Author: Josiah Meldrum

Jenny Linford's book The Missing Ingredient: The Curious Role of Time in Food and Flavour explores the critical part that time plays in food production and cooking. In this extract from the Hours chapter Jenny talks to Hodmedod co-founder Nick Saltmarsh and considers the history of the British relationship with pulses.

Wow, we won! We're over the moon to have won Best Food Producer in the 2017 BBC Food and Farming Awards.

After three years of research and crop trials we started harvesting the first commercial crop of British-grown lentils at the end of August. Over the next few weeks six farms in Suffolk, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Hertfordshire and Sussex will harvest a range of organic and non-organic lentils.

After a global search for seed, a couple of years of trials (and several months working out how to flake and mill it) we’ve finally welcomed organic naked barley into the Bean Store.

We were very excited to discover Abyssinian peas in the John Innes Centre's seed bank and are now running garden trials to find out more about these unusual and beautiful peas from Ethiopia.

Perhaps surprisingly fava beans have a long association with Christmas and the midwinter festivals that preceded it, including a traditional cake that we think is well worth reviving.

Four or five years ago, when Nick, William and I were working for East Anglia Food Link and developing the Norwich Resilient Food Project with Transition City Norwich, we talked a lot about lentils. We were thinking about what a more sustainable diet might look like for the city of Norwich; what would people eat if they were more reliant on local production? How would farming have to change? It seemed to us that lentils could be part of the answer.

Last autumn Christine Smallwood, good friend of Hodmedod and a writer with a passion for Italian food, sent me a small packet of Cicerchia (Lathyrus sativus also called 'grass pea') to try cooking with. 

William is making regular checks on the organic quinoa being grown for Hodmedod on the sandy soil of south east Suffolk. We thought you might be interested (amazed even) to see just how quickly the quinoa grows at this time of year. I've stitched together two photos taken from the same viewpoint a fortnight apart - the difference is impressive.

Back in 2012 when we founded Hodmedod it was nigh on impossible to reliably find British-grown pulses in the shops – and the range was tiny. Two years on and we’ve got 16 varieties of dried British peas and beans plus...