Having eaten our fill at the Festival Hall slow food market and procured the necessaries to grow your own garlic, we set off to one of London’s food highlight’s, Borough Market. According to the wikipedia entry, the first reference to Borough Market was in 1276. The market is believed to date from Roman times and has been on the present site near London Bridge Station for 250 years. 
Our aim was to buy ingredients for a Christmas dinner. We opted to to hit the meat stalls first to see what game they had. We opted for a beautiful pheasant – dressed and stuffed with plumb and ginger and ready for the oven. There were all sorts of game on offer, the turkeys and geese were literally flying off the shelves! There are several meat and game stalls to choose from, with a great selection of produce and prices. Our stuffed and dressed Pheasant cost £6 and was sourced from Buckinghamshire. I felt this was great value considering that two free range chicken breasts would cost a similar amount in a supermarket.
Because it was Christmas time, there was a great selection of mulled wine, mulled cider and other festive treats on offer. The Salvation Army brass band were playing at the centre of the market, adding to the festive ambience. As you’d expect, the market had all kinds of good, from far and wide on offer. However, the best prices and nicest stuff was, in my opinion, the local, in season fruit and veg. One of the things I like to do at the market (as well as sampling everything I can) is to look for stuff you’ve never seen before. Some of these wierd looking mushrooms looked fabulous and most of them, I’d never heard of before…except for one… 
…the night before going to the market, we saw the ‘Black Trompette’ on a BBC TV’s QI quiz show. Also know, in English as the ‘Trumpet of Death’ it was illustrating how the fearsome looking mushrooms can be safe to eat, while the more plain looking ones can be poisonous. The fragrance of the mushrooms was intense and made me wish I knew enough to go mushroom foraging!
We picked up the necessary veg for our Christmas meal, including sprouts of which there were plenty. It would seem that that prices at Borough Market vary daily at the same stall, with Saturday being the most expensive and busiest day. I have it on good authority that these ‘sprout trees’ which were going for £2.50 per stick on Saturday, were only £1 per stick the day before. It is therefore well worth remembering that it is a market and there’s always an opportunity to try and haggle.
I stopped by my favourite stall, which sells real ale and beer from small and local brewers from all over the UK. I was saddened to hear from the beer porter that he had no beer from Cains of Liverpool as they were struggling financially and may have to stop brewing – it would be a tragedy if a wonderful brewery with fabulous beer and pubs were to disappear. We completed our market trip with the purchase of some fabulous traditionally smoked kippers (£1 per pair) which made an excellent breakfast with some fresh bread from the market. With everything we needed for the Christmas dinner, we moved on to the final stop of the South London Food Trip – Neal’s Yard Cheese shop which is blogged separately.
