Cooking Outside the Box
Keith Abel
The ABEL & COLE
Table of Contents
If you’ve bought this book thinking I’m somehow related to Delia Smith or have some “Fat Duck” palate for mixing bananas and worms, I want to come completely clean and apologise profusely. Someone in the marketing department obviously got carried away. With some basic dishes I am a complete failure, and even my 11-year-old Jessica continually trumps me in the toast, spaghetti and boiled egg departments.
But before you start clogging up the returns department at Amazon, or boycotting Waterstone’s thinking you’ve been sold a dud, I do have one thing over most cooks in that I have spent the last 18 years of my life working with the finest organic farmers, cheese-makers and artisan bakers, who produce a range of beautiful and delicious food that makes your average supermarket look positively cold-war Russian. Furthermore, for all these years I’ve been responsible for choosing the weekly vegetable shop for some extremely talented cooks (and a few chefs) across Britain who were just a bit fed up with the air-freighted, plastic-covered, plastic-looking, and plastic-tasting, produce being offered to them after the demise of their local greengrocer. The challenge for me and for Abel & Cole has been to keep the variety of organic foods coming month in, month out and, as word has caught on, to show the less adventuresome cook (like me) how to prepare, store and cook all the wonderful food on offer in the UK throughout the seasons.
The farmers I work with deserve 100% of the credit for my cooking inspiration. They invariably have a hundred-and-one serving suggestions for their much-loved and much-nurtured produce. I wanted to pass these ideas and recipes on to my customers, and so began the Abel & Cole weekly newsletter with headlines like: “The thing in your box that looks like a brain this week is celeriac.” And the great thing about our customers is that they have always reported back on what works and what doesn’t, and often send in recipes of their own. So grew a great bank of knowledge which I am now sharing with you.
The Abel & Cole Story
In 1988, after two successful previous summers of degree-taking, I got cocky and failed the bar exam. I had escaped the rigours of study (or lack of it) for the comfort of a tent in the south of Spain in a very old VW Beetle (damn, now I’ll have to change the bank password) with my new (and first) girlfriend Catherine Ciapparelli (Chippy to everyone, Mrs Abel to me). The tan was going well, the windsurfing was improving and I felt pretty chuffed having this gorgeous girl as my beach bunny. I had been there about three weeks when I put in the call to get my exam results from my most amusing friend, Jeremy. When he told me I’d failed I asked him to stop ****ing joking around. He wasn’t, which meant I was in real trouble…and a lot of debt. I had the option of carrying on clowning around on the beach or doing the sensible thing by heading straight back to London, putting in two months’ hard graft with the books, and resitting the exam. Naturally I chose the former.
Over the next few days, though, I resolved to go home and set up business flogging potatoes door to door, a profession I’d mastered earlier to pay for my vices at Leeds Uni. So the plan was hatched. On my return I borrowed some traveller’s cheques from my big brother and roped my friends Jules Allen and Paul Cole and my Mum into joining me in my fledgling business. One night in the middle of September I pitched up with the boys, £200 and a posh accent to New Covent Garden market to buy a load of spuds. By 7am, they’d been hand-selected and packed; by 8am we were double-sausage, egg, chips and beaned; and by 6pm the whole lot was sold. We were cashed-up and home via the pub by 10. Up again at 2am with Jules and Paul picking me up wearing their permanent smiles and constant good humour.
A few months in and we had a fleet of complete wrecks doing the rounds with a handful of handsome Kiwi fellas at their wheels. We’d added free range eggs to our service (taking the total product offering up to two), and emblazoned our new motto: “STOP BREAKING YOUR ARMS AND EGGS” all over our vans.
I should probably mention that at this stage I had no idea what “organic” was. Indeed, I was rather sceptical the first time I was offered organic potatoes. Of course potatoes were organic, I thought, they’re vegetables. A farmer I knew told me about this organic thing and encouraged me to ask my supplier at the time (a Kent farmer) to show me what he used to fertilise his crops and keep the pests off. I tried hard not to look too shocked when the doors to the shed were pulled back. It was like a laboratory, and all of those chemicals were being dumped on our food…not the kind of thing you’d brag about while flogging spuds door to door. I got hold of my first organic potatoes and our sales pitch changed from “bakers or mashers?” to “with chemicals or without?”
Up until then, our main challenge had been getting people to stick their heads out of the door for long enough to ask us, “How much are they?” Now, people were genuinely interested. Like me, they were discovering for the first time the amount of sprays used on their food. They had a lot of questions to ask and we knew some of the answers.
By the time summer came we had a large handful of very cool customers buying our first mixed boxes of organic vegetables. Their enthusiasm gave us a great sense of encouragement; meanwhile they were also telling all their friends about us.
Over the next ten years we carried on doing what we were doing, trying to run the business in a fair and decent way, and being constantly amazed at how rare this was in the modern food industry. It seemed that all the supermarkets were inadvertently employing sadistic post-pubescent buyers whose job descriptions appeared to read: “Bully, use your muscle, humiliate and bankrupt as many farmers as you can. We’ll always be able to find others. Use any techniques you choose, no matter how underhand – they won’t be able to say a word against you publicly or we’ll put them out of business. Make them pay for promotions and if you cock up your weekly order, no need to worry: just say the produce is not up to scratch and make them pay for you to throw it away.”
The more I heard about this, the more I was encouraged to just sell safe, healthy, local organic food bought from people I got on well with, supplied to people I liked, by people I enjoyed working with. While great on paper it was a financial catastrophe! Regardless, I kept believing it would work and eventually manna from heaven fell down in