Food for the soul in Paris

And so, adieu Paris – until the next time! We pulled out Gard du Nord with Sacré Cœur silhouetted on the horizon in the brittle winter sun. And as we picked up speed, La Tour Eiffel rose against the sky like a hand raised in farewell.

The Other Half describes me as a 'romantic Prussian' on occasion, but it is a romanticism that I also feel in Paris; the ghost of a past era seems to permeate the walls. It is almost within reach; almost an aroma that I can smell.

But enough of such intangibles. This was not a trip about romance - but it was (in part at least) a little pre-Christmas gourmet adventure.

We arrived on Thursday evening - too late to dine, and ready only to lounge outside La Terrasse with a glass of something and a cigarette, watching the world go by. But before that, I booked us in for the following evening at Septiéme vin, our favourite eatery in the city.

Just around the corner from where we like to stay, we visit at least once a trip. Olivier, the maitre d' and co-owner, has always been an utterly charming and generous host, making us feel more like returning friends than simply occasional customers.

It's a small place, but comfortable and warm. In the warmer months, we've enjoyed dining outside, but this was most definitely not the time for that. And with the temperature falling, winter food was on the agenda too.

The menu is, if not quite unchanging, one where you know what to expect. But on Friday's specials of the day was something I don't recall seeing there before: marrowbone gratinée. After my introduction to that ingredient in Carcassone in July, there was no question what my starter would be.

What arrived was a piece of bone, around eight inches long, halved lengthways and with a very fine topping of breadcrumbs and garlic over the marrow itself. There was toasted baguette to accompany and fleur de sel to garnish.

Scoop out the jellyish marrow onto toast and eat. This is not haute cuisine. It is not food to worry about eating elegantly. But boy, oh boy, this is the food of the gods. Sweet, with a fabulous mouth feel, and so, so satisfying.

So satisfying, in fact, that I struggled to eat all my main course of scallops with beautifully julienned vegetables and a very nice buerre blanc. It was further evidence of something I'm starting to understand: that fat - the real, natural stuff - makes you feel sated quicker than any other foodstuff.

I had a lemon sorbet to finish - although Olivier suggested having it with vodka and seemed impressed when I named that as a 'colonel'. I'd known about it for ages, but never tried it. I swear he put more booze in there than would be usual: the sorbet was nearly swimming. It's a great - hic! - combination.

The following evening, we made the error of eating at Café de Champs de Mars, just near the tower – my favourite piece of bling in the world. Now this is a fairly touristique spot on a small roundabout, but I love it: it absolutely reeks of the 19th century and 'gay Paree'. However, we had forgotten that it's fine for eating if you stick to their grills or steaks and frites, but less so if you off piste, so to speak.

We both felt like a change and opted for dishes with pasta. Neither was bad - they simply weren't much better than average.

The next night, we went back to see Olivier - with me hoping that the specials would still be the same. They were. So it was a case of the marrowbone redux.

You always worry at least a tiny bit that, on repeating something like that, it won't be as good the second time. Oh, but it was: every bit as good if not even more.

Olivier told me that they pre-cook the bone - as I understand it, in a court bouillon. Whatever they do, it's stunning.

What struck me was just how basic such a food is - how much it plays to our core. And how much the fast and junk food industries spend fortunes trying to replicate the same sort of impact with all their chemicals, additives, sugars and salts.

Now it's a very long time since, in an act of desperation driven by food deprivation, I consumed fodder from one of those such outlets, so things might have changed, but on the basis of memory, they don't come close to what I ate at the weekend.

Marrowbone has plenty to recommend it in terms of the old nose-to-tail eating philosophy alone, but ignoring that, it's a sensational food to taste. Why on each did we stop eating it and when?

If you're still interested, I followed with cod and a little rice and more of those julienned veg - I asked for a small portion, but it was still a bit too much. Y'see what I mean about being sated?

I did manage to cram a first ever taste of Iles flottante - the classic French meringue dish. I expected it to be as meringue that I've tasted has always been: hard and crisp, but it was soft and, well, sort of floppy – the result of having been poached.

But swimming in a quite delightful chilled custard, with a drizzle of caramel, it was very, very nice indeed.

Aside from the eating, there was preparing for future eating. Or put another way, shopping in the food hall at Le Bon Marché, which is an absolute joy, and saw me transformed into something like the archetypal child in a toyshop. And in the kitchen section was the biggest selection of moulds and rings I've seen anywhere outside of the catalogue of professional cooks' suppliers.

There was also a reminder of just how many top-notch chocolatiers and patisseries there are in Paris - every street has at least one of each, it seems! Even a fleeting look in the window and you're drooling like one very happy cat.

So, that was Paris in summary.

But I warn you: it may not be the last you hear of marrowbone.

In a stew about gravy

Some things are best forgotten; left well hidden in the attic of memory, buried away behind the other clutter.

But memories, no matter how deeply interred, have a habit of popping up unexpectedly and coming back to haunt you.

Slouched in an armchair on a Sunday afternoon, wind rattling the plane trees outside, i was delighting to the joys of Nigel Slater's Eating for England, when a brief section suddenly threw the words 'gravy granules' out from the page and directly at me.

From the tender comforts of nostalgia for custard creams and mint cracknel - the latter of which I hadn't hear of in years, the former of which the same book has had me wanting instantly - I found myself slapped across the face by the wet fish of embarrassing memory.

I have to admit that there was a time when the kitchen cupboard housed tubs of beef, chicken and vegetable gravy granules.

That was bad enough, but then more detail flooded through: memories of serving Birds Eye frozen chicken burgers (the breadcrumbed ones, not those with something like Rice Crispies over them).

I felt mortified at the thought. But at least it serves as an illustration of what a difference a decade or so can make.

Mr Slater has a lot to answer for. But he also provided me with the roots of an interesting challenge this weekend.

The first chapterette in the aforementioned book talks of stew - of the great English stew a creation of diced meat, diced vegetables, a jug of water and a bay leaf, all of which comes together as something that is, almost at best, bland.

He compares it, pithily, to the casserole traditions of France, Italy and Spain, with the addition of booze (in the first case, at least) and the use of various herbs and spices.

Returning to the attic of memory - but deliberately this time, and with care - I rooted around for memories of maternal stews.

She cooked a stew rarely and, when she did, it was on a Saturday for a late lunch: it would have some meat of other, together with assorted veg, pearl barley and liquid.

I remember nothing more specific - except the slices of bread that we mopped up with at the end.

As I've mentioned before, she didn't believe in onion - not in an atheistic way, of course, but I have never known her have one in the house, whether a cooking onion ordinaire, one of the red variety or even the milder shallot.

Her culinary belief system did seem to understand that onions were occasionally required, but that was achieved by rehydrating some Whitworths dried fragments in an old, enamelled tin mug and then popping it in the cooking pot.

Well a least that's how I remember things - and I'm not getting the ladder back out and going back into that attic right now to see if I can find more detail.

But all this set me to considering a stew for Sunday, instead of the pot roast I had been contemplating as a way of christening the Le Crueset oval casserole.

I wanted to cook without any specific recipe, but that didn't mean a lack of research before I stepped into the kitchen this afternoon.

Elisabeth Luard's European Peasant Food offered clues in a number of recipes for classic dishes that seemed a tad more authentic than most versions I'd seen before.

For instance, meat was usually caramelised in lard or dripping instead of the currently obligatory 'healthy' option of oil - Which? magazine actually once criticised a Rick Stein book for including dishes involving cream and butter.

And the cooking time was also often considerably longer than I'd usually seen: for instance, I'd never seen a recipe for a daube that saw it cooked for four hours at 120˚C. That was information that I stored for use.

I've also got poor - albeit gradually improving - understanding of cuts of meat. More research suggested that for such a dish, I should use blade (or chuck, as it's also) known. Sure enough, Matthew had some.

It was beautiful meat, delightfully marbled (see picture at the top). This afternoon, I cut it into pieces (large bite size) and then diced onion, celery and carrot - the holy trinity of the mirepoix - plus parsnip.

The meat was browned in dripping first, then removed and replaced with the vegetables.

Once they were softened and a little golden, a tablespoon of plain flour was added, stirred in and allowed to cook through for. Minute, before I started deglazing with Wychwood's Scarecrow organic golden pale ale.

Once it had stopped thickening, I added a couple of springs of thyme, some seasoning and then the meat, topping up the liquid to just cover.

Then it went into the pre-heated over at 115˚C, since I was using a fan oven.

After tasting on 90 minutes, it was a rather bitter - but not in the way the beer would have been if you'd been drinking it out of a glass. I sprinkled in a little demerera, drizzled on a little Maggi sauce, stirred in a decent squirt of tomato purée and turned up the temperature about five degrees. An hour later, this seemed to have sweetened matters - a little.

Later still, something hit me: all the remaining bitterness had gone, leaving something with lovely layers of developing flavour, a general sweetness at the front and a hint of sourness later.

In the past, I've wondered whether I've done something wrong when I've tried meat 'n' beer dishes: they always seemed to have that bitterness. Is that really what the Flemish intended with the traditional carbonade?

The problem, I now realise, is that most modern recipes in the UK seem to regard 'long, slow cooking' as meaning two hours at the max. Presumably, British cooks are assumed to be somehow incapable of cooking anything for any longer – are we too impatient?

For the final 45 minute's cooking, I added dumplings, made of self-raising flour, mustard powder, shredded suet, seasoning, chopped parsley and a little chilled water.

Having left this dish for over four hours, it took a mere one bite to realise that there's a substantial difference when you seriously cook for longer.

I've been curious about slow cooking for some time, but had been struggling to find recipes that seemed to involve anything that was genuinely slow – apart from a Heston Blumenthal belly pork dish that took nine hours.

What a shame I hadn't bothered studying Luard's book earlier and in more detail! With the feeling that I've enjoyed a really tasty success today, I'm going to be studying the book further and actually trying some of the specific recipes - not the least the daube. No wonder my previous efforts have never tasted as I know, in my gut, the dish should!

What's really British?

With British Food Fortnight now over for 2011, it seems the ideal time to consider just what British food really is.

It's fair to say that, in restaurant terms, it's probably never been better. The influence of the Roux brothers and Raymond Blanc in particular has had a massive impact - not simply in terms of record levels of Michelin stars held by establishments on this side of the Channel, but in an approach to cooking that has spread considerably beyond the upper reaches of eating out.

The ideas of seasonality and regional ingredients have become a mantra in the restaurant - and in the home.

But it is not something that has spread to every corner of Britain's food.

Nigel Slater's Eating for England is a collection of pithy essayettes on the cuisine of these islands.

Slater increasingly seems to be to food writing what Alan Bennett is to literature and the stage, with a sense of Englishness at it's most poignant as well as it's most ridiculous, and an understanding of memory and time and place that, in his case, can make you yearn less for a madeleine and more for a custard cream.

Like his volume of autobiography, Toast, much of this book is filled with a sense of nostalgia for the quirkily British foods that we remember from childhood: rice pudding to Murray Mints; the best biscuits for dunking and the sheer regional variety and creativity of the British when it comes to cakes.

But don't get too cosy, basking in the warm glow of nostalgia, because Slater peppers the book with withering comments on the other side of British food; the perennially grey stew; the stock cube that works against the taste of the meat; the high street butchers that are a dying breed because we shop online from our sofas ...

And that is where I start to feel depressed about the state of British food.

Watching Stephen Fry's latest series on language, another thing hit me. He was showing how the words we use have a cultural significance, describing national or regional attitudes.

One of his illustrations of this was a visit to the Basque region of Spain, looking at it's vocabulary and its food. All well and good.

But there's an even better example. Look at all those French phrases about the love of food: bon vivant, bon viveur, gourmand, gourmet and so on. We know these words because we have adopted them.

Try to think of an Anglo-Saxon phrase that describes the same thing - in general, let alone with the different subtleties that the words and phrases convey. We don't have the concept, so we have had to import the words and phrases wholesale.

I'm stymied. 'Foodie' is very recent and, for many, slightly deprecating - which tells its own story.

And that, to me, is the problem. These islands produce some fantastic food, yet most people ignore that and go to the supermarket.

Today, I bought some gilt head bream that was brought ashore in Cornwall only yesterday. If you found anything comparable in a supermarket, it would have been at least a day or two later, given the nature of supermarkets' centralised systems of distribution.

I grilled the fish for around five minutes a side. And served it with some carrot and broccoli. Simples. And very nice.

In the meantime, most people on these islands will probably have pulled something from the freezer, bunged it into the microwave and then sat and eaten while watching the TV.

And that, for me, is always going to be disappointing.

But in the meantime, I continue to enjoy a Yorkshire tea loaf that I tried out on Sunday. Lovely, as it happened! Moist and fruity sweet. And very, very easy.

So here, as an homage to British food, is my recipe for a Yorkshire tea loaf.

Take 500g of mixed fruit and pop it in a bowl with 230g sugar.

Just cover with hot tea (I used three tea bags of Earl Gray) – this should be around 570ml.

Leave overnight.

The next day, heat up your oven to 180˚C (fan oven).

Sift 454g self raising flour into the fruit and tea, together with two eggs. Mix well.

Then share the mixture out between two loaf tins that you've greased, lined, and greased again.

Pop in the oven for five minutes and then turn down the temperature to 140˚C (fan oven).

Leave for an hour – and then test with a skewer. If the skewer doesn't come away clean, then give the loaf another 10-15 minutes.

When the skewer comes out clean, remove the tins and leave for five minutes before lifting the loaves onto a rack and leaving to cool. Then eat with good butter.

This, I promise you, is British food at its best. And I think that Mr Slater would agree.

Summertime in the autumn

It has been a crazy few days. There we were, slipping into the autumn, with long-term weather forecasts predicting a tough, cold winter – and one that will start early in October – and what happens?

Summer pops it's face back above the parapet and we find ourselves enjoying glorious sunshine and sizzling temperatures.

Yesterday morning, with condensation dotting parked cars and a bank of mist suspended just above the grass in Haggerston Park, the towering buildings of the City beyond seemed almost spectral in the stunning light. The day warmed rapidly and even the night was muggier than any in the usually sweaty August.

There are no complaints here at this reprise of heat and light, but nonetheless, it's had me in a spin on the food front.

There I was, having accepted the departure of summer and starting to relish the bounty of the new season.

We had watched from the office window at work as a white wagtail had stopped for a rest on the nearby sedum roof; a breather on its journey to Africa - the blustery weather had even been sending migrating birds off course.

I was contemplating roasts and casseroles, mushroom heaven, baking blitzes on chilled Sunday afternoons, warming soups and even advance preparations for That Festival at the End of the Year.

And then, in what might sportingly be referred to as a curveball out of left field, our crazy weather forced all that back out of sight, leaving me foundering around with a feeling that I needed to prepare summer dishes again - but with a completely changed larder.

So just what do you eat in such confusing weather? On Saturday morning, sitting outside in the garden in shorts, with notepad and pen, I leafed through Gordon Ramsey's A Chef for All Seasons, hunting inspiration.

It is, I realised – gazing with pleasure on page after page of food porn – not really that difficult.

Ramsey is not a cook who really go in for massively heavy dishes, so even his autumn dishes, making the most of the seasonal produce, are not overwhelming. Pigeon breasts, for instance, which I've been enjoying throughout the summer, would still be perfect now.

With a list drawn up, it was off to Broadway Market.

Then it emerged that Andy was not there with his game stall, which meant a rethink. And at the top end of the street, across the road from London Fields, was a scene of chaos.

It looked like someone had taken one of those huge bins and strewn the contents everywhere. Empty bottles and cans lay all over the place, behind a wide cordon of crime scene tape and police.

It seems that the heat had been bringing people out to party for the previous three nights. In the early hours of Saturday morning, however, it had turned from a boozy street party into someone more serious, as shots were fired and a woman was caught in the crossfire. She is in hospital. It was the third shooting in the borough in a week.

Good old Hackney. However trendy the area becomes, there are still the gangs and there are still the guns; and there are still youngsters with no apparent hope or self respect beyond what they believe such things offer them.

And like August's rooters and looters, torching people's homes and wrecking small businesses only a little further away, they don't give a damn about anyone else getting caught up in their spiral of self-hating and self-destructive violence.

Depressed, I turned away and tried to concentrate on the shopping, but was distracted enough that I forgot the butter and actually had to return a short while later.

Fortunately, an afternoon spent 'watching', via the internet, as Manchester City overcame the week's tribulations by beating Blackburn Rovers 4-0 away from home, cheered me.

But what were today's culinary solutions?

First, for lunch, a salad of endive, with wafer thin red onion, a small Cox apple, blushing pink inside when it was cored and sliced, shavings of Montgomery Cheddar, cob nuts and a dressing of lemon juice, virgin oil and honey.

Full of taste and textural contrasts, and a perfect celebration of English ingredients to mark both the end of British Food Fortnight and British Cheese Week. Seasonal, yet light. It can be done.

It was inspired by a recipe but didn't follow it to the letter – the Cheddar instead of blue cheese, and no blue cheese dressing, cob nuts instead of walnuts.

And the evening presented a similar opportunity. I had been intended to do Ramsey's pan-roasted cod, served on a bed of garlic potato purée, with ceps.

But there was no cod, so I picked up some of Vicki's beautiful smoked haddock instead and did a little adjusting.

In this case, I roasted the fish in a gratin dish, dotted with plenty of butter and covered in foil, at about 155˚C for 20 minutes.

The potato was cooked, pressed through the ricer and then had butter and good double cream beaten into it.

The ceps were thinly sliced and cooked gently in a little butter, before a good squeeze of lemon was added, the pan shaken carefully and then left to heat back up.

And that was pretty much that - except instead of adding garlic to the potato, I seasoned it and the ceps with a little of the truffle salt that I'd bought in Carcassone back in July.

All in all, it was scummy. And suitably seasonal but not too heavy. And also not simply taken straight from a written recipe.

For dessert, a combination of seasonal pear – and downright unseasonable (but English!) strawberries: a match that seemed to completely exemplify the situation.

Later, as The Other Half and I sat outside in the dark, smoking, neighbours enjoyed a barbeque while watching The X Factor on a portable TV. At least not all partying in Hackney is violent.

A little bit of pork

Late on a sunny Sunday afternoon, with the oven having finally condescended to hit the proper temperature – and stay there – a piece of pork was gently laid on the rack of the roasting tray, scored fat thoroughly seasoned, and placed into 220˚C of heat.

It had been bought the previous day on Broadway Market as a rolled, boned joint. But since this was English Food à la Jane Grigson’s book, I’d cut the string that bound it, stretched it out and seasoned it all over – paying particular attention to the boned side. Then it was covered in foil on a plate and popped back into the fridge.

The meat got 20 minutes at that temperature, before it was lowered to 160˚C (or the fan oven equivalent). At just over a kilo in weight, it was due to have another hour cooking.

In the event, after spearing the joint with a skewer after that hour, and finding the juices running pink, I gave it another 15 minutes.

But for that hour, it was accompanied by two Cox apples, skin scored near the top to prevent them from bursting.

In the meantime, a peeled, quartered parsnip was also roasting away in some lard, on the basis (a bit of a guess, this) that since the temperature was on the low side, it would need longer.

Small potatoes had been peeled carefully, then boiled for 20 minutes (they’re so solid, they don’t fall apart), and were then tipped into a small gratin dish with some melted lard and roasted in an oven that had been whacked back to really hot after the meat (and apples) had been taken out to rest.

I had wondered about adding Yorkshire pudding, after The Other Half pointed out that there really is nothing that says it can only be served with beef. But I decided that the temperatures worked against me on that count – 20 minutes resting time was enough to finish the potatoes decently, but wouldn’t be enough for a pud.

In that last stage, sliced leek was sautéed and then steamed, while gravy was made in the roasting dish, with the fat poured away and flour added to the meat residues, before a brief deglaze with white wine and then a little stock.

The parsnip was overdone – my guesswork really hadn’t worked – but that was the only downside. The pork – although the rind hadn’t crackled – was delicious and moist. The leek was a perfect – if clichéd – compliment, and the roasted apples were a really pleasant change from the more usual sauce.

If I’d thought more and planned better, I’d have got some cider in for the gravy. But there you go.

That’s probably the first time I’ve done a roast dinner on successive Sundays – and by the end of it, I was dripping with sweat! This cooking malarkey probably makes you lose weight!

Let's have a bit of a harvest festival

Since we’re in the midst of British Food Fortnight, it seemed the perfect opportunity to do some serious British cooking – and also to consider just what 'British food' means in the 21st century.

Since I did roast beef just over a week ago – and what could be more British than that? – a portion of last Friday evening was given over to the question of what to cook this time around.

It was a football Saturday – and an early start – so there could be no sitting up with a coffee in the morning. The list had to be ready in advance for The Other Half to head to Broadway Market.

Jane Grigson’s English Food is, on such occasions, a fascinating read, with dishes from around the country – many of which you’ve never heard of in the first place and a substantial number of which have probably been all but forgotten.

You see the regional ingredients reflected in recipe after recipe – lamb in Cumbria, for instance, where sheep graze the hills from the rolling Lake District to the bleakness of the utterly inappropriately named Eden Valley.

British Food Fortnight was started, 10 years ago, by two vicars, who wanted to revive the tradition of the harvest festival. I've always relished the ripeness of the season, its fecundity, its sensuality and voluptuousness – and it was one of the parts of the religious year that most appealed too when I was growing up.

The fortnight itself, though, has changed since those early days and come to represent something more, but very much with a sense of the celebration of what we produce on these islands.

It was no surprise, though, to see food writer Matthew Fort tweet that supermarkets weren't supporting it or to read, in a column by Oliver Thring, that a Morrison's, sitting right next door to the orchards of Kent, is selling Chinese apples – although one suspects that even if they’d been selling apples from the garden of England, the fruit would probably have been halfway around the UK and back, such is the crackpottery of the centralised supermarket distribution system.

Living in urban areas, it’s all too easy to forget just what an agricultural heritage we have. The journey north by train is always an enjoyable reminder.

The sky above was as pale blue as my shirt on a beautiful morning. At times, the scenery could have been an almost chocolate box vision of England in the early autumn. Sheep and cattle rested in fields. Green hills rolled gently and an increasing number of the trees were wearing the signs of seasonal change.

Narrow boats dotted the landscape as the canals wound their way between the industrial conurbations, with ribbons of smoke drifting upward from slender chimneys.

There were signs of ploughing: bare soil marked with the patterns of agricultural machinery; stubble elsewhere, spiky in the morning light, like an unshaved chin. The occasional small, square church squatted amid neatly arranged gravestones.

Not that this is the only England visible from the train: there’s the manicured golf course that sits incongruously alongside a vast, belching power station, and cloned, modern rabbit-hutch homes within sight of the tracks too. Depending on the route, there is industrial dereliction: buildings with jagged, broken windows like screaming mouths, as forgotten as the productivity they once housed.

Slag heaps are slowly returning to nature. And at Watford, the journey passes by one of England’s new cathedrals, a vast shopping mall in which to worship the buying of things (except food, usually).

So what about the food?

Well, however many of the dishes from Mrs Grigson’s book might have gone out of fashion, one of the staples of British food remains abidingly popular – the banger.

Not, of course, that a love of sausages is limited to these shores. But unlike our Germanic cousins, for instance, we have managed to reduce the banger to a shadow of what it can be.

Things have improved a little since reluctant producers were dragged kicking and screaming into revealing on packets just what percentage of proper meat was in a sausage – as opposed to the delightfully euphemistic ‘meat derivatives’, which now have to be labeled as such.

But that’s not solved the whole problem.

Industrially made sausages are difficult to brown properly because the sheer scale of the production process means that the machines that make them have to be constantly cooled by water, which finds its way into the finished product along with the listed ingredients.

And that’s another big question – what’s in your mass-produced sausage?

Checking Ocado’s website, even the ingredients list for Daylesford’s ‘organic pork chipolatas’, we find: “Antioxidant: Ascorbic Acid, Citric Acid”, plus sugar and sunflower oil.

Then there’s the matter of the right balance of quality meat to fat: yes, you need proper fat and no, sunflower oil does not count.

So there’s more than one reason for buying the best butcher's sausages you can find.

Sausages can be magnificent – but all too often we seem to forget this and treat them as ‘fast food’ in the worst sense of the word; as not being seriously good food that’s worth investing a little time and care in.

So when you’re ready to cook, don’t prick them – you’ll actually lose all those valuable juices that keep the sausage moist.

Heat some fat – lard is brilliant, dripping would be perfect for beef sausages – in a heavy pan and then cook on gently on a low heat, checking frequently. This helps to prevent the skins bursting.

It can easily take 30 minutes, so don’t expect to rush.

There were pork and leek sausages in the fridge when I got back from the football – and I cooked them as described, in the Le Crueset casserole, with a sliced red onion.

On the side – simple boiled spuds and carrot, with good butter. Nothing complicated – but it really doesn’t have to be.

I did, though, have a bit of a revelation the other week, realising that potatoes bought from the organic stall on Broadway Market actually had a different, discernible taste. So too did some new potatoes from the not-quite-organic stall that I’d tried a few days before.

It’s a surprise, because – like so many other people, I suspect – I’ve accepted, over many years, a sense of potato being potato being potato and, generally speaking, just padding. Well, with the exception of Jersey Royals. But I’d certainly never been so conscious of a particular flavour in a maincrop spud.

So the next time I’m on the market, I’ll have to check just what they are.

And in the meantime, I'll contemplate further how to celebrate the joys of the British harvest season.