An appetite for provenance

So, what does ‘traditional’ mean in this context? Broadly, it is the way our antecedents did things, before technological innovation and global supply chains. “My approach is to preserve maternal stories, recipes and techniques,” says chef Ravinder Bhogal of Jikoni in London. “I learnt to cook by intuition, and that’s how I’ve always trained my team.” Key to this is a reversion to the natural rhythms of the food cycle, or the seasonal calendar – this means a lot of squash through the autumn and no green beans until June – and avoiding imported produce wherever possible. Bhogal, for example, makes traditional achars (south Asian pickles), but instead of using the mangoes her “foremothers” would have used in India, she puts British seasonal staples such as carrots and Bramley apples to work. She also avoids unnecessary gadgetry; instead of “fancy smoking guns” she lights a coal, leaves it to smoulder, then adds it to a metal receptacle with ghee. This is then added to flavour things like yoghurt, dhal and biryani.

A big part of all this is using ingredients in their entirety rather than just, say, the prime cuts of meat. “We use the whole animal,” says Simon Spence of Worton Kitchen Garden, a farm-to-table restaurant on a smallholding in Oxfordshire. “We sent four Middle Whites to slaughter a few weeks ago, so we have a lot of pork on at the moment. I’m salting the ears ready to be crisped up for a salad, we had the trotters Szechuan-style for Chinese New Year, we’ll make scratchings, confit offal pâtés, a brawn from the head meat, then ribs and sausages.” This is reminiscent of St John, where Fergus Henderson coined the phrase ‘nose-to-tail’ cooking some 30 years ago. Countless restaurants have since followed suit, and in February St John popped up at Walpole member Fortnum & Mason’s FIELD restaurant, a clear sign that the likes of roast bone marrow are hitting the luxury market in a big way.

When Joké Bakare opened her modern West African restaurant, Chishuru, in London’s Fitzrovia, she started buying whole cull goats and, with her team, learnt how to butcher them in-house. “Now we cut each carcass down into cuts you wouldn’t get from a butcher, like bavette of goat. We use every bit that we can. It honours the animal and is a sustainable way of eating, but it also makes us more creative in our cooking.” Cull (ex-dairy) goats would simply have been culled and not eaten in the past, but Bakare says they have “fantastic mature fat marbling” – so why waste them?

McMaster agrees with Bakare that, as with many creative endeavours, limitation breeds opportunity and new frontiers of flavour. Using up ‘waste’ products is intrinsic to what he does at Silo, the world’s first zero-waste restaurant – and fermentation is key to this, offering ingredients a second life, and a delicious one, too. “We’re unlocking the potential of something that was invented before Christ,” says McMaster of the koji, miso and garums he makes. Rick Toogood of Padstow gem Prawn on the Lawn also makes garum – a fermented fish sauce traditionally made from anchovies in Ancient Rome, but which involves a fermentation process most often used in modern Japan. He explains: “We strip the bones of anchovies, sardines and herrings, salting them for use in other dishes, then blend the heads and bones to a paste, combine this with 18 per cent of salt and leave it in a Kilner jar for six months. We use the resulting filtered liquid to dress things like razor clams, along with lime juice, sesame and Korean mint.”

Both McMaster and David Taylor of Grace & Savour, the restaurant at Hampton Manor hotel in Warwickshire, upcycles the woody ends of mushrooms, buttermilk (a waste product in butter churning) and stale bread into garum and miso respectively, using koji – a strain of fungus grown on cooked rice – to convert them. “With these methods, you can turn something fresh into something that’s stable for a long time, nutritionally advanced and full of rich umami flavour – what an opportunity for chefs,” says McMaster.

Flavour is paramount here. If you simply cook with the ingredients that the season makes available, and preserve anything you want to last longer – as Spence does with his mirabelle plums, pickling the fruit and making drinking vinegar from their blossom – the results will actually taste more vibrant. “It all comes back to produce,” says Johnnie Crowe, Executive Head Chef of St. Barts in London’s Clerkenwell, observing that good ingredients – organically grown or reared and which haven’t travelled far – need only a light touch in the kitchen to taste wonderful. “If chefs put their emphasis on sourcing ingredients produced by good farming practices, they don’t need to do much to it once it’s through the door.” Consciously sourced produce lessens the need for swanky kit, too. As Hugo Worsley, a chef turned knife-maker at All Day Goods, tells me, we all want less but better stuff, and we don’t need much more than good ingredients and an excellent knife to make a stellar meal.

Where does the appetite for all this come from? All agree that customers are hungry for, and inspired by, it; they like to know the provenance of their food as a mark of quality. I ask McMaster if he finds it tedious to have an approach that’s so ancient referred to as a ‘trend’. No, he says, it’s a positive, a reflection of how large numbers of people are finding meaning in eating more thoughtfully. Recently, he appointed Silo’s Head of Fermentation, Ryan Walker. “We always need people who are open-minded and malleable to push us forward,” says McMaster. “We’re touching so many industries – politics, philosophy, chemistry, education, cooking, media. Food is not ‘just’ food anymore.” Traditional some of his methods may be, but McMaster is of the culinary vanguard. And they’re just getting started.

Lead image: Worton Kitchen Garden