Pulses

We're continually amazed at the wonderful things people do with our Organic Carlin Peas and have collected these superb dishes from Instagram. In no particular order...

We've been privileged to work with Essex quinoa pioneer Peter Fairs over the last few years to develop supply of some of the very first British-grown Quinoa. As drilling of this year's crop approaches we've been getting nostalgic re-reading this article by journalist Craig McLean on the launch of our first trial batch in 2014.

Religion, folklore and now Facebook encourage us to give things up for Lent. And if you’ve got a meat-, alcohol-, chocolate- or sugar-shaped hole in your life for the next few weeks, there are centuries of history behind the foodstuff you could fill it with: carlin peas

Feasting on pulses is something the Hodmedod team are happy to do any day of the week but on January 6th we had two extra reasons to celebrate. As well as an almost belated Christmas lunch, January 6th marked the launch of the UN’s International Year of Pulses with hundreds of people across the world celebrating with a pulse feast.

Israeli archaeologists claim to have dug up the world's oldest fava beans, suggesting that beans may have been the very first farmed crop. Does this mean the paleo diet is old hat and neo(lithic) eating the new thing?

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. 

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...