Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table. Nigel Slater
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The Farmers’ Market – An Allotment for Wimps
Home to the locally grown and hand harvested, the farmers’ market fills the gap between allotment and supermarket. I shop there because I want to meet the people who grow what I eat, to experience the joy of seasonal shopping, to be as close as I can to where my food originates from without actually getting my hands in the soil.
The farmers’ market works on several levels. It appeals to my need for those who supply my food to have a face rather than to be part of a vast, invisible food machine; it provides an opportunity to buy produce that was picked hours rather than days or even weeks ago; it supports local workers and encourages me to ‘do my bit’ to cut down ‘food miles’. At last, I can put my pound directly into the weathered hand of the person who planted, watered and then dug up the pink fir-apple potatoes I am about to turn into a salad.
And I suspect that, as I trundle up the hill with my recycled bag of cheap corn on the cob still in its fresh green husks and a swaying bunch of three-foot-high sunflowers, it probably allows me to feel just a wee bit smug about those shoppers with their supermarket packet of identically sized, overpriced, cellophane-wrapped green beans from Mozambique.
There are 350 farmers’ markets in Britain at the time of writing, from Aberystwyth to York. Dorset alone has ten, London a measly fourteen. Pushed from pillar to post, they find a temporary home wherever the local council will let them set up shop, in school playgrounds, village squares and, ironically, supermarket car parks. The bustling square with its jam-and-‘Jerusalem’ stalls and green striped parasols is the twenty-first-century replacement for the local outdoor market. The selfsame market that closed down a decade ago, when it could no longer muster the strength to do battle with the invaders from planet Sainsbury. Coming to town just once a week, this colourful gaggle of brave traders in everything from unpasteurised cream to lavender-coloured aubergines has something of the circus about it. We gather round the stalls in awe, gasping at the beauty of a cloth-wrapped truckle of cheddar or a wicker hamper of downy field mushrooms picked at dawn. The farmers’ market has become the modern equivalent of a band of travelling minstrels.
Is this the infamous Ibby-Jibby Custard Green Snot Pie (all mixed in with a dead dog’s eye) of the delightful children’s poem?
If it is true that we eat with our eyes, then it is somewhat curious that rhubarb and custard ever made it into our lexicon of national puddings. Perhaps this is a dessert for our hidden child, the one who likes all things ghoulish, spooky and slightly scary. Nothing curdles quite like warm custard poured into poached rhubarb. If you are really unlucky the custard separates into globular forms like those that rise and fall in a lava lamp.
I seem to remember ‘rhubarb-n-custard’ was the nickname of a particularly acne-ridden boy at school. Nowadays he would probably be called ‘pizza face’.
Blood and pus aside, the idea is gastronomically sound enough. Sweet, smooth custard sauce to soften the astringent blow of the fruit; a yellow blanket to put out the acid fire. This is why it is best not to oversweeten the rhubarb, so you get a pleasing hit of both sharp and smooth in the mouth. Scientifically, sweetening the fruit is less effective, as it is the action of the oxalic acid in the rhubarb that curdles the proteins in the egg custard.
Aficionados will surely agree with me that a love of rhubarb and custard, of slithery pink-and-green stems with wibbly wobbly custard, is purely a matter of allowing flavour and sensuality to get the better of aesthetics. That, and trying to forget the spotty kid at school.
If you take the genre a step further you can whip chilled rhubarb and custard into a bowl of sleepy, lightly beaten cream to make a fruit fool. Even then, it will curdle a little, though the effect of pale pink fruit swirled through custard and cream like a raspberry ripple will take any squeamish eater’s mind off it.
There are probably few people over thirty who cannot instantly burst into the theme tune from the Fruit and Nut adverts. Which, for younger readers, is ‘Everyone’s a Fruit and Nut case’, sung to the music of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. It was probably the first famous piece of classical music to be linked to a product, a habit that is now endemic throughout the advertising industry. It is now almost impossible to hear a well-known symphony without a mental link to some household-name product.
It has to be said that Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut is an older-generation confection, and hasn’t attracted the younger chocolate-eater. The sole reason is the fact that young people generally hate ‘bits’, and this bar, with its creamy, almost watery-tasting chocolate, currants, sultanas and shards of nut is as bitty as it gets. It has a place in the hearts of the older chocolate-eater, but almost certainly as much for the adverts, and their delightful silliness, as for the chocolate itself, which, let’s face it, is hardly Valrhona Manjari.
To the French, the Italians, the Turkish and all the other great preserve-makers, the perfect jam is all about the flavour, the amount of fruit, and a texture poised somewhere in that heavenly state between syrup and a lightly set jelly. To the Spanish, the Swedish and the Bosnians too, it should have visible fruit suspended in a luscious jelly the colour of a jewel in a royal crown. To the British jam-maker, all that seems to matter is ‘the set’.
When you mention, casually and perhaps over coffee, that you made jam last weekend, the question will not be ‘Does it taste wonderful?’ but ‘Did it set?’ The British jam-maker is obsessed with getting their jam so stiff you could turn the jar upside down and the contents would stay put. The rest of Europe makes jam that slides sexily off the mound of clotted cream and dribbles down the edge of the scone (an exquisite moment if ever there was one). We make jam that sits prim and straight, like a Victorian child at Sunday school.
Commercially produced British jam is easily spotted because it stays put when the jar is moved from side to side. We make jam a little bit like ourselves. A jam that is a bit uptight and reserved, a preserve that wobbles tautly rather than falls off the spoon with a slow, passionate sigh.
The curious fact about Oxo cubes is that we have probably never really needed them. These little cubes of salt, beef extract and flavourings were, and I suppose still are, used to add ‘depth’ to stews, gravies and pie fillings made with ‘inferior’ meat. Two million are sold in Britain each day. Yet any half-competent cook knows you can make a blissfully flavoursome stew with a bit of scrag and a few carrots, without recourse to a cube full of chemicals and dehydrated cow.
Apart from showing disrespect to the animal that has died for our Sunday lunch (imagine bits of someone else being added to your remains after you have been cremated), the use of a strongly seasoned cube to ‘enhance’ the gravy successfully manages to sum up all that is wrong about the British attitude to food. How could we fail to understand that the juices that drip from a joint of decent meat as it cooks are in fact its heart and soul, and are individual to that animal. Why would anyone need to mask the meat’s natural flavour? By making every roast lunch taste the same, smothering the life out of the natural pan juices seems like an act of culinary vandalism, and people did, and still do, just that on a daily basis.
Yet the Oxo cube has played a very important role in the British kitchen. It gave us a guaranteed, copious lubricant for our meat, and in the years after the war, the existence of gravy was something to be celebrated. Gravy carried with it an air of achievement and success, but more importantly, it announced a return to normality after years of rationing. It gave us a taste of home as we felt