British

How do you eat your peas? Whole or soft? Parched or mushy? Black or green? Carlin or marrowfat? (We’re talking proper dried peas here, not those Johnny-come-lately immature fresh “garden pea” imposters*.)

If you are following a gluten-free diet it's not always easy to buy British ingredients with clear provenance. Hodmedod has now launched a range of gluten-free flours, all milled in Essex from pulses and quinoa grown on British farms.

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.