Riverford Farm Cook Book: Tales from the Fields, Recipes from the Kitchen

600g purple sprouting broccoli, trimmed

1 tablespoon capers, soaked in cold water for 20 minutes, then squeezed dry and roughly chopped

4–6 anchovy fillets, chopped (optional)

6 garlic cloves, chopped

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teaspoon fennel seeds

a pinch of dried chilli flakes

1 tablespoon chopped parsley

4 tablespoons chopped black olives

sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Toss the breadcrumbs in 2 tablespoons of the olive oil and spread them out on a baking tray. Bake in an oven preheated to 200°C/Gas Mark 6 for about 5 minutes, until golden. Remove and set aside.

Break the purple sprouting broccoli into separate small heads. Warm about 2 tablespoons of the olive oil in a wide, shallow pan over a medium heat, add the broccoli and stir well. Leave to cook for about 10 minutes, until you see the edges browning slightly, then season to taste and stir gently. Add the capers, then cover and cook for about 5 minutes, until the broccoli is tender. Drizzle over the remaining olive oil and scatter with the chopped anchovies, if using, plus the garlic, fennel seeds and chilli flakes. Toss to mix in. Cook for 2 more minutes, then add the parsley and olives. Sprinkle with the toasted breadcrumbs and serve.

Purple Sprouting Broccoli with Mustard and Tarragon Hollandaise (#ulink_0b1caf20-46c6-50e6-b95e-e4992ba34c79)

We wanted to do something with purple sprouting broccoli at the Exeter Food Festival, but didn’t want to boil it at the food stall. To make things easier, we took it up there ready blanched and just griddled it to order before smothering it with this gorgeous hollandaise or with Bagna Cauda (see Bagna Cauda (#litres_trial_promo)). It also made a great breakfast with a poached egg on top before we started work.

Serves 4

400g purple sprouting broccoli, trimmed

For the mustard and tarragon hollandaise:

250g unsalted butter

3 egg yolks

juice of 1 lemon

a pinch of cayenne pepper

2 teaspoons wholegrain mustard

1 teaspoon chopped tarragon

1 teaspoon chopped chives

salt and freshly ground black pepper

To make the sauce, melt the butter slowly in a pan, then remove from the heat. Put the egg yolks, lemon juice and cayenne in a bowl set over a pan of simmering water, making sure the water doesn’t touch the base of the bowl. Using a balloon whisk, whisk until slightly thickened, then whisk in the melted butter a little at a time until it has all been incorporated. The sauce should be thick and glossy. Stir in the mustard and herbs and season with salt and pepper. The sauce will keep in a warm place for about an hour.

Cook the purple sprouting broccoli in a large pan of boiling salted water until just tender. Drain and refresh in cold water, then dry well. Heat a ridged grill pan (or a barbecue) until very hot, then place the broccoli on it. Cook, turning occasionally, until slightly charred. Arrange on a serving dish and drizzle over the hollandaise sauce.

Easy ideas for broccoli

♦ Gently cook 2 chopped garlic cloves, 1 chopped chilli, 1 crumbled dried chilli and 1 teaspoon of dried oregano in 2 tablespoons of olive oil for 2–3 minutes. Blanch romanesco or calabrese florets for 2 minutes, then drain well and toss in the flavoured oil. Sprinkle with lemon juice and serve.

♦ Roast broccoli as for Annie O’Carroll’s Calabrese on (Annie O’Carroll’s Roast Calabrese with Chilli and Soy (#ub1469df0-0430-4745-8ba7-845842f0aadb)), and then toss with 1 tablespoon of capers, a handful of pitted black olives, 2 sliced spring onions and 2 sliced roasted red peppers.

♦ Cook 2 thinly sliced garlic cloves and

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chopped red chilli in olive oil for 1 minute, then add 5–6 anchovy fillets. Remove from the heat and mash with a wooden spoon until the anchovies have almost completely disintegrated. Add 500g blanched purple sprouting broccoli, mix well and cook over a low heat for 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Makes an excellent accompaniment to grilled fish or lamb.

♦ Substitute broccoli for half the cauliflower in a cauliflower cheese – you could try some of the variations on cauliflower cheese listed in (Easy ideas for cauliflower (#litres_trial_promo)).

♦ Serve steamed purple sprouting broccoli with Bagna Cauda (see Bagna Cauda (#litres_trial_promo)).

Brussels Sprouts (#ulink_a66fd2d5-f0e1-512e-a9e3-68be9f88db84)

Without the barrage of fungicides and insecticides that protect conventionally grown Brussels sprouts from germination to harvest, our organic sprouts are never quite cosmetically perfect. However, their iconic status for the annual Christmas feast, means that we are obliged to do our best. And though yields are low, these slowly grown organic sprouts do tend to taste better, rewarding the additional effort often needed at the sink to take off the dodgy outer leaves.

Seeds are sown under glass in March for planting out in May. Sprouts are heavy feeders, so a deep and fertile soil with plenty of muck is needed to give a good crop. Today the huge majority of the UK crop is grown on the deep, fertile soils of the Fens. As the crop matures, the lower leaves senesce and drop off, leaving a plant a bit like a palm tree, with just a crown of leaves at the top. The sprouts are born like mini cabbages in a dense, DNA-style double helix up the stem, one developing from each bud above each fallen leaf. As the spreading crowns join across the rows, a dense canopy is formed which traps the humidity, providing a protected breeding ground for the slugs, aphids and fungal diseases that plague the crop.

With traditional, open-pollinated varieties, the sprouts mature from the bottom up and could be picked from September right through the winter. Modern hybrids are bred for vigour and to develop sprouts synchronously and uniformly right up the stem, thus facilitating machine harvesting. As Christmas approaches, the sprout harvesters rumble across the Fens day and night with a team of workers grabbing the stalks as they are cut and feeding them into the greedy machine that strips off the sprouts and spits out the chopped leaves and stalks while delivering the perfect sprouts to a hopper.

Oh, how I envy them. Most of our sprouts are grown and picked by hand by our co-op member, Anthony Coker. He spends the summer picking courgettes and the winter picking sprouts before dispatching 400 turkeys and moving on to lambing his sheep. He used to shear sheep for a living, so he must have a very strong back, which is just as well because picking and selecting by hand to get reasonable quality is back-breaking work.

Sprouts keep well on the stalk and, provided the crop is reasonably free of disease and aphids, we will cut the whole stalk for the boxes during Christmas week. I would like everyone to know that I started doing this back in the 1980s, a full decade before any Johnny-come-lately supermarket got in on the act.

Storage and preparation

The stalks will keep for 2 or 3 weeks in a cool outside vegetable rack or in the fridge. Once the sprouts are picked off the stalk, their life is reduced to a week or so.

Peeling the outer leaves off a sprout is a tedious task but most people only do it once a year. I’m not sure if cutting a cross in the stem is worth it; it can make the sprouts go mushy. My approach is to do it to just the larger sprouts to speed up their cooking, so they are all ready at once. They take anything from 5–10 minutes to boil, according to size – try to catch them before they go soggy.

Think of sprouts as mini cabbages, so anything that goes well with cabbage tends to be a good accompaniment – caraway, bacon, nuts. And they make a good alternative to cabbage in bubble and squeak – or try Jane’s Bubble and Squeak Soup on Bubble and Squeak Soup (#u298c70b0-5062-4ee0-b1df-7a02ade5d3fb).

Sprout tops

Before the days of hybrid varieties, it used to be traditional to harvest the apical bud (or growing point) of the plant in late autumn and eat it as a small cabbage. This has the effect of stopping the plant generating new sprouts and thus helps persuade it to put energy into filling the small buds higher up the stalk. An alternative approach if there was no market for the tops was to walk down between the rows with a mallet in each hand a few weeks before harvest, giving the heads a good thwack. Sprout tops can be excessively bitter and are best boiled – not a vegetable for the fainthearted. Check for colonies of mealy aphids lurking in the centre before cooking.

Bubble and Squeak Soup with Wensleydale Cheese (#ulink_920071a6-1dde-5e71-9535-9445f2638f17)

Jane got the idea for this smooth soup from Gary Rhodes. If you prefer it to be more rustic, just take out a cupful and blend it, then stir it back in to bring it all together. The smooth version is also very good finished with truffle oil instead of cheese.

Serves 6