A little light lunch of lung, trotters and shin anyone?
Throwing a bonfire party this weekend gave me the perfect excuse to spend a couple of hours at Ridley Road Market buying an excessive amount of food for very little money indeed.
For me Ridley Road is everything that Broadway Market isn’t. It’s rowdy, messy, cheap and authentic. An ex boyfriend once described it as looking like a scene form Mad Max, and although I was furious about his bourgeoise, judgmental sniffing at the time – looking back he did have a point.
Bits of the road are dug up, some of its cordoned off, there’s crap everywhere and there is definitively nothing quaint or picturesque about the place. If you are looking for a French-style market with great produce served by impossibly cliched vendors, then you are in the wrong place. In fact, let’s be honest: it’s pretty ugly really.
But the produce is generally excellent as well as being cheap as chips – and the people on the market, both vendors and buyers, care about the quality. My fruit and veg man filled around 5-6 bags of the best veg for me: carrots, spuds, beetroot, tomatoes, parsley, onions, red cabbage – and the parsnips he’d been saving for his own Sunday roast. His wife got the hump sometimes, he said, because he’d go home without any veg and she’d have to go out to the supermarket to stock up. “Not to blow me own trumpet,” he said. “But their stuff isn’t as good as mine.” He was right – it isn’t. It’s more expensive too. and when your pre-packaged plastic bag of parsnips beeps through the till: the woman on the checkout doesn’t say: “There you are my lovely, think about me when you’re eating them tomorrow.”
A bit further down the way, Jimmy didn’t have any cooking apples. But he did have a twinkle in his eye as as he handed over 5 apples for 50p, he asked me if I needed a lift home with my bags. The charm police were out in full force on Saturday, it appeared – as even the chap I bought my shoulder of lamb (which was meltingly tender in my hot pot the next day) from at the first butchers on the left-hand side asked if he could come round for the dinner it would feature in. It did cross my mind that he could have been a distant cousin of Ali, who the ever-hilarious Cereal Killah wrote about in winning terms.
But none of this was sleezy, or threatening – it was fun, and cheeky and a bit of banter. The type of interaction that makes you leave a market with your hands full of bags and a smile on your face.
I love Ridley Road market. I just hope that it manages to hold its own as Dalston changes around it – all those of you who have moved into the monstrosity that is Dalston Square (the single most ugly and aggressively masculine building in London?) please do go and get your veg there. It might look a little more untidy than the uniform isles at Sainsbury’s, but all the extra joy is free.
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