borough resided in the realisation that this was a very different market to the ones her grandmother had hauled her to. “Oh, it was totally different to Coronation,” she hoots. Significantly, that difference occasioned a sense of discovery and interaction with foods that this young Jamaican woman – who would once insist on having all the peas picked out of her Sunday rice and peas – had never previously encountered. “One awakening for me was truffles,” she explains. “I’ve seen people walk by and say: ‘What’s that horrible smell?’ But, for me, I love a fresh truffle shaved on pasta; I love learning about different cheeses. Being here has been a learning experience.”

This transformative exposure to new, previously unknown culinary pleasures feels familiar to me. By the time I was in my early 20s – increasingly obsessed with kitchen experimentation and TV chefs like Jamie Oliver – my relationship with markets had shifted alongside my general relationship with food. Age brought agency. And so, relieved of the psychological baggage of those childhood expeditions with my mother, I was able to see different markets in a fresh, alluring light. Plantains and warm loaves of Percy Ingle bread from Deptford; golden, delicate girolle mushrooms from stalls in Brockley; the hurriedly devoured prize of a Brindisa chorizo roll at Borough itself. The more I fell down the rabbit hole of gastronomic obsession, the more I appreciated the collision of cultures and the sense of community that gives a good market its crackling energy.

Dawn has felt this too – whether it’s going for a recuperative, end-of-the-day drink with fellow traders, or customers letting her know that Pimento Hill’s chilli jams and curds are particularly good muddled into certain cocktails. Stephen, meanwhile, notes that Borough Market’s multiculturalism has shaped and defined a business that now produces everything from raw ghee to raw buttermilk. “The beauty of a market in London is that there are so many cultures, so many different people,” he says. “Somebody from Poland or South Africa or India buys our milk and I’ll ask them why they’re buying it. Sometimes it’s to sour it or turn it into yoghurt. We get all these little gems that show us how important all this is. Not just as food but in terms of a belief and a culture.”

Places like Borough Market, then, track how neighbourhoods and communities evolve, interact and exchange ideas. But, perhaps more than that, they mark how we grow as people and eaters. “I do get very reflective,” says Dawn. “Because I think, oh my god, if my grandmother could see me working at a market now, her jaw would drop to the floor.”

Picky by Jimi Famurewa (Hodder & Stoughton, £20) is available now