Happy (Greek) New Year!

This article first appeared on the Borough Market website as the final in a 3 part series exploring a few festivals celebrated in December, other than Christmas, and the foods associated with them. I interviewed trader Marianna Kolokotroni, who grew up in Athens, to get some local insight on the festivities.

This holiday season Marianna Kolokotroni is planning to find a boat for her shop Oliveology at Borough Market. In Greece it is traditional to decorate a boat rather than a Christmas tree “because Greeks were sailors and surrounded by sea.”

Unable to get back to Greece for Christmas, she tries to keep the Greek traditions alive at the shop, which “in a way is my home now”. In fact, one of the reasons she started Oliveology was because she had decided to stay in the UK after studying and she was keen to retain “a link between home and my roots with Greece and Greek produce.” She promotes traditional recipes on her blog and tells customers how things used to be made.

Click to read more ...

Las Posadas

This article first appeared on the Borough Market website as part of a 3 part series I am writing exploring lesser-known religious traditions in December from around the world. 

En el nombre del cielo (In the name of heaven)
os pido posada (I ask you for lodgings)
Pues no puede andar (For she can’t walk further)
mi esposa amada (my beloved wife)

So begins the call and response song between the procession of peregrinos (pilgrims) and posaderos (innkeepers) re-enacting Joseph and Mary’s journey from Nazareth to Bethlehem looking for a safe place for Mary to rest and give birth.  

Las Posadas, a festival celebrated between 16^th and 24^th December in Latino countries, commemorates this journey. It is particularly important in Mexico, where it has been celebrated for over 400 years. The 9 nights of the festival are most commonly said to represent the 9 months that Jesus was in Mary’s womb, though some say they represent a 9-night journey.

Click to read more ...

St Lucia's Day

This article is part of a 3 part series currently featuring on the Borough Market website which focuses on a few religious festivals celebrated in December, other than Christmas, and the foods associated with them. I interviewed trader Erica Fransson, who grew up in the South-East of Sweden near Kalmar, to get some local insight on the festivities.

Food is the most basic human necessity; we depend on it for our survival. Food can also build and sustain communities and identity. When we cook, taste and eat food together we create shared memories and powerful social bonds. It is hardly surprising then that food is so often used in religion as a symbol not only of the divine, but of life itself.

On St Lucia’s Day (13^th December) in Sweden, food is one of a number of material symbols used to tell the story of  Lucia, a young Christian girl who was martyred in 304. “Sankta Lucia used to go in the catacombs in Italy and give food to Christians who were hiding there,” Erica Fransson, trader at New Forest Cider, tells me. The story goes that she used to wear a wreath or crown on her head with candles to light her way and to free her hands to carry the food. 

Click to read more ...

I am what I eat: Nadia Stokes

Photo: Miles Willis

This post first appeared on the Borough Market website as part of my series, I Am What I Eat, where I explore the links between food and identity, interviewing traders about the foods that are important to them and why.

To conclude my second series I asked my commissioning editor, Claire Ford, for someone who touched on some of the other themes in the series - someone interested in sustainability and/or environmental issues, someone with ethical and moral values around food, but perhaps a meat-eater to contrast with some of the other interviewees, someone who cares about where there food comes from. I didn't expect her to find someone who covered all these bases and several more. Nadia was a joy to interview; I hope you'll enjoy reading this article, as much as I enjoyed writing it.

“I had a very close relationship with food all my life. I grew up in Cyprus in a very, very, very small village in the middle of nowhere. I think it was about 80 inhabitants to 400, 600 goats. I don’t think I realised how much it was a part of me until I came to the UK.”

Nadia Stokes, co-owner of Gourmet Goat, first came to the UK to study law in her early 20s. The way people viewed food was the “biggest culture shock” for her. “Being in the supermarket in the UK I just remember being like ‘why is everything wrapped individually’ and ‘why is everyone buying single cucumbers?’” She came to terms with this in time, but “there was still a massive hole in my life of really, really local produce”.

Click to read more ...

I am what I eat: Bill Oglethorpe

This post first appeared on the Borough Market website as part of my series, I Am What I Eat, where I explore the links between food and identity, interviewing traders about the foods that are important to them and why. In the second series I chose to speak to Bill because I knew his path into cheese-making had been an interesting one. Actually, we ended up talking a lot about food science, in particular transformations, and this instead became the focus of my article.

“I’ve always been interested in anything to do with transformation,” says Bill Oglethorpe, owner of Kappacasein Dairy. “It’s kind of magical. Like mayonnaise, the emulsification of egg yolks and oil – that’s amazing – turning something that’s oily and separated into something that’s creamy. Or béchamel or soufflé…”

Or cheese, one might add – he doesn’t say it, but it’s implicit. Bill has worked with cheese for over 20 years. He started on the shop floor at Neal’s Yard Dairy and gradually moved into affinage, the aging and maturing of cheese, arguably one of the most important transformative processes in cheese making. In 2008 he started Kappacasein Dairy, producing cheese in a railway arch in Bermondsey with milk that he collects from the Common Work Organic Farm in Kent.

Click to read more ...