Billingsgate Market: London's freshest

o say that I am crap in the morning is to say nothing. All too oft, it takes about two hours for a huge mug of coffee, a handful of Chinese herbal pills, a round of Kundalini breathing exercises, an invigorating contrast shower and upbeat music throughout the commute to yank me out of lethargy into some semblance of functioning humanity.

It sure takes a promise of something really special to get me up at 3AM and drag my vehemently uncooperative body across dark and cold London. This time it was the perspective of a sightseeing session that worked the miracle. My group mate Tom used to work for an Italian restaurant and Billingsgate Market is where they used to buy fresh pesci spada and gambas and he promised us a tour. Nice.

Being the wholesale fish and seafood market of the capital of the country that has only recently started shedding its ichthyophobia, Billingsgate is sure not Tokyo's Tsukiji Market. A lot of the produce that will later be featured on the menus as "fresh catch of the day" is in fact hauled in refrigerator trucks. Well, how else then would you ship anything fresh from the tropical expanses of the Indian Ocean to a cloudy island in the North Sea?

At any rate, the choice is incomparably larger than the pathetic hike and pollock of my childhood's fish shops. The high turnover makes sure that the gifts of the sea are affordable to the gluttonous masses in the Big Smoke.

Speaking of prices, they are not that much lower than at my Brixton Market fishmongers, so a couple of quid difference is definitely not worth the tribulations of an hour-and-half night bus trip.

A lot can be said by the food cooked in the market. Grilled seafood in Barcelona's La Boqueria Market was superlative. The only ocean-derived item we found in Billingsgate Market's café was this grilled scallop bagel with bacon and cheese. It tasted just the way it looked.

Les cadeaux de Brixton: why I live here

is again the time of the year when I get all sentimental about les cadeaux de l'automne, the gifts of the autumn. I love the generous maturity of this season, the contrast of warm colours and cold air, the earthy smells of fallen leaves and seasonal produce. Last year, I went to the market and, at the spur of the moment, bought two bags of autumnal produce: a pumpkin, parsnips, root celery, chestnuts, Brussels sprouts,

This year I choose to rejoice in the grand affordability of Brixton. The whole display on the picture:

• 6 bell peppers,
• 8 vine tomatoes,
  
• 3 ears of sweet corn,
• 3 bunches of spinach
  
• and a huge bunch of fresh mint
  

only cost me 6 pounds 59 pence!

And luxury for all: Marks & Spencer venison sausages

have had more venison sausages since I moved to London in 2008 than in my entire life. First I saw them at the enlightened Slow Food Festival on the Southbank: aimed at the kind of crowd that regularly hangs out at the Royal Festival Hall, with prices to match. Now the commoditification of luxury products has brought game meat to the shelves of Marks & Spencer. Mind you, marked down! Four quid fifty for two boxes, 12 venison sausages. Is the right spelling surely not Marx and Spencer? Granted, working classes don't shop at Marks and Sparks but wealth-trickling needs to starts somewhere. Now it is down to persuading the masses to stop buying the similarly priced frozen toilet-paper-and-emulsifiers Cumberland sausages and switch to game, Argentine red and silver cutlery. Next logical step perhaps would be licensing the denizens of Woolwich for fox-hunt.

Serving suggestion: grilled, with garden salad and finocchio alla griglia. If you have the patience, sauté chopped shallots in the sausage juices, add a few juniper berries and red wine, simmer until alcohol evaporates.

Shrimp paste: kapi, belacan, terasi

hatever people can make out of what Nature gives us! Kapi shrimp paste represents a totally different approach to using seafood than crevettes mayonnaise. Here, weeny shrimp that otherwise would be too small to consume is fermented into a condiment. It has a solid homogeneous consistency and intense flavour.

It took me a while to get used to it. For someone brought up halfway between Moscow and Alaska, the heady smell of sun-rotten shrimp ground into paste was just too overpowering.

Time heals everything, even aversion to exotic condiments. These days I add a wee dram even to some dishes that are not supposed to contain it, like Korean jaeyook bokkeum. It works amazingly good.

I call this shrimp paste by its Thai name kapi because I first encountered it in Thailand. It is called the same way in Laotian and Khmer but its native range actually spans from Southern China to Indonesia. In Malaysia it is called belacan, in Indonesia - terasi. They make an intensely fragrant sauce out of it, sambal belacan or sambal terasi that tastes amazing with squid (sambal cumi-cumi). The same thing is called nam phrik kapi (น้ำพริกกะปิ) in Thailand and used as a dip.


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Thai language school and translation agency in Bangkok, Thailand offering Thai, Chinese, English, Japanese, Russian and Laotian (Lao, Isarn, Isaan) language courses.

Kikurage: the mushroom of many names (キクラゲ, 黑木耳)

nown in the past as Jew's ear, these days it is safer to call it kikurage (キクラゲ) by its Japanese name. Its alternative name, jelly ear, is not very widely recognised, while the Latin name, Auricularia auricula-judae, is too cumbersome. The Chinese name hei mu er (黑木耳) will hardly ever catch on, will it?

Once I had to ask Floyd to buy it for me in a Chinese shop. None of the names seemed to work although hei mu er proved outside Floyd's linguistic abilities. Finally, he gave up on seeking help from the shop's people and, after quite an effort, managed to locate it himself. The bag said "Black Fungus".

Kikurage is sold dry in most Asian stores. It expands a lot when soaked in water (takes about 30 minutes). The pictures below is the same mushroom as above before soaking! It has a faint earthy flavour and gently crunchy, agaric texture for which it is mostly prized. I don't know what kind of coincidence it is, but kikurage is only popular in the traditionally Confucian countries - Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan and Vietnam. It is not particularly click with the rest of Asia.

In traditional Chinese medicine hei mu er is believed to possess anti-thrombosis properties, that is, it de-clogs your arteries and veins. By extension, it is believed to promote longevity. Polysaccharides that it contains have a tumour-preventive effect.

I use it in a variety of dishes: from sashimi (it is one of the few mushrooms you can eat raw) to noodles and sweet-and-sour chicken. It does not need much cooking and can be added just a couple of minutes before the dish is ready.

Mandioquinha: a root veg from Brazil

s it always go with me, an innocent trip to buy some sesame seeds ended up with me walking away with 4 bags of foodstuffs. Such is Brixton Market, a serendipity outlet where you never know what you are in for.

This time my lucky find was Brazilian mandioquinha (aka arracacha in Spanish). It is a root vegetable indigenous to South America. Its taste is a cross between parsnip and chestnut.

I fixed it in the authentic Brazilian way: boiled and mashed, with fried spinach and bife de tira, baby beef steak. No condiments but salt and pepper not to mess with natural flavourful goodness!

The spinach they sell at the market is more robust and has a stronger, faintly bitterish taste than what you get in supermarkets.

It's happened: I am a shoyu whore

oday I committed adultery. All my adult life I was a Kikkoman man. Kikkoman is one of world's most popular and definitely best marketed brand of shoyu, the Japanese soya sauce. You will hardly ever see me declaring my allegiance to brands but in this case I am not ashamed. Kikkoman delivers a superbly manufactured condiment. Its shoyu can be compared to a wine, as it is brewed and contains 0.5% alcohol. You can smell an unmistakeable whiff of alcohol from a freshly opened bottle. (The first character in the Japanese word shoyu (醤) signifies that it is a kind of alcohol.)

But today I went astray. I saw a Yamasa brand shoyu in Wine and Rice Shop on Brewer Street at almost half the price. The shop assistant kindly explained that in fact Yamasa brand has a better pedigree (由緒正しい) as it was established in 1645 as opposed to Kikkoman's 1917. A longer noble line at half the price, how could I resist that?

Yamasa's shoyu turned out to be good quality with a bit drier taste and less heady aroma. I am not sure that I will keep buying it because I think I do miss Kikkoman's delightfully rankish flavour.

Kam-jam: eat like an elf! (金針)

ating flowers seems like an elves' and fairies' pastime. However, there are millions of regular humans in East Asia who do that at least once in a while. Well, the Chinese do not sustain on petals and pollen, but on occasion do consume dried daylily (or tiger lily) buds (金針).

They go by kam-jam or golden needles in Chinese grocery stores but I really like their French name: fleurs de lys séchés. I imagine French royalists (all 14 of them) cringing when somebody boils their totem flower with sea brim and ginger.

They - dried daylilies, but, perhaps,French royalists too - need to be reconstituted in cold water before consumption. Normally half an hour is enough. The water comes out sour-ish and not very pleasantly tasting so I just dump it. The buds themselves taste quite like asparagus without its characteristic funk. I use kam-jam in mapo-tofu, seafood noodles and mushroom noodles. There is also a delicious fish soup recipe where daylily buds feature prominently.

They can be consumed fresh too. My Mom picks them just before they blossom out and stuffs them with something reminiscent of a very light celery-flavoured chicken salad. I will publish recipe once I talk her into divulging it.

Chayote squash: a.k.a. cristophene

epending on which shop you buy it at Brixton market, it is called chayote, chow chow or cristophene. Apocryphally, it goes by "old people's lips" on the Stateside. If you look at the picture you will see where they are coming from.

Chayote is uniquely crunchy, juicy and starchy. Its texture and taste are a cross between squash and guava. It can be used like either.

I find it quite pleasant raw with the sugar and chili powder pepper, just like they have unripe guava in Thailand.

So far I have tried it in its squash emploi in Ghanaian abenkwan and will report on my further findings.

Ode to Brixton Market

allelujah, the vicious plans to pull down this exciting fount of exotic foods and erect yet another Faceless Temple of Bland Edibles and Mindless Consumerism have come to none! Brixton Market is here to stay.

Tesco's 2-pound Curry Pack and Starbucks' Cardamom-and-Chili Soy Milk Crappuccino aficionados will have to go elsewhere and leave us alone to enjoy the colourful cornucopia of African, South American, Indian, Chinese, Caribbean and Middle Eastern groceries.

Brixton Market keeps us from the sad fate of having to sustain on Tesco and the ilk's substandard fodder. Where else can you buy in one place

• Columbian sausage,
• Thai durian,
  
• Nigerian fufu,
  
• Jamaican locust fruit,
• Turkish bulgur,
  
• Panamanian chayote,
  
• Chinese daylily buds,
• Brazilian mandioquinha and
• Ghanaian garden eggs

and at a price anyone can afford?

Shopping for rice in London

ormal folks do their grocery shopping because they have to. Foodies, like yours truly, because they love to. I can spend hours ferreting out right ingredients in fresh markets and grocery stores.

The simple task of buying rice took me to four shops around Brixton Market. In each I interviewed the people about which rice they think is the best value. I was given a bewildering range of opinions about tens of different sorts and types. Indians and Pakistanis all claimed their Old Country's rice is the best.

Finally, I consulted a disinterested part, a Lebanese. I followed his advice and bought Indian Daawat basmati rice. It is more expensive than average but totally worth the extra money spent. It has long grains, faint vanilla flavour and when cooked stays fluffy, the texture the Japanese call tsubu-tsubu.

I haven't yet bought a rice-cooker but I have managed to cook rice in a pan on an electric range even with the golden brown crust at the bottom, so priced by the Iranians and Japanese!

Turkish sweets (Türk tatlılar)

he other day I was in Shepherd's Bush and happened upon an Afghani grocer. The owners have lived in Moscow in the mid-90s so we had a nice chat in Russian. They had all kinds of amazing stuff among which I recognised a familiar sight.

The translucent ones are chewy and called lokum. The speckled white blob is full of spices and called macun. They all are very sweet and taste great with black coffee.

Grilled Moroccan merguez (مرقاز) and couscous aux legumes

erguez is a harissa-flavoured Moroccan lamb sausage. In Amsterdam they are sold in the ubiquitous Moroccan butcher shops. To find one in London you need to go to Goldborne Road in North Kensington.

Lean and spicy, merguez does not need any additional seasoning. It tastes best grilled. Mind and do not overcook, it should stay pink and juicy inside.

The best accompaniment for merguez is couscous aux legumes, couscous with vegetables. You can go for the traditional Moroccan way of steaming it for hours on end in special earthenware, or do as I do and fix it in under 10 minutes with comparable results.

1. Peel and slice a few cloves of garlic.
2. Heat a thick-bottomed pot and add a nice glub of olive oil. When the oil is hot add the sliced garlic.
3. Fry garlic until golden yellow and add chopped mint and coriander, a small bunch each. If you can't get hold of fresh herbs use dry ones. Allow the flavours to diffuse into the oil.
   
4. Add any robust vegetables cut into bite-size chunks. I try to use one of each colour, for example, carrots, string beans and cauliflower. Tomatoes won't do because they are too gentle and I find that broccoli is too smelly and clashes with couscous. Quickly stir-fry for a couple of minutes.
5. Add one cup of water and wait until it boils.
6. Add 2 cups of couscous and stir well. You can use more couscous and water but the proportion must be the same to ensure that couscous comes out fluffy and not soggy.
7. Reduce the heat to minimum and leave to steam for a 15-20 minutes.
8. Serve with slowly roasted sultanas and pine nuts.
   

Sometimes I top merguez with tomato velouté flavoured with something simple and honest.

1. Fry a few cloves of garlic, peeled and sliced, in a glub of olive oil until golden brown. Add any spice or herb you want at this stage, like smoked paprika powder or finely chopped coriander
   
2. Add half a tablespoonful of corn starch and make sure it dissolves chunkless into the oil. Fry a short while.
   
3. Add a tin of pizza tomatoes and reduce the heat. Stir well and allow to simmer for 10-15 minutes.
   

Chopped fresh coriander and sweet red onions give the whole dish a herby and crunchy zest.

Full-bodied Cahors comes from the Southwest of France. Russian Orthodox Church considers it to be the only type of wine good enough to represent Christ's blood in the Holy Eucharist. It is delightfully robust and goes gloriously with spicy merguez.

Thai durian does not smell!

he king of fruit, durian (ทุเรียน), is my favourite ever. Thanks to globalisation now you can buy it in many ethnic groceries even in the West. In Amsterdam it's to be found in Chinatown, in London - at Brixton Market.

It's got a bad rep because of its alleged pungent odour but that is so not true. The real culprit is the cheaper yellow-fleshed variety common in Malaysia in Indonesia. In Thailand it is known as Chani and generally looked down upon. It smells indeed rank and does not taste as good as the superior type, the more expensive Mong Thong, the Golden Pillow.

Its creamy flesh reminds of fruity custard but, really, is just incomparable to anything else. It is delightfully sweet but the Thais can't seem to have enough, they eat it with sweetened sticky rice boiled in coconut milk!

Recently I have seen writings by gormless individuals trying to bust the "myth" that combining durian with alcohol is dangerous. Whatever your "research" may say, I myself have had a near-death experience when I gulped down a can of beer half an hour after gorging on a durian. That was one of the most unpleasant physical experiences. Despite it was 30 degrees in the street, I was covered in sticky cold sweat. I felt sudden weakness like I was about to faint and there was nothing to do about it because both the fruit and alcohol had already been in the system. Creepy. So NEVER mix alcohol and durian!

Venison sausages with juniper sauce

cooked the venison sausages I bought at the Southwark Slow Food Festival the best way I know how: with juniper sauce. It is a variation of the classic bourguignonne for game dishes. Juniper berries give that foresty, coniferous fragrance that goes well with the powerful flavour of venison, boar or pheasant. Potatoes boiled in jackets are there just to soak in the juices and aid the enjoyment of two major flavours.

Jamaican cerassie/corilla herbal tea

Regular tea or coffee after 3PM gives me insomnia for the next night. That is why I am very big on herbal teas and infusions.

In Russia, herbal teas are a part of daily life. Mint, linden blossoms, rose hip, nettles, St. John's wort and willowherb are both commonly self-administered for medicinal purposes and enjoyed just for their flavour.

I get excited every time I discover a new type of caffeine-free beverage. This time I stumbled upon Jamaican cerassie or corilla at Brixton Market. The tea comes out rather bitter but it is purported to cleanse blood and purge pimples. But for those alleged properties I don't see why anyone would drink this willingly.

Thank God for globalisation and mass migration: ethnic groceries in London

"Sesame oil, almonds in slices,
Dried lotus leaves and Indian spices,
Bunches of French herbs tied up with strings
Those are a few of my favourite things."

This is the kind of sight that makes my head spin from excitement: stacks and rows exotic foodstuffs whose names and uses I don't know. I can spend days exploring stores like this.

More stuff to make me fall over myself: exotic recipes from Brixton Market.

Southbank Slow Food Festival & venison sausages

Yesterday I attended Southbank Slow Food Festival which is essentially 2 rows of tents selling organic and exotic foods: from Portuguese jams and Kentish apple juice to organic ham and pheasant supremes.

All nice stuff but a tad on the pricier side, although still cheaper and actually more interesting than Waitrose. I bought myself 6 venison sausages for 5 quid - quite a bargain actually, as you normally fork out more for chopped pig offals stuffed in plastic. The grilled bit I tasted at the stall was superbly palatable: juicy and flavourful with just two basic tastes of venison and pepper in a perfect combination.

The producer - Manor Farm Game - has a very extensive range of yummies such as duck and orange burgers or pheasant, calvados and garden vegetables pies. I will give those a try next time.