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Place and Patina
When you visit Narborough Hall, either as a garden visitor or as a wedding guest, we hope you will taste and enjoy the food we grow and cook for you. Narborough Hall is a family home with a long and a powerful ‘sense of place’. It was settled by the Iceni because it was a place rich with life. A settlement on the Fen edge, it combined the possibility of hunting in the Norfolk forests and fishing and wildfowling in the seasonally flooded Fen ‘Wash’. The soil, though free draining, has the silt and loam of a fertile valley. Trout swim in the clear water of the River Nar. Deer roam through the woods.
The act of growing and cooking food here has a deep past, nature’s history layered with human history. We know that vegetables have been grown for generations in the Walled Kitchen Garden by the river. We have knowledge, through written and oral testimonies, of the gardeners who grew them. We know that apple, peach, pear, medlar and mulberry trees have been growing in the grounds for centuries. We know where and why they were planted, and often, by whom.
Everything we provide here, from the flowers on the table to the pudding steaming on the Aga, is grown, gathered and cooked by us. It is therefore, real. Distinctive experiences that truly nourish the body and soul can only come from authenticity. So many food experiences have now been extracted from their rooted cultural practice, packaged and presented in homogenized plasticity. We experience them as ‘fake’, they don’t feel right and we can tell the difference.
At Narborough, we are proud of being traditional English cooks. However, we are also curious. As gardeners we inherit a long tradition of horticultural experimentation that, for centuries, has introduced us to exciting flavours and ingredients. If we can grow contemporary ingredients we can challenge our palate without losing our integrity and damaging the human and natural soul in the process. We serve ginger, lemongrass, cinnamon basil and coriander seeds, only if we have grown them in our garden and are therefore as fresh and aromatic as a cook would use in rural Thailand. Even former staples of the English pantry, caraway seeds for soda bread, hazelnuts for pastry, rosehips for syrup - ingredients which have now, in practice, disappeared from our rapidly dwindling vegetable gardens - we grow and preserve. Our policy could not be simpler: if you are eating it we’ve grown it. Goodness
Food at Narborough is not just about a sense of place and authenticity, it is also about people. My family and I cook with a sense of inherited pride. This comes from its own particular place and time and has its own story. It is a personal story, but is one that I believe should be shared as it informs the heart and soul of our life here.
One of the stories I tell my children is the story of their great grandma’s garden, a story interwoven with the memory of food. Grandma’s garden was an orchard, deeply cultivated and childishly wild. May was its utopia, dawn chorus of woodpigeon, thrush, blackbird and skylarks, the insistent calls of pheasant. Waking, from the nest of her feather beds, into the knowledge of a long light filled day, open with freedom to play and day dream, was rapture. I remember the scent of lilac, also cow parsley deeply rooted in fenland soil, strong growing and cloudy with perfume under the blossoming apple trees. It was a vital, saturated space, so beautiful you ached with the thought of its loss.
For my grandma the point of any garden was to eat. Beauty was in taste and flavor. From working her garden my grandma gathered the sure knowledge that what she prepared, cooked and served to her family, was “good”. The garden was deeply useful and healing. Built on generations of knowledge, everything grown, it had a secure place. The walk to the horseradish patch, the flowering of pungent coltsfoot, the earliest menstrual flash of rhubarb, the heaviest yielding damson tree, all were mapped, known, unchanging. This was not a garden of experimentation, but of ritual, wisdom and routine.
The vegetable garden was kept fertile by poultry manure, honey bees and simple rotation. My grandmother’s life was spent growing, cooking and preserving food and her garden was based on the seasonal needs of an English cook. Rows of bottled fruit, syrups, cordials, honey, honeycomb, wooden trays of keeping apples, fruit vinegars, baskets of chicken and duck eggs. Her back kitchen was a constantly changing exhibition of the garden’s productivity, and, our duty and pleasure, as children, was that we grew up as part of it.
We only entered the front kitchen through the back kitchen, and, it was here that we were intercepted and given our daily jobs. We fed the chickens corn that we had gleaned from the field verges. We gathered eggs from warm nests minutes after the hen loudly clucked her lay. We picked gooseberries and blackberries by slipping our smaller fingers through the thorns. We plucked sticky caterpillars from the young cabbage leaves. Our reward would be a fresh dippy egg, a slice of jam roly-poly kept warm in the rayburn, the reddest apple, or, a jar of liquid honey to take home for breakfast.
I visited my grandma every day and never escaped a duty or left empty-handed. It was a place where every meal was savoured, from toast charred over fire embers to the grand Christmas goose. Even a simple soup made from a hen too old to lay would never be sipped without a discussion of the bird she had killed and its strength of flavor. The detail was intricate, from the taste of the bird remembered along with to its particular age, life and diet. It was the same with vegetables. Varieties, grown from saved seed, year after year, were often unchanging, but the difference in taste, between harvests, were noted for soil conditions, sunshine and moisture, time of gathering and storage. It was not only the making and preserving of food that was valued, but the meticulous accumulation of food knowledge, the organic gathering of a lifetime that was daily replenished and re-sown.
When grandma brought her food to the table she did so with pride, confidence and the phrase “this looks good, it smells good, it tastes good and it will certainly do you good”. If one thing defined grandma it was her certainty, the knowledge that she was doing her duty to us and to life. The certainty derived from confidence in her soil, her produce, her culinary practice, that she was bringing “goodness” to our table. It is this spirit - this immersion in growing and eating food - that inspires and gives meaning to Narborough. Our lives here would be pale without it. A good Eater
My paternal grandma came from a family of Fenland land-workers. She left school at twelve to take care of and cook for her brothers and sisters so her ‘mam’ could work on the land. Her role as a very young cook, was, as she often said, “to make ends meet” or as I always understood it “meat”. Her cooking, as a consequence, included the cheap and filling ingredients of bread, suet, flour and dripping and her early experience of making food was clouded by the real fear that there wouldn’t be enough.
Like her mother, she spent her adult life working on the land, harvesting potatoes, weeding sugar beet, strawberry picking. She lived in a zinc lean-to with my grandad on the side of a tithe cottage inhabited by four other families. She had little privacy or garden. Much of her family’s fresh food was gleaned, poached or gathered. My memory of early family meals with my grandma was of her efforts to “fill” us up. For us to leave the table hungry was her worst fear and she would invariably serve a big plain suet pudding to start the meal. It wasn’t until the 1970s when she had the security of a council house with an acre of vegetable garden, that her fear of not having enough food abated. Her garden was Fenland functional, rectangular, open, bisected by a straight concrete path. The only real feature was a rhubarb patch in the far corner by the dyke. It grew to gunnera-like proportions and my brother and I made camps under its giant leaves. We would take sugar cubes down the garden and chew raw sticks of rhubarb with a sugar cube in our cheek to take away the bitterness. The soil in this garden was, however, deep and silty, perfect for growing big quantities of the staples she relied on - potatoes, cabbage, swede - nothing “fancy”. It was then, and I think to compensate for a childhood where there was a frightening lack of food, she would pile the table and our plates high with homely country cooking. Her kitchen smelt of sausage and sage, her store cupboard was filled with home-grown and pickled onions, red cabbage, piccalilli. My memory of eating at grandma’s during my later childhood, is a memory of simple abundance, of a woman who was proud, joyful and whose cooking displayed the same qualities that animated her soul, softness, earthiness and profound generosity. A woman who finally had made ends meet in a warm circle around her family.
In my family therefore, a small portion of food signaled poverty or was a sign of being unwelcome. A small appetite was a warning of ill health, or, if it was noticed in a guest, a deliberate insult. The compliment of being “a good eater” was, and still is, the highest level of praise you can bestow. The “landgirl” portions of food you will be given in our café still reflect my belief in that a proper plate of food signals warmth and love. Even now, after years of exposure to smart urban lifestyle, I still can’t help feeling a sense of anxiety and rejection when I am in a restaurant that serves minimalist cuisine.
When we are cooking, we cook in the way that grandma learned to value. We cook in abundance. This is also the way we grow food in this garden. We don’t want a sprinkling of parsley, we want a pungent hit; we don’t want to serve a salad garnish but ladlefuls of aromatic colourful vegetables, leaves and flowers. I strive for a joyful celebration of flavour and plenty. Cooking in this way makes me feel secure, that my family will thrive and that my guests will be properly welcomed. Distinctiveness
I grew up thinking of myself as English, but more importantly I thought of myself as from Sutton St James. This was only a tiny Fenland village, but we understood ourselves to be different from the people from the neighboring villages, just two miles away, of Tydd St. Mary, Sutton St. Edmunds and Gedney Broadgate. Honey from our village had its own taste, compared to the honey of our neighbors. We had our own traditions, celebrations and recipes. Families would be known for their specific culinary area of excellence. Grandma had a special way of making toffee, Mrs. Neale, potted meat, Mrs. Johnson, fairy cakes. This was a world that celebrated the intricacies of difference. It was antithetical to the homogenized, branded, factory- produced world of contemporary food culture, which seeks to replicate the same experience in every town, in every country.
Growing up in a rural village, I understood that real food was always ‘slow’. The germination of a good meal began with tiny seeds being sown into warming fertile soil. Meals came from the raw materials of nature. They had to be grown, husbanded, and harvested. If my grandma had it in mind to make a chicken soup, she spent time thinking about which of her chickens had gone off lay and would make the best ‘boiling fowl’. When selected, it would be corn-fed to give it the soft yellow flesh she needed. A good meal took time, deliberation and patience.
I ate my first meal that wasn’t home cooked, at a party when I was thirteen. Throughout my childhood, I never tasted a “bought” cake. This was something you saw in towns and a town was culturally a very far away thing. We only ate, in our village, what we produced in our village, and it was the same throughout the Fens. As a result, visits to other villages would bring new and different taste experiences. A village fete would be a chance to taste different food and produce, to admire different culinary skills and leave with admiration and sharpened sensibilities. A simple sponge cake made from the same ingredients, would taste different with a different maker. I learnt that there is an alchemy, an energy in the making of something by hand, that gives distinctiveness to food. It is for that reason that we mix our cakes by hand, with wooden spoons. There are no metal mixers in our kitchen.
As a visitor to Narborough Hall we would like to give you an experience that cannot be replicated, that is unique. We do not use the same ‘Norfolk made’ breads and pies and cakes, that other places you may visit, do use. We want you to feel you have visited, not just Norfolk, but Narborough Hall, somewhere special, distinct, unique. If you taste my orange blossom cake you will not find it replicated in deli’s around Norfolk. If you eat my steamed treacle sponge, you are tasting my grandmas recipe. We run our house and café as a family. My mum and my daughters cook along side me. This is the way we like to be, it’s not just work, it’s a life.
We look forward to meeting you.
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