Adding Spice
Two Days at Borough Market
A couple of years ago, I started teaching myself how to cook. Don’t get me wrong, I hadn’t been at the ‘burns water and kitchen around water. Possibly also country.’ stage before that.. I’d been able to knock together perfectly good (Or at least perfectly average. Or at times perfectly warm. Or perfectly on the plate.) food but none of it had really stretched me. So, a couple of years ago I started to really push myself.
The end result can be found over here, under the Al Dente tag. I love cooking and I love stream of consciousness humor for the same reason; they’re like stage magic but without the capacity for a small child to break your thumbs or tie you into a sack. You take a completely disparate set of ingredients and create something completely different from them. Sometimes the joke is awful. Sometimes the food’s delicious. But it’s always different and it’s always down to you.
It was my birthday last week and to celebrate we went down to London. Across three days we saw STOMP (Go if you can, if there’s a percussionist in your family take them too, they’ll love it), went to the Tate Modern, the British Museum and most importantly spent time at Borough Market.
Tucked away near London Bridge Station and just under the watchful eye of Sauron in his office at the top of the Shard, Borough Market has a legendary and deserved reputation. It’s one of the food meccas of the country and just setting foot in there is like stepping into a faintly Dickensian food science laboratory. The entire market is under one of the busiest railway bridges in the region and trains rattle overhead constantly. No one cares. There’s food to cook, sell and eat.
That sense of industriousness, but not industrialization, powers the market. Each of those stalls is a standing location and each is crammed with food and its impossible to not get caught up in their enthusiasm. I’ve worked retail, I know patter when I hear it and whilst there’s some here, even it is infused with absolute love for the food and the work that goes into it. We saw that the first day we were there, when we stopped for a toasted cheese sandwich from one of the stalls. This being Borough Market, there was, of course a twist. For a start, the stall was also selling Raclette cheese broiled under a heater, then sliced and dropped over potatoes. The smell was amazing. The three feet wide wheels of cheese they were using were more so.
The sandwich itself? Sourdough bread with about a pound of blended grated cheese and, five minutes from done, green onions, red onions and chopped leeks. It was amazing. It was massively filling.It was like being punched in the heart by dairy products. I want another one.
Food is redefined constantly at the market. It’s an industrial process, a work of art, a tool you use to help you buy more food, a constant rolling experiment of taste and texture and smell and feel. So much so in fact that the market is now the center of a rapidly growing community of businesses. Just across the road from it are a pair of excellent flower shops, a Patisserie and, at one end, a bakery with a bread school attached. We’ll come back to that.
Walking around on the Friday, as you see here, the place was busy but not hugely so. As a result, we got talking to one of the stall owners, running a Borough Market merchandise stall. We explained that I was teaching myself to cook and his eyes lit up. He quizzed me on what my best dish was, asked me what I was looking for and shook my hand. He said ‘There is nothing better in life than learning how to cook. There’s nothing more satisfying and people will love you for it.’
We ended up talking to him a couple of times, and it was extraordinary. Firstly because to be met with such open admiration and absolute genuine charm from a complete stranger is so wonderfully non-British I was genuinely moved. Secondly because he told us the secret to the market.
He’d eaten his way around the market four times and said that he’d learned two things. The first was that he found himself looking for seasonal favorites as the months passed and secondly, that he made a point of not eating there every day. He described it like this; doing so would dull the palate, make you used to luxury so when you needed it most, the pick me up a treat provides wouldn’t be there. The market was something to be savored, as my girlfriend Marguerite put it, like spice. A little goes a long way.
Meeting this guy was a revelation. He was so practical and hands on, and enthusiastic and had an absolute awareness of where he was and the temptations it offered. He was the one, when I mentioned I was a baker, who pointed me at Bread Ahead, one of those businesses that has grown up around the market. They make bread (And cakes, Oh God the cakes) and sell them through a stall. Their bakery is close enough that they literally wheel the bread out to it on a trolley.
Also? Three foot long loaves of sour dough.
Three.
Foot.
I’ll just leave that there.
They run one day courses and the plan, next year, is to go on one. Because for me, this is a form of physical activity that may be more perfect than martial arts. There’s the same simultaneous unification and separation of mind and body, the same meditative aspect but instead of going home with bruises, you go home with bread. Or cake. Or bread and cake. What’s not to love?
We went back to the market on Saturday, twice, and it was there we really saw the idea of it being geographical seasoning given form. The Friday had been busy, the Saturday was insane. Every aisle, every stall was completely surrounded as London turned out to buy the best food it could, eat the best food it could and spend time in an area that’s as odd as it is beautiful. I took a couple of shots of the crowds and the only way to do so was to hold my camera directly over my head and point down. Incidentally,cameras are a very common sight in Borough Market. The stalls are so colourful and varied that you can point your camera anywhere but the floor and get a good shot.
We fought our way through the crowds because I had a hit list. I was concerned with picking up ingredients that would challenge me and help me grow as a cook rather than just enable what I’d already done. So, we went around and picked up all the things that had jumped out at me over the last visit, including;
- Sumac, a red, lemony Turkish herb.
- Olive Oil soap. Because I enjoy olive oil and being clean and am interested in seeing how the two combine.
- Apricot balsamic glaze. Which will shortly be going on chicken. And quite possibly all over my face.
- Cepes oil. This stuff is amazing. There was a mushroom stall there, which freely admitted they’d ordered the Cepes oil in by mistake. It’s mushroom oil and it tastes…broad. Total. And yet subtle all at once. I’m thinking savory crepes. I’m usually thinking savory crepes but now more than usual.
- Tamale flour. There’s an excellent Mexican food stall there and I nearly picked up one of the books they had for sale. Then I remembered I live with a Californian.
- Smoked oatcakes.
I picked everything up and I’ve already started experimenting with it. The Sumac in particular goes really well in the Northern Fried Chicken (Which is neither Northern, nor fried but that’s another story) recipe I have and once we’ve moved? It’s going to be Tamale time. I’m going to be working with these ingredients for months and I’m going to be using the knowledge that gets me for years, which, when it comes down to it, is the point. Places like Borough Market give you the chance to try something new, and have that change your life. Like the man said, there’s nothing better than learning how to cook. Except, maybe, eating what you make…
We ended up passing the market one last time on our way home. We’d stopped off at The Ring, a local pub near the site of one of London’s first boxing, wrestling and Shakespeare arenas (Yes, all three) and walking back took us both past the market and under the watchful eye of the Shard. It’s a ridiculous building, looking like it’s been dropped into the area from a particularly good utopian SF movie, and the contrast between it and the sleeping market is an absolute one. The Shard is bright, industrious and immense. The market at night is quiet, deserted, but not silent. There’s a sense of the generator being on but low, of the constant business of food being paused rather than shut down. There’s work to be done. Things to be made. There’s always work to be done and things to be made. Next time we go, I plan on being one of the people making them.
