Wanting an early start (so that we could move gluttonously on to Cafe East), we tooted off from Oxford at the skull-rattling hour of 9am on a Saturday. This meant leaving a bit earlier, and stopping off at McDonalds first. I'm ashamed to say that despite knowing better, the refrain of "It's going to be a... lovely day! repeat x3, McDonalds for breakfast it's going to be a... loveeeelly daaaaay!" still haunts me from my childhood. Positive association is a terrible thing.
A sausage and egg McMuffin and hashbrown later, both A and I were regretting the G&Ts we'd had the evening before, and the grease+salt we'd recently consumed to keep the G&Ts company.
So tempting before you see it, but so nasty when you do. Truly the work of the Devil?
Yes kids, the nutritional guide says that this is 7% of your daily calorie intake. The rest of the nutritional information is in helpfully indecipherable hieroglyphs, to avoid scaring you with those nasty nasty health considerations.
A short train ride and very efficient tube hop later, and we were in Notting Hill and at the start of the winding market. Nowhere will I mention the movie Notting Hill, nor Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts. Oh, damn. Well, anyway, we weren't sightseeing; we weren't tourists; we were there for the antiques and hopefully a spot of good eats.
20 paces in, a man passes with a meat pie. Fighting off the McMuffin insurgents who were making another spirited bid for freedom, I knew that it would be foolish to assauge my pie-lust. Foolish, but tasty. Nowhere in this heathen country have I yet found a decent fluffy pastry-encrusted mess of deliciousness, and I am always on the lookout, always ready, ever vigilent of what might turn out to be the One.
To give a little perspective: I grew up eating pies. I was a pie eater. We are a nation of pie eaters. My primary school sold lunches of pies (4 kinds - mince and cheese, potato top, steak, steak and cheese), battered sausages on a stick (which is what we call hotdogs), and apple turnovers. Deep fried goodness. I'm sure food in NZ schools has become more nutritious, but luckily heart-stopping pies are still available everywhere. On every street corner there is a purveyor of baked-goods filled with cream, and golden orbs of pastry perfection. There's nothing like looking forward to a piping hot mince and cheese pie, the crust perfectly fluffy and oh-so-crisp - shattering beautifully as you bite, without flaking into dust - and hitting that last layer of pastry resting soggily on that beautiful savoury filling: no other food compares. The pastry having absorbed all the flavours of savoury mince, which flows like magma into your childishly expectant gob, that moment of burning when you realise that magma is quite an apt comparison, and you wish that you hadn't been so greedy after all. But you take another mouthful anyway. Having been deprived for half a decade now, the next time I bite into one of Mr Bun's pies, I will, undoubtedly, lose several layers of skin. But I look forward to it.
Anyway, we soon found the origin of the disc of joy - Humble Pie.
With a stunning array of culinary creations, they seemed to be at the gourmet end of the spectrum, with an eclectic menu offering up "Lamb in Shiraz", "Chicken, Avocado and Brie", "Chicken with Mango", and "Humble English Breakfast". Humble Pie aims to be posh-nosh in pastry, rather than what I was really looking for.
However, two items caught my eye: Aussie Minced Beef, and Chunky Steak Pie. To order something labeled Aussie would be a travesty, so I voted with my dollar (or £3.50 in this case) and was soon the proud owner of a Chunky Steak pie. Actually, for £4.50 I got the pie with a drink of my choice, which in this case was A's choice of organic pressed pomegranate and apple, which was very nice and well worth the £1 extra.
The pie was disappointing. I choked back bitter tears of disappointment as I stuffed my gob with substandard pie. The salty droplets of my sadness didn't improve the flavour as I had secretly hoped.
To its credit, the pie was well shaped, and sat in a small wooden case reminiscent of a brie box, which was incredibly helpful for walking and eating. No tops were ruined in the making of this article. You may think that I jest, but I've ruined a suede jacket this way, by failing to contain all of the magma flowing out of a pastry case. Perhaps I have an eating problem.
Unfortunately, the pastry was rock hard, and took serious stabbing, sawing and prodding to make a dent, and without the wooden pallet it sat in, the pie would have been reduced to mushy goo on my hand. The filling was tasty. Very nice with whole green peppercorns occasionally exploding on the tongue, to combine nicely with the beefy gravy. The chunks of steak were large, and plentiful - the pie having been filled with a layer of steak then topped with gravy - however the meat was tough and impossible to swallow. Hey-ho The search goes ever on.
Further up the market we arrive at the fruit and vege stalls. Beautiful, and very reasonably priced, fresh fruit and veges, fish, meat and hot foods stretched as far as the eye can see.
We couldn't resist the beautifully ripe persimmons (also called sharon fruit here, for some reason), a bargain in the UK at 4 for £1. Choosing two overripe fruit for immediate consumption, and two hardier specimins for transportion home, we dug in with messy, sticky gusto.
Yum.
More than replete, and more akin to lumbering whales on land than I'd care to ever be again, we rolled on through spice shops, clothing stalls, and bric-a-brack. Locals must shop here too, as the vege prices are lower than Oxford, and the halal butchers, displaying gorgeous looking beef shanks and whole rib roasts, had cuts for less than 2/3 what I would usually pay. Obviously not just a tourist destination.
The market is well worth a trip, and very interesting to walk through. By 1pm, when we left, it was heaving with people. Mostly small groups with insta-cameras asking stupid questions in loud voices: "is this an antique? is it over 100 years old? how do you know how old it is? I'm not going to buy it if it's not 100 years old".
Intermission at Cafe East.
After our adventures in pho, we arrived rather hurriedly and out of breath, hoping to catch Borough Market before it closed. Arriving at 3.15pm before a 4pm close was cutting it pretty fine, but we quickly armed ourselves with glasses of pink prosecco and jostled our way to one of the three oyster stands dotted around the market.
This one always has a selection of native and rock oysters, and a long line of customers waiting to be served. By the time we arrived, they only had a few Duchy of Cornwall, and small and regular rock oysters left. Two each of the Duchy and rock oysters for each of us went nicely with our bubbly. The native oysters were much tastier, with a beautiful texture, while the rock oysters had a less subtle flavour, and just slightly chewier. Yes, you have to chew oysters - just letting them slide down your throat is cheating.
Look at the size of that beast in the bottom left!
Unfortunately we couldn't find the kina (sea urchin) stand, that usually hides across from the prosecco, ready to abduct unwary foodies with their alluring wares cut to order.
One benefit of arriving so late, which I hadn't considered before, is that stall keepers are trying to move their wares to save on repacking. The nice lady at Wild Beef flirted and enticed by showing me her vast range of beautiful steaks and roasts. The beef are native breeds, mostly Welsh Black and Devons, grazed on grass outdoors, and killed locally rather than at one of the massive commercial abattoirs. The meat is hung for 21-28 days, and promises to be far more flavoursome than bog-standard, bright-pink supermarket cardboard. We'll see. Still reeling from the awesome pho, I scored a large brisket joint for just over a third of the usual price, because it was closing time. Methinks it will shortly be turned into corned beef (or, dare I dream it, pastrami), and pho.
The cake stand that had earlier caught A's eye had run out of jumbo chocolate brownies, so she settled instead for a slice of rich dark chocolate cake and a slice of white chocolate cheese cake. A steal anywhere at £3 for both (again, because of closing time), but especially good here because they were both so well made. Much gorging was had by all, on the train back to Oxford.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment