“Do local rules apply?”

Fine Food with

Charles Campion

Food writer and critic

• It’s time to go left field rather than safety-first
• “Fashion or for keeps?”
• “New year and new possibilities”
• “What is in a name?”
• “The art of shopping”

Year on year, our ongoing obsession with “local” foods is tested to the limit. The idea that responsible foodies should shop locally, and in tune with the seasons, is a good one, but rules are there to be broken

It’s all got very complicated, and that’s before you find out that our borders are shrinking. The climate is changing and farmers are finding they can grow many of the crops that once only came from mellow locations on the Continent.

In a recent piece I rather unwisely suggested that “when it comes to charcuterie you don’t immediately think of Shropshire,” only to receive a couple of rather cross notes from Shropshire charcutiers. The landscape of food and drink is changing. Now you can get a huge selection of decent chorizo and salamis which are not only made with high welfare pork, but British through and through. 

This year the warmer weather has coincided with some fruit farmers cashing in on a brave decision to plant more stone fruit some years ago. At Bardesly Farms, Staplehurst, Kent they have seen a bumper crop of apricots. Not nuggety little fruit but 200 tons of large, rosy-blushed, juicy apricots. This fruit farm already works with the big supermarkets and British apricots have already been sighted in Tesco. Meanwhile, other fruit farmers have also had some success growing exotica like British kiwi fruit – there’s a mixed parentage if ever there was one.

At Huggits Farm near Tenterden, Kent, they are already selling jars of British table olives under their ‘Olio of Oxney’ brand, and this year the crop is shaping up well. The key to success for this British olive grove is very careful research when deciding which varieties to plant. Now it’s a question of waiting for the trees to mature and the hope is that in years to come there will be another English oil to compete with Britain’s already successful rapeseed oil growers.

For a long while quinoa has been a bit of a puzzle – one of the main difficulties being how to pronounce the word (“keen wah” apparently). But this grain, which comes from a member of the goosefoot plant and whose true home is in the Andes, turns out to be perfectly happy guesting in East Anglia, where The British Quinoa Company has been increasing the crop year on year.

Just when you think that planting exotica in the balmy south east of England is all very well, spare a thought for food writer Christopher Trotter. Three years ago Trotter planted some vines in Fife in the hope of creating Scotland’s first commercial vineyard – Chateau Largo. Despite using early ripening grape varieties like Solaris and Siegerrebe, his first cuvee wasn’t a great success. The wine was oxidised and as he described it with remarkably honesty: “not great”. Many a French vineyard could learn from this honest appraisal.

Whether we like it or not – and generally we do like a tad more sun – climate change and all manner of other changes are upon us, and the list of what we consider to be local and “our” foods is changing fast. Dish up a platter of charcuterie with a quinoa salad dressed with British olive oil, follow it with a luscious British apricot and, if you must, a glass of Scottish wine. Quite suddenly it seems that the sky is the limit and we can now eat foreign specialities with British provenance. Let’s raise a glass to shrinking borders.