How a Food Culture Grows

Some cool chefs, a loaf of bread and the new energy in Somerset food

Last Saturday I found myself on stage at Big Brue, Bruton’s new festival of ideas, with three exceptional chefs who have at least one foot in Somerset: Margot Henderson, Merlin Labron-Johnson and Tim Siadatan. We were there to talk about Somerset food culture, but roamed happily off piste: whether ingredients REALLY matter (they do), what creates magic in a restaurant (buzz, service, technical skill, warmth, welcome), whether vegetables are still undervalued (probably), how to make the perfect plate of pasta (practice, a lot), what chefs bring home from travelling and whether The Bear bears any resemblance to life in a serious kitchen.

Such different chefs, so much camaraderie. And sitting in the front row, in his trademark blue work jacket, was Fergus Henderson. (They say don’t meet your heroes, but being watched by one is a whole other thing. I digress.) I didn’t realise it at the time, but much of the conversation led back to him.

I remember very clearly the first time I walked into St John, how blisteringly different it was to any other restaurant I had ever seen. It was 1999, I had just moved to Clerkenwell and was looking for somewhere to buy my daily loaf. The bold, bald whiteness of it, almost an abbatoir, down the road from the meat market. Serious bread, sold casually from the bar, long before sourdough became something you discussed with your estate agent.

The stripped back language of the menu, the simplicity on the plate. The slippery roast bone marrow you sucked straight from the bone, tossing the oven-hot bone from greasy finger to greasy finger, or spread onto bread if you were more graceful than me. Oh, now I am thinking of their Welsh Rarebit, too; a huge slab, deeply flavoured with stout and mustard and generous with spiced, bubbling cheese.

Looking back, I realise the St John Cookbook was also the first food writing that made me laugh. ‘This is based on a very dour recipe but it is no less delicious for that’ runs the intro to the Pea and Pig’s Ear Soup. And ‘Finished off with a healthy topping of parsley, dropped in the dumper truck style’ for the Onion Soup. Reading it became a bingo moment to me, when I realised that ingredients had characters and could come alive on the page as well as in the pan. It made me want to write about food like that.

More importantly, though, St John, (and a small number of other restaurants at the same time, including the River Café) didn’t just send dishes out into the world. It sent people. Chefs left carrying bits of its DNA with them: terse menus, whole animals, deep respect for ingredients, conviviality, service that was not just lip-service and, perhaps most radically, the idea that a serious kitchen didn’t have to run on fear. Margot said at the time that they didn’t set out to change food culture, they just cooked what they wanted to eat.

Perhaps this is how food culture – any culture in fact – is made. Not by deciding to make one but by enough people doing what they believe in, well enough, that it makes other people begin to do it differently, too.

Which brings me back to Somerset. The county has deeply rooted traditions around food: particularly in dairy, cheddar and cider, and they are on the move. You can see the connections everywhere once you start looking. Charles Dowding has spent decades changing the way people think about growing vegetables and caring for the soil beneath them, influencing a new generation of growers such as Cam at Offgrid Organics. They, in turn, grow produce good enough to change the way chefs cook, believing in the vegetable enough to put it at the centre of the plate, not on the side.

Many dairy farmers here still keep their herds outside for as much of the year as they can, grazing land thick with herbal leys. The milk from herds such as those producing Holy Cow is unlike any milk you can find in a supermarket. It is rich and mild and fresh. What is good for the soil becomes good for the animals, their milk, and then, of course, the cheese. The great cheddar-making farms of the area, Montgomery and Westcombe among them, have held fast to traditional methods; smaller, newer cheesemakers such as Trethowan Brothers are making their own mark with Pitchfork Cheddar alongside, while makers such as White Lake and Buffalicious are adding goat, sheep and buffalo cheeses to the story.

New cooking projects add character, too. Horrell & Horrell cook over charcoal in their barn; restaurants and farm shops such as Teals and Castle Farm put exceptional food on the plate out of agricultural buildings. In some ways, the housemade kale kimchi, wood-oven roasted beets and salt-baked celeriacs are a giant leap from the cracked vinyl sofas of Roger Wilkins’ cider barn, where local farmers eat hunks of cheddar and pickled onions washed down with farmhouse cider. At the same time, they are only taking a small step on. The room may have changed but the instinct hasn’t.

It is impossible to know, when you are standing in the middle of these things, whether you are watching something emerge. You can only notice that people around you are doing what they believe in and doing it exceptionally well – and that other people are beginning to do things differently because of it.

Back in 1999, I was just looking for a good loaf of bread, not consciously witnessing a cultural shift. I ate bone marrow, felt excited by a bare, industrial room, laughed at a cookbook and began to think differently about food. I wonder whether, in thirty years’ time, we will look back and see the moment that a traditional food culture began to take on a new shape. The hope is that Somerset can make room for the new without tidying away the old.