SAVOUR & SIP
daily breakfast, have a think about all the hard work, passion and dedication that’s gone into producing that food and drink.” This month, you can visit the superb display organised by the National Farmers’ Union at Ely Cathedral to get a real flavour of the bounty of our local countryside. Peterborough Cathedral, meanwhile, hosts the National Harvest Service, an event set up by Love British Food that moves around the British Isles. It is where the Harvest Torch sculpture will arrive – this is the farming community’s answer to the Olympic Torch and depicts the harvest’s natural bounty. We are incredibly lucky in East Anglia to be able to celebrate such a wide variety of autumn produce. There’s just so much to choose between – fruits such as apple, damson, pear, plum, quince, fig and tomato; vegetables like spinach, cucumber, cabbage, kale; together with onion, broccoli, beans, pepper, aubergine, marrow, sweetcorn, leek, courgette, marrow and squash. All of this and more makes up the seasonal fresh food harvest. Well-known local producer Calixta Killander of Flourish has a farm shop based between Hildersham and Linton. She also supplies many national and local restaurants. Her ecological farming practices produce the most wonderful vegetables, fruit, herbs and cut flowers. Many of the crops grown are rare varieties from across the world. “Given the kind of farming we do here at Flourish Produce, we harvest every week of the year, so our relationship with a typical harvest might be different to that of other farmers,” notes Calixta. “Harvesting is a time to celebrate the abundance that we have been working for, but it’s also a challenging time due to the ever-changing variables, including extreme weather and very long days!”
FEAST FOR THE SENSES Local produce in late September is a riot of colours, scents and flavours
centuries-old Nottingham Goose Fair. It is now a rather expensive bird, eaten more often at Christmas or Easter. I have found relatively few historic dishes to celebrate the end of the harvest. The most interesting is fidget pie – a deep, rustic, farmer’s pastry pie of roasted apples, sliced potatoes, onion and gammon, made with a cider stock. For dessert, it was traditional to have harvest pudding, a raisin-and-lemon-flavoured steamed suet pudding. Another variant was to make it as a bread pudding with apples. However, I would rather try a more flavoursome candied-peel-and-currant-based Suffolk harvest loaf – sadly, I have found no Cambridge variant. To demonstrate my own love of food history, the produce of East Anglia and my role as a Love British Food ambassador, I have set myself the task of creating a traditional harvest bread in the shape of a wheat sheaf, complete with a little bread mouse with currant eyes. I will not, however, allow the mouse to be eaten!
Another local champion of seasonal food is Duncan Catchpole from the zero- waste Cambridge Organic Food Company. A trailblazer of the movement, he was one of the earliest to support and re-adopt the organic approach approximately 25 years ago. He is also a founding member of Cambridge Sustainable Food. Cambridge Organic currently delivers locally grown organic fruit and veg boxes to more than 1,000 local households every week. Other events, such as apple days, support local growers and the diversity of local varieties, but it is also interesting to consider forgotten feasts. Perhaps these should also include the feast of Michaelmas, which commemorates the Archangel Michael’s defeat of Satan as described in the Bible. Celebrated on 29 September each year, the custom was to mark the occasion with a roasted goose, fattened on the stubble of the harvest field. They had to waddle, with feet covered in protective tar and sand, from Cambridgeshire or Norfolk to the
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