Nina Planck - The Farmers Market Cookbook

When I tell people that I created the first farmers market in London, England, in 1999, they look surprised. Surely such a thing existed in Roman Londinium? Well, yes, certainly there, and in more recent times farmers near whats now Heathrow Airport brought produce to very old trading places such as the famous Covent Garden.

But in modern Londonno. There were street markets, and organic markets, and small but growing organic sections in supermarkets. There were lots of radical Green types and there were terrible, European-wide food scandals (BSE, dioxin in chickens), but the first American-style producers-only farmers market in the capital (though not in England) was mine.

Its fair to say that the markets were an overnight sensation. Immediately the phone rang with farmers wanting markets and neighborhoods offering spaces. According to The New Yorker, the British press dubbed me The American, which, if I understand British tone of voice even a tiny bit, I take to be a largely but not entirely friendly moniker.

Never mind the nickname. My little business was and is thoroughly English, entirely homegrown. We soon opened more weekly markets. They thrived and in the next two years markets opened all over England, Scotland, and Wales. Today there are more than five hundred markets in the U.K. and the tradition, now rediscovered, is thriving in cultural and financial terms.

From this adventure, born of my own longing for the markets of my youth, came The Farmers Market Cookbook. In a year of cooking, I borrowed or created, and then cooked and devoured, recipes for all the foods our markets proffered from earth, sea, and sky, whether farmed, hunted, or foraged.

Quite by accident this little book converted me fatefully from an unhealthy and fat-phobic vegetarian who dabbled in fish, to a permanent and enthusiastic omnivore. My gateway food, it turned out, was roast chicken, and the particular gate, chicken skin and The Parsons Nose, as the Brits sometimes call it: that fatty, stubby little tail. Ecstasy it was to discover that the fats I feared were, in fact, my salvation. As I ventured, at first gingerly, and then in the style of a charging rhinoceros, into beef, pork, butter, and cheese, I lost weight and cheered up immensely. Honest friends will tell you that I also became a better cook. Better ingredients will do that.

The recipes are just as I wrote them in 1999. I havent changed a thing in this edition, but my own cooking has certainly evolved. I use more butter and more bone broths, braise more meats. I cook and eat more meat in general. Also, American readers may wonder how big a knob of butter is. Its a tablespoon or two; exactly how much is up to you. In the first edition, I recommended using an everyday olive oil for frying and your very best oil for dressing a salad; today I use the best extra-virgin, cold-pressed olive oil for every purpose and every dish. In the fruit and vegetable profiles, Ive mentioned many varieties I discovered in England. You might not see them at your local markets, but Ive left the names as tehy are, a snap shot of my London markets in 1999.

My faith in the superior flavor of local produce harvested at its peak and sold in its prime remains. My faith in the farmers ability to lead us to good food, a belief instilled by my own childhood at Wheatland Vegetable Farms, and rekindled by all the farmers who attend our London marketsand by good farmers everywhereis as strong as a taproot.

N ina Planck

New York City

2013