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

About Riverford (#ulink_9bbcf415-5642-5163-a0e5-4a4167005e69)

The Riverford dynasty emerged in the post-war years out of the marriage of a fantastic cook and a determined young farmer. Fifty-five years later it is still a family business, with all five of the second generation applying the values we inherited from our parents in the search for a saner way of producing, distributing and enjoying food.

The patriarch

When the recently demobbed, idealistic and pitifully inexperienced John Watson took on the Church of England tenancy of Riverford Farm in 1951, his more traditional farming neighbours confidently predicted he wouldn’t last five years. Food rationing was coming to an end and British agriculture was embarking on a new era of chemically driven intensive farming. For 25 years Riverford was at the forefront of these changes, even at one time being a demonstration farm for ICI. But by the 1970s my father was increasingly questioning the sustainability and animal welfare involved in some of the more intensive practices. By the 1980s the door was open for the next generation to take the farm in a different direction.

The matriarch

Perhaps even more significant to the shape of Riverford today was the influence of our mother, Gillian, who married John and moved to Riverford in 1952. It was her irrepressible enthusiasm for food and cooking that laid the foundations for the food businesses run by their five children today.

Their children

There was no overt pressure for us to continue in food and farming, but it was deeply instilled in us that we should do something useful with our lives, and nothing else seemed to make the grade. Over the years, those of my siblings who had gone away have drifted back to continue and broaden the farm’s activities, now into a third generation.

First Ben, complete with law degree but recognising that he would be stifled in a wig, started experimenting with curing bacon in the garage. Thirty years later he has three shops and a substantial home-delivery business supplied by his own pies and preserves, butchery and bakery.

I was the next to return, after a brief spell as a management consultant in London and New York, and was responsible for setting up the vegetable box scheme and starting the Field Kitchen. Meanwhile, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Oliver and Louise expanded the farm, developing the dairy and moving to extensive, organic production methods, complete with their own milk, yoghurt and cream business. Rachel was the last of the five to return to the farm, after a marketing career in London, and is now involved in developing the marketing of the vegetables and farm shops.

Vegetable boxes

As the vegetable business developed during the 1980s, we started looking beyond local shops. Supermarkets were just starting to stock organic produce and it was inevitable that we would eventually end up selling through them. This brought scale and forced a more professional approach, but working through such a wasteful supply chain was hugely frustrating; seeing our vegetables devalued through age, distance, excessive packaging and anonymity, while trebling in price, made me think there must be a better way. A meeting with Tim and Jan Deane, founders of the first box scheme in the UK, sowed the seed but it was the enthusiastic response of my first customers on the doorstep that really convinced me to change paths.

The first vegetable box was delivered in 1993 and since then home delivery has enabled us to break free from the clutches of the supermarkets and to relate directly to our customers. The early boxes were very basic and it soon became obvious that we would need to broaden our range and season if we were to appeal to more than a small band of hard-core local veg-heads. We put up polytunnels, experimented with new crops and eventually started trading with farmers abroad to keep the boxes interesting throughout the year. Initially my staff were sceptical. Planting and picking the small, fiddly quantities that the boxes demanded was an unwelcome complication after loading lorries with white cabbage, but the appreciative comments of customers, in contrast to a supermarket buyer’s abuse, converted everyone. Like the Field Kitchen that followed, the box scheme has been the way to make the best food accessible and affordable to all, and to share our enthusiasm for food and cooking.

Why organic?

Having made myself sick spraying corn as a teenager, and seen my brother committed to hospital with paraquat poisoning, my initial motivation for farming organically was simply a personal desire to avoid handling pesticides. At the back of my mind, there was also a hunch that it offered better long-term financial prospects than adding to the lakes and mountains of overproduction that pervaded the EU in the 1980s.

During the early years there were numerous mistakes and frustrations but I came to relish the challenge of finding my own solutions to agronomic problems rather than following the prevailing belief that the answer to every difficulty lay in a chemical container. Latterly, this has evolved into a belief that we must find a more harmonious and holistic way of living within the limits of our planet. The problems faced by food and farming now have more to do with culture than with science. Organic farming, in its broadest sense (working from the underlying principles rather than just following the minimum standards for certification), provides the best framework available for finding answers to those problems.

Co-operation

By the late 1990s we were no longer regarded as freaks by our neighbours and a few were open to the idea of organic farming. In 1997 ten (now16) local farmers joined us to form the producers’ cooperative, increasing production to keep pace with the expanding box scheme.

The future

Meanwhile, my father, John has stepped aside and has since devoted his time to searching for a more sustainable way of living and farming. Recreated in this role, he has become the guardian and critic of the environmental activities of his offspring. Perhaps it was partly this parental ethical audit that led me to decide that the booming vegetable box business based in Devon was big enough. If we were going to grow any further, it would be on a local basis in co-operation with local growers in ventures on a personal scale. Over the last few years, we have been using our knowledge to set up other regional box schemes supplied by local farmers. Today that is River Nene in Peterborough, River Swale in Yorkshire and a second Riverford in Hampshire, hopefully soon to be joined by similar ventures with local farmers in Kent and the northwest. My dream is that if these ventures stay small and work together, we will have the professionalism that will allow us to offer a real and substantial, but saner, alternative to supermarkets without becoming like them.

Farming, cooking and eating habits have changed hugely over the half a century since our father milked his first cow at Riverford. The challenge for the second generation is twofold: to reduce the environmental impact of producing food and getting it to the door, while fostering the culinary knowledge and enthusiasm needed to get it on the table. Shortening the food chain and promoting the connection between producers, cooks and their tables is the best way of restoring food to its rightful position as a central part of our culture. I hope this book goes a small way towards achieving this.

About the Field Kitchen (#ulink_0136e2cb-a669-5eca-9301-74e1bf984012)

My four siblings and I are obsessed by food. It all comes from our mother, who was a fantastic cook and, contrary to the fashion of the times, drew her inspiration from the seasonal produce grown in her garden and on the farm. Every day she served wonderful, generous lunches for the family and many of the farm staff. Looking back, I am struck by how similar the lunches we shared around a long kitchen table then are to the ones Jane serves for our guests in the Field Kitchen today. They both demonstrate a passion for simple, gutsy food, served with informal generosity, combined with an unhealthy appetite for butter and cream – but then we are principally a dairy farm.

Bolstered by occasional but erratic amateur success in the kitchen and by an unflagging enthusiasm for my vegetables, I did briefly harbour fantasies of becoming a chef whilst in my thirties. Fortunately the fantasy passed, but the seed of an idea lingered on, nourished by preparing occasional feasts at the farm for staff, customers or school groups. Meanwhile, our box scheme flourished out of an enthusiasm for sharing the farm’s produce at its best, with people who wanted to know where it came from. A farm restaurant was a logical step but it took a lunch at Alice Waters’ wonderful Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, to sow the seed.

Wanting your own restaurant is an affliction common to many middle-class, middle-aged men and has been the ruin of quite a few. Anthony Bourdain, author of the wonderful Kitchen Confidential, puts our ailment down to a pathetic lusting after waitresses. For some, perhaps. For me, it had more to do with gluttony, and frustration at all the dreadful, overpriced meals I have been served locally, combined with a blind arrogance and naive belief that it can’t be that difficult.

I was determined that we would find a way of making the kind of authentic food my mother served at those farm lunches available to a wider audience without charging the prices that, too frequently, make real food the preserve of the wealthy and childless. With a strong vision but no experience, I set about designing the building, fighting with planners, raising the cash and starting construction. But who was going to cook the food?

Chefs and their staff make up an international network, with tribal allegiances accessible only to those on the inside. Every time I met an insider, I would collar them, describe my vision and ask if they knew of a chef who might help turn it into reality.

The cook

One day the phone rang and there was Jane from Sunderland, via a string of prestigious restaurants and a Pacific atoll. After 15 years of poncy food and high-pressure urban cooking, she had slowed life down and got back to basics on a remote atoll 550km north of Samoa, where she baked bread in a stone oven, and had her son, David, along the way. Swearing that she would not go back to London, and looking for a chance to apply her skills to the best ingredients with the minimum of pretension (something all southerners are suspected of), she threw herself into making the Field Kitchen a reality. As I remember it, there was no interview; it was obvious from the outset that Jane was the perfect choice, and we just got on with talking about how we were going to make it work.

Jane has a degree in agronomy but had spent much of her time at university cooking for friends. Her break came in Cornwall, working for George Perry-Smith at the Riverside in Helford, which led to a job at the Carved Angel in Dartmouth during its heyday under Joyce Molyneux – who Jane still cites as her main influence. This was followed by a spell at the River Café in London, which gave Jane an understanding of cooking very simply with respect for top-quality ingredients. Seven years spent cooking her way around the South Pacific challenged culinary preconceptions and taught Jane to improvise with greens such as the slippery cabbage she encountered on the Solomon Islands, making anything we can throw at her seem tame in comparison.

While we were finishing building the Field Kitchen, Jane established a canteen for our staff at one end of our packing shed, then a few months later, working with the head of our local primary school, took on the contract for supplying its school dinners. Initially I was fearful that such everyday feeding of the troops would be at best boring and at worst demeaning but, true to her proclamations in favour of gutsy over poncy, Jane rose to the challenge, making these children and staff some of the best fed in the land. The Field Kitchen was opened by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall in May 2005 and was instantly a success with customers, if not necessarily with my accountant.

The restaurant

First-timers at the Field Kitchen can’t believe the quality and generosity, given the prices, which reflect our determination to make real food accessible and affordable to all. Indeed, we did lose money for the first two years while we fine-tuned our service but it looks as if we may have made a small profit in 2007. The secret, as with our box scheme, has been to banish choice, keep things simple, cut out fussy service and make the most of what is seasonally available from the farm. With Jane’s experience at the River Café and other high-end establishments, I was expecting a battle to get her interested in the humble, indigenous vegetables in our fields. I was so wrong; from the start, the ingredients around her were her inspiration, as they had been to my mother, and the menu quickly developed to reflect that week’s harvest, with new vegetables appearing on it as the season progresses.

The food is brought from Jane’s kitchen to the communal, refectory-style tables in bountiful quantities for guests to serve themselves and share with whoever is next to them. Occasionally there is some initial anxiety but the informal and communal atmosphere has a remarkably civilising influence, which eventually works its spell even on those cursed with a gluttonous resistance to sharing.

Getting excited about vegetables

Cooking with raw, unprocessed, seasonal ingredients requires time, commitment, and a range of skills lost to many of the current generation of cooks. I am a firm believer that the more you know about how, where and by whom your vegetables are grown, the greater will be your confidence, enthusiasm and willingness to spend time in the kitchen acquiring those skills. I hope that a walk around our fields, followed by Jane’s cooking, will inspire at least some of our visitors to cook, and to make more of fresh produce. The dishes we have included in this book are our favourites from the Field Kitchen and, in most cases, make best use of local ingredients. In each chapter, Jane’s recipes are preceded by information on how the vegetable is grown, when it is in season, what are the key indicators of quality, and how best to store and prepare it. Interspersed throughout the book you will find occasional rants on a diverse range of food and farming topics, which are broadly based on some of the newsletters that accompany the veg boxes each week along with a recipe from Jane.

Apples (#ulink_8c0f4fee-937b-519c-bab3-b588bd2bd5b4)

When my father took on the tenancy of Riverford after the Second World War, he was advised that the cider would pay the rent. The tenancy combined three small Church of England farms and each had its own mill for crushing the apples and press for extracting the juice. As the nation turned to beer and then wine, the orchards surrounding the farms progressively contracted, fell into ruin and were, for the most part, grubbed out in favour of more profitable crops. As children, we earned our pocket money in autumn by gathering the apples from the remaining trees for delivery to Hills Cider, the one surviving press in the parish. Orchards were made up of dozens of different local varieties, with glorious names like Pig’s Nose, Slack ma Girdle, Tommy Knight and Plympton Pippin. Most of these were ‘uck and spits’ – too bitter and high in tannin to be fit for anything but the press. After weeks of labour interspersed with apple fights, the hessian sacks were hauled to the cider works. While the apples were weighed and unloaded, musty-smelling men in leather aprons delighted in plying us with last year’s cider in the cool semi-dark of the barns, surrounded by rows of the 120-gallon wooden barrels used to mature the cider.

Today even Hills has gone. The cider works have been converted into dwellings that financed the emigration of the last of the Hills family cidermakers to Australia. There is a renaissance of cider and juice-making amongst a new breed of enthusiasts, alongside the boosting of mainstream cider brands by some clever marketing as ‘over ice’ drinks. There has even been some replanting of orchards in Somerset to meet this new demand. Growing cider apples is relatively easy because you are not constrained by specifications of size and cosmetic perfection; the odd bug and blemish all go to make up the brew. Producing dessert fruit is another matter.

The southwest of England, with its mild, damp, maritime climate, has never been a good area for table fruit; the persistent humidity makes the trees susceptible to fungal diseases that sap vigour and hence yield. The main production areas in the UK are in the southeast: Kent, Sussex, Suffolk and, to a lesser extent, Hereford and Worcester.

Even in these areas it is very difficult to produce an economically viable yield of fruit that is acceptable to a buying public whose eyes have been trained by supermarket displays of cosmetic perfection. Despite numerous attempts to develop more holistic, less intrusive approaches, even most organic growers resort to regular sprays of sulphur and sometimes copper oxychloride (allowed under organic rules) to control fungal disease. As Paul Ward, our most successful UK apple grower says, ‘It’s a flawed system, but a good bit less flawed than the non-organic one.’ Even Jeremy Saunders, perhaps our most determinedly idealistic supplier, growing on a sunny southern slope in the most favoured part of Devon and combining fruit with chickens ranging underneath, has found that he cannot make a living without regular spraying. As things stand at the moment it is either pragmatic compromise or imports, so we go with the compromise.

Despite the nation’s professed enthusiasm for heritage varieties and local food, the stark reality for most commercial producers is that if it is not nigh on perfect in appearance, it will not sell. Pile a fruit bowl with a mixture of fruit of different grades and I guarantee that, unless your household is starving, or made up of hardcore eco-warriors, any blemished specimens will be left to wither at the bottom. That is why there are so few orchards left in the UK and why the huge majority of our fruit, organic or not, is imported. Pears, being early flowering and hence susceptible to frosts, are possibly even more difficult to grow commercially in the UK than apples. Plums and damsons fare a little better but are still going the same way as apples. Our native varieties, many of which produce plums of great flavour but poor shelf life, are again being slowly forced out by the more reliable, huge plums on steroids, mainly from Spain that have a longer shelf life.

The apple varieties that combine eating quality with a reasonable degree of disease resistance and suitability to our climate are (in rough order of maturity): Discovery, Early Windsor, Red Windsor, Worcester, Falstaff, some Russets, Cox (probably the most difficult to grow), Red Pippin and Spartan. The Dutch do well with Elstar, which tastes very similar to Cox and is a good keeper but much easier to grow. The only hope of growing quality fruit without copper and sulphur (the Holy Grail for all committed top fruit producers) is through using modern varieties, and there are now some very promising ones coming from Eastern Europe (Evita and Colina), France (Cox Royal – a Cox cross) and the USA (Crimson Crisp).

Apples vary hugely in their keeping qualities. Some late-cropping varieties such as Russets will improve in store and can be kept successfully in ambient conditions until Christmas, but generally the commercial practice is to keep fruit in cold storage at 1°C and high humidity. Fruit stored beyond January will normally also have the benefit of controlled or modified atmosphere storage. This means the apples are kept in a sealed store, where the oxygen levels are reduced and CO2 levels rise as the fruit respires. The idea is to put them to sleep without killing them and, just like anaesthesia, it requires careful monitoring and control to avoid disaster. If all goes well, the reduction in the respiration rate of the fruit can double or even treble shelf life. It is even possible to hold some varieties in reasonable condition right through to the start of the next season.

Horrified at this ‘unnatural’ and prolonged storage? Don’t be Luddite; as most affluent people view a 52-week supply of crunchy apples as a prerequisite of acceptable life, and as all apples in the northern hemisphere are picked between July and October, the only alternative is shipping fruit from the southern hemisphere (normally Argentina, Chile, New Zealand and South Africa), where it is harvested in March and April. Intelligent use of controlled-atmosphere technology is far more energy efficient. It can even save energy compared to straight refrigeration because the fruit can sometimes be kept at a higher temperature. And don’t be taken in by spurious research sponsored by southern-hemisphere fruit growers; there are almost no circumstances where shipping long distance is environmentally less damaging than storage.

Storage and preparation

Ripening starts on the tree and continues at a rate determined by temperature and atmosphere (particularly concentrations of oxygen, carbon dioxide and the natural ripening agent, ethylene, which is produced by the fruit itself). The aim of storage for the producer should be to deliver fruit that reaches perfection in your fruit bowl. Once you get the fruit home there is, unfortunately, no doubt that long-stored apples will deteriorate faster and have a shorter window of perfection in your fruit bowl than freshly harvested ones. Some of the early-season varieties of apple, particularly Discovery, are at their best for only about a week. As with all fruit, smell is a good indicator of flavour and ripeness. For the main varieties, ripening is all about the conversion of starch to sugar; they get sweeter up to a point, then the texture dives and they lose moisture, becoming soft and woolly. I suspect that apples, and particularly pears, are more often than not eaten well before their optimum ripeness.

Unless your fruit is becoming overripe, or you are not planning to eat it for a week or more, it is best to keep it in a fruit bowl at room temperature; you will lose much of the flavour and virtually all the perfume if you eat it straight from the fridge. Check the smell and firmness from time to time and try to eat the apples while they are at their best.

Apple and Amaretti Tart (#ulink_340df01a-f85d-5766-8526-e6b73e44f15f)

This contribution came from Sarah Pope, who works in the kitchen. It’s lovely – which has been said about Sarah herself!