You might assume
that the era of the Merchant Adventurer is long dead. Now that everyone travels and we
have restaurants of every world cuisine on every street corner, surely there is no room
for the old-fashioned explorer who risks life and limb to bring back gastronomic
treasures?
But you’d be wrong. Out there are our latter-day Walter Raleighs, bringing
back modern equivalents of potatoes and tobacco to whet our appetites.
Mark Leatham is one
of them, with a culinary ancestry to live up to, as shown in his company’s name,
Merchant Gourmet. A teenage spent in Greece made him realise the potentials of olive oil
and the delights of Mediterranean food. “We had a Spanish cook who would create
dishes from whatever I shot as a child - rabbits, pigeons, anything. I discovered that
finding my own food was fun.”
 Leatham enjoys searching-out things that people
would love if only they knew about them. He discovered a man in the Camargue who grew a
new form of red rice, “but the way it was packaged made it look like birdseed,”
he winces. Leatham re-packaged it, and turned it into a best seller. Then the
“Italian Revolution” in sun-dried tomatoes happened, and Leatham really found
his forte – sun-dried vegetables, including the deli-counter staple, Sunblush
Tomatoes.
Mark Leatham’s
voyages of discovery have taken him from Argentina to Canada, from Austria to South
Africa. He never knows what he will find – “I’ll often look for one thing
but find something else,” he says. Like the time when he went to Austria to hear the
mating call of the Capercaillie Grouse and was incidentally served a dish with a dressing
he had never tasted before. He loved the roast pumpkinseed oil that it turned out to be
and now imports it as part of a range.
There are unexpected hazards in being a Merchant
Gourmet. “Everyone wants to make the
Englishman drunk,” he sighs. He is often given weird foods just to see if he will
eat them. “I didn’t much enjoy the live raw snail,” he admits, “and
didn’t actually try the snake wine…”
Whilst Mark Leatham
imports foodstuffs, Charlie Bigham has taken a different angle. As the founder of
Bigham’s Global Gastronomy, he has been influenced by the cooking techniques he saw
on his travels after leaving a “sensible” lifestyle to travel the world in a
van. “I remembered that when I was working in the City, I detested
“convenience” food – all those nasty microwave pre-cooked dishes full of
additives,” he shudders. “While we were
travelling through India, we would stop by the roadside and have a wonderful meal cooked
in a single pan, using fresh ingredients, ready to eat in a few minutes.”
Inspired,
Bigham came home and started experimenting with dishes that could be cooked at home using
the single-pan techniques he had witnessed. He came up with a series of ready-marinated meats, prepared vegetables
and sauces, which could be cooked at home in the same amount of time that it would take to
reheat a take away. “It allows people to do a little burst of cooking
themselves,” he explains. Global Gastronomy products, including influences from
India, the Carribean, South East Asia and the Middle East can be found in places such as
Harvey Nichols, Waitrose, Selfridges and other upmarket food stores.
Travel is still a
part of Bigham’s life – “I had a fantastic dish at a traditional restaurant
in Isfahan, chicken with ground walnuts and pomegranate molasses,” he says. “I
wouldn’t have stumbled upon that if I’d just been on the phone to a
supplier.”
Closer to home,
Adrian and Michael Daniels, co-founders of The Gate vegetarian restaurants, are Merchant
Adventurers virtually in their own back yards. There is nothing they would rather do than
ramble through the British hedgerows to find new and exciting ingredients.
“We’re after a chicken-of-the-woods,”
says Adrian Daniels as we tramp deep among the trees at Hampstead Heath, five minutes
from the restaurant. “One of the things I miss, being a vegetarian, is Chicken
Tandoori and this fungus has a distinctly chicken taste to it. It’s only an
occasional find but well worth the effort.”
The Daniels
brothers, from an Indo-Iraqui background, have a deep respect for the free gifts nature
provides. “My first improvised meal was when I was working on a farm in Israel,”
says Adrian. Everything closed for the weekend, so he created something from vine leaves,
mint and other “found” food, surprising the farmer on his return.
Like all
mushroomers, Daniels is secretive about his sources. He doesn’t make me walk
blindfold – as some would - but I am sworn to secrecy when we actually find a
gnarled, dead oak sprouting alarmingly with the kind of mushroom my mum would have told me
was poisonous. “This will be a special tonight,” he says, deftly cutting
handfuls of the golden yellow fungus with its delicate peachy folds and placing them
carefully in a wicker basket. “These are impossible to cultivate,” says Daniels.
“Our customers look forwards to this sort of thing, but they have to be flexible
– you can never tell what you will find.” He spies some elderflowers in a
hedgerow and wades through the nettles (“the blue nettle flowers are good in
salads”) to cut more goodies for his basket. We leave what look to me like some
perfectly edible mushrooms under the tree (“No - you can’t eat those”) then
squelch around further on a vain search for wild garlic.
 Back at the restaurant, Adrian has barely put his
basket down than his brother has his nose in it. “What did you get?” he wants to
know. The chicken-of-the-woods is proudly displayed. It is agreed that I “need to try
some” – a good enough excuse for the brothers to cook a little of the delicacy.
As we solemnly chomp on the pan-fried fungus I have to agree that it does taste like
chicken. “That’ll fool a few people this evening,” grins Michael.
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