A visit to a sunny Perth Farmers’ Market was a joyful one for Murray Chalmers as he begins to forget about winter and lockdown.
I went to Perth and bought a chicken.
If ever the act of buying something for dinner could take on a resonance hugely out of proportion to the simple act of exchanging money for an organic bird in a farmers’ market, this was that day.
Firstly, the sun was shining, which helped immeasurably. Spring was in the air and, as such, it soon sprung to the nether regions of my step. I fair bounced out of the car, my mind suddenly open to joy and future possibilities in a way that it hasn’t been for a very long time.
While being aware that lockdown has had an incalculable effect on all our psyches – fellow solo lockdown dwellers will relate to the fact that we can often go days without seeing another person – I think it’s time to try to move forward both mentally and physically, shaking off the icy shackles of winter as if it were a favourite heavy coat.
Spring officially starts today and it’s come not a moment too soon. Winter, coupled with all the rules, restrictions and traumas in the world, has led to the feeling that the dusty pallor we’re all trying to shake off isn’t just confined to our skin-tone; it will take more than a nightly application of moisturiser to shift the deep lines of pain and sorrow accrued within our beleaguered faces over the past year, but spring feels as good a time as any to try.
Renewal
Spring is all about renewal and hope and farmers’ markets are such resolutely happy experiences that it’s just wonderful to see them opening up again, however tentatively. In truth, I counted a very healthy 45 stalls in Perth, a creditable number for the first market of an already difficult year.
One of the loveliest things was to be able to walk around and interact with the producers and stallholders, something I’ve really missed. Buying food here is just a nicer experience; I’m not a huge fan of supermarket shopping at the best of times, far preferring being able to try new things and ask questions about the produce, knowing that it’s likely the people answering will be the ones who actually produced it.
An unwritten rule of farmers’ markets is that you buy things you didn’t intend to – in fact that’s part of their function, just as the thrill of a visit to an art gallery or museum is inevitably heightened by a souvenir trawl around the gift shop afterwards. At a farmers’ market you’re swayed by the freshness and splendour of the ingredients on display and the enthusiasm of the stallholders is impetus enough to try things you’ve never tried before.
Smash and grab
Although I arrived reasonably early, everything from the Wild Hearth bakery had already gone, with only a single ciabatta loaf within grasping distance. Using a diversionary smash and grab technique I perfected at the legendary Johnstons of Elgin annual warehouse sale – so posh that it’s invitation-only, so chic that you’re given a bin bag on arrival – that loaf was soon irretrievably mine.
To accompany it I bought two cheeses from Strathearn Cheese – their own The Lady Mary, a soft cheese imbued with the flavour of wild garlic and truffle oil, and Bonnet, an excellent hard goats’ cheese from the Dunlop Dairy in Ayrshire. I also bought a very nice jelly to have with the cheese made by Hansen’s Kitchen in Comrie.
Of the three cheeses made by Strathearn, The Lady Mary actually turned out to be the least notable for me, coming third in my order of preference behind the excellent Strathearn and the Wee Comrie. But that’s no shade on what is still a good cheese, if not one entirely suited to my own personal taste.
The Lady Mary was no huge disappointment because my mission today was to try new things and the idea of wild garlic-infused cheese seemed to chime with sunshine, the start of spring and the wild garlic season. For some this creamy cheese will work brilliantly; I just feel that the wild garlic overpowers and makes it feel too much like a one-note symphony, lacking the subtlety at the heart of Strathearn’s more accomplished two cheeses.
Chocolate truffles
Wild garlic was to reappear in the unlikely form of chocolate truffles from Charlotte Flower Chocolates, from whom I also bought some delicious sea salt caramel-filled chocolate hearts.
The discovery of the wild garlic truffles was akin to that feeling when you discover a new book or record that you just can’t wait to tell your friends about. The search for the innovative is one that thankfully will never leave us but, just as that search has uncovered 2021 delights like the Cadbury’s mini egg chocolate bar, it’s also given us the execrable Gordon Ramsay’s Bank Balance on prime time TV.
The moral from this is possibly that sometimes things lie undiscovered for a reason. So – chocolate? Always! Wild garlic? For sure! Together – for me – maybe not so much.
Innovation in food is such a weird thing – one man’s triple cooked chips is another’s desperate affectation. I once tried to impress my friend David’s father with a gift I bought at great expense from a very posh deli in Tynemouth. The gift was a jar of pickled almonds and I presented it as if I had triumphantly imported culinary modernity to a great north-east population existing largely on stotties and pan haggerty.
I remember the air of expectancy that hovered as David’s dad Bob took a bite and, with the expression of a man who’d just been forced to swallow a piece of Hadrian’s Wall, looked at me with absolute pity and said in the broadest of Geordie accents: “Well, Murray, I’ve never actually had a pickled almond before and I can honestly say I wouldn’t be at all troubled if I never had another one again in my life.”
I’m afraid I probably feel the same about wild garlic and chocolate. On a happier note, everything else I’ve bought from Charlotte Flower Chocolates has been a delight.
Golden yolk
Other highlights at Perth were Nature’s Baker’s 100% plant-based cakes, Hugh Grierson’s delicious organic beef burgers (a bargain at £4.50), macarons from Chardon, and an excellent Scotch & Co soft yolk Scotch egg with mustard (again, a bargain three for £10).
This I ate while strolling in the sun past the allotments on Moncreiffe island, opposite the market. As golden yolk dribbled down my chin and a pleasantly officious lady stopped me trespassing on to the allotments, for a few beautiful minutes the horrors of the past year receded even faster than my hairline.
Returning to the market I finally thought about dinner and my thoughts turned to chicken, because I’ve always wanted to try an organic bird from Hugh Grierson.
An £18 chicken might sound extravagant – and of course it is, especially if you’re trying to feed a family while relying on universal credit and foodbanks. I was aware as I handed over £20 for this golden trophy and six eggs that my mother would put such caprice down to me living in London for 40 years and coming back here with fancy ways.
Old bra
My mother used to take her own eggs with her on holiday to Turkey. They were the cheapest, battery farmed, runts of the litter and she dutifully packed them in her hand luggage as if they were Fabergé.
They might have been the cheapest eggs she could find in Lochee, the shells barely thick enough to withstand the zap from an airport scanner, but they were her eggs and they were going to Turkey wrapped in a bubble-wrapped old bra and God help any airport official who tried to stop her.
Bacon and a frying pan also travelled without passports or much resistance.
The Grierson’s organic chicken was delicious and, as the cliché goes, it lasted me for three meals excluding the stock that I dutifully make and often throw away a week later just before my kitchen incubates new life forms.
Did this chicken taste better than a regular chicken from the supermarket – enough to justify its high price tag? It definitely did. This was an entirely different experience to eating a regular battery-farmed chicken, or even a good free-range one. Firstly, the texture of the meat was entirely different – it wasn’t at all wooly or claggy, the way that the cheapest chickens can feel in the mouth. This was meat where the flavour had been allowed to develop and the difference was pronounced.
Finest chicken
A roast using the revelatory dry roast method I first read about in Rose Prince’s the New English Table (itself adapted from a Thomas Keller recipe) meant that this was probably the finest chicken ever to come out of my oven. And for once the fact that my oven thermostat is broken worked to my advantage, as you simply whack the oven to gas mark 8 and roast for an hour. The only additions are sea salt and dried thyme; the 12 fennel seeds in the original recipe are a faff too much for me. No butter or oil is needed although faith in this deviation is needed and will be rewarded.
Followed by some excellent Italian biscotti from the brilliant Perth bakers Casella and Polegato, this was a dinner that seemed to bring the promise of better times ahead. Spring has most definitely sprung!
The next Perth Farmers’ Market is on April 3.
Hugh Grierson Organic, visit hughgrierson.co.uk or call 01738 730201
The New English Table by Rose Prince, £15.
