Market Day

Contrary to popular opinion, there is good food in England. On Thursday we partook of a great London tradition: the Borough Market.


Operating for the trade from 2 am to 8am on the weekdays, the market also opens from 11 until 5 Thursday to Saturday for those of us who love food and cooking enough to think that we could open really charming, small (and successful!) restaurants where we cook only what we like. Mind you, in our fantasy land we don't think about the money or hard work or heartbreak involved in that kind of business. We just love to cook with amazing food like this:




One of the most amazing things about London is how old everything is. This is a phrase that has always annoyed me as an historian because, after all, the whole world is old. But there is something about stepping into a place where you know others have been, and have been doing similar things, for hundreds if not thousands of years. Borough Market has been around, in one form or another and in the general vicinity of its current incarnation, since at least the 13th Century.

It didn't have the cool artwork then:


Or the 19th Century ironwork:


It didn't have Neal's Yard Dairy, with its own version of Stilton:



The fishmongers probably were not as artistic in their displays:


The retail market at Borough features something I am pretty sure is absent from the trade market: baking. In Toronto, these custard tarts (barriga de freiras, or nuns' tummies) are found throughout Little Portugal. Here, they were at a French bakery stand, along with gorgeous meringues (as big as a softball) and tiny caramelized puddings that must be the French equivalent of Timbits.




There were also these perfect flower-pot baked loaves of bread from a health-foody kind of bakery.


One thing that I am pretty sure all marketeers --mediaevel, Victorian, modern, and everything in between-- did was feed people who came by, whether to shop or for the purpose of buying lunch. Market stalls might have been the original fast food, with for example, things like savoury pies:


We trotted around the market looking for what we might have. The fishmonger had an assortment of curries including this one, an incongruous madras chicken:


There were also plenty of butchers selling portions of their wares wrapped up in a bap, a soft white roll. At one point, as we walked down a wee market alley, we passed a barber called Hobbs and smelled some delicious grilled beef and onions. Looking across, we saw a takeaway with hot sandwiches and pies, also name of Hobbs. Hmmm. Visions of Sweeney Todd dancing in our heads we moved on. Kelly went back to the fishmonger's where she murdered a green Thai seafood curry and I, well, I found the sarnie of my dreams.

Pork belly, with gorgeous crackling, and a generous smear of Bramley apple sauce.


Fear not, gentle reader, despite the sandwich I live still! We, along with half the South Bank, ate our lunches in the courtyard of Southwark Cathedral, which butts right up against the market.


One picked the fat away from the meat in one's sandwich (but not the crackling -- once cooked that crisp, it does not count as fat) and tossed it in the garbage, from which a local resident was rather adept at snatching juicy bits.


I get the feeling he does that a lot.