Restaurants

London’s markets and grocers’ shops are stacked with fresh tropical fruit and veg, pungent spices and exotic juices, yet how many of us actually know what to do with them? Curry may be the nation’s most popular dish, but it’s unlikely most of us could cook one using anything more exotic than a jar of paste and some chopped-up chicken – or a microwave or takeaway leaflet. Frankly, it’s a bit of an embarrassment. Feature continues

So, to learn a little more I’ve arranged to meet Mr Dauladram Chadda, a retired electrician and enthusiastic cook, at Queen’s Market, reputedly London’s most ethnically diverse market and a superb source of Asian and Caribbean ingredients. Adjacent to Upton Park tube, and loomed over by an unprepossessing 1960s tower block, Borough Market it’s not.

The simple covered open structure houses around 140 stalls, kiosks and shops, and here you’ll find everything from rolls of colourful sari material to stacks of shiny cooking pots, baskets of apples to crates of raw fish bones. It’s also earmarked to be turned into a supermarket.

‘It’s been here over 100 years, you know,’ says Chadda, originally from India and a vocal local campaigner against the development. ‘I’ve only been here for 38.’

It doesn’t take long before I’m pointing like an annoying child. ‘What’s that?’ I ask. Mr Chadda looks at the baskets of what are probably tubular vegetables and look like a cross between a yam and a husked coconut. ‘Chalo,’ he says. ‘Bless you,’ I reply. ‘It’s like a potato,’ he continues, ignoring me. ‘But it’s not sweet like a sweet potato. You cook it in curry. After peeling it, of course. And these are edo,’ he says, pointing to the similar vegetable next to it. ‘Or arbi, if you prefer. They are like brother and sister. You must cook them first, you cannot eat them raw.’ Later investigation revealed these are various types of taro and colocasia, root vegetables which are now grown right around the tropics and are called a different name in nearly every country – and language. What Chadda calls ‘shishinga’ is another example of a vegetable blighted by the curse of the Tower of Babel – in Hindi it would be called ‘padwal’, in English we call it snake gourd.

Further in and the sheer range of food and nationalities is awesome. Men carry babies, old people push shoppers, women of all colours fill up bags with food.

‘There are many more African foods now,’ says Chadda. ‘We’re eating their food, they’re eating ours.’ And it’s true, everything’s stacked together – yam next to okra, plantain next to tinda; there are no fruit and veg ghettos here. Even at Pride, the Asian caff in the middle of the market, they’ve recently added Caribbean staples to the menu.

‘Are these green mangoes?’ I say, pointing to what are very obviously green mangoes. ‘I mean, you use them now and not when they turn yellow?’

‘Yes, we use them to make mango chutney. They must most definitely be raw and not ripe.’

‘Is it hard to make?’ I ask, imagining days and days over a bubbling pot.

‘Oh no, not at all. Take some raw mango, fresh coriander, ginger, green chilli, onion, some lemon juice, and grind it up, grind it all up and you can eat it straight away or put it in the refrigerator. We have it with everything.’

I start rifling through a basket of ridged green beans longer than my arm. I hold one up, eyebrows raised.

‘It’s a drumstick,’ says Channa. I look quizzical. ‘You stew it in curry to soften it. It also makes good soup with onion and garlic.’ Even when cooked the outside remains inedibly tough, but the tender interior is easily revealed by stripping stripping it off with your teeth; it’s a staple of South Asian cooking in dishes such as avial (‘mixture’).

He runs his hands over the green chillis. ‘We only use the green chilli,’ he says. ‘Every Asian food uses the chilli. From the young child, the first taste is the chilli. Like alcohol here! The bigger chillis are not so hot, you can eat them raw.’ He looks over the larger bell chillis. ‘Or try to! This is karela,’ he says, picking up an extremely knobbly gourd-like vegetable that, truth be told, doesn’t scream ‘I’m delicious!’ but rather ‘I’m very odd-looking, watch out!’ ‘It’s very bitter if you eat it raw,’ warns Chadda. ‘Some people eat it raw, but cooking takes out the bitterness. Fry it and serve with dahl on the side.’ Karela is indeed very bitter, and needs to be cooked for a long time to make it even palatable, hence its alternative name of ‘bitter gourd’ or ‘bitter melon’. It’s very popular in north Indian cookery, and dahl makes a perfect foil for its strong flavour.

Small green berries turn out to be gunda, which can be pickled or roasted. Next to them are the bigger, translucent, berry-like tree fruit, sometimes called karvanda, which can also be pickled; when eaten raw, they have very little taste for ‘around five minutes’ after which they become intensely sour. The sour agent is ascorbic acid – that’s vitamin C – and raw karvanda has a vit C content of around 30 times that of a fresh orange. However, it’s not palatable raw; it’s usually eaten either pickled or in ‘wild berry’ jams in India.

One of the most prevalent vegetables at the market is tinda from the gourd family, which looks like an apple-sized squash. Tindori (aka tindora, tindli, ivy gourd or gentlemen’s toes) looks like a small gherkin, and can be sliced lengthways before adding to a slow-cooked curry. It grows abundantly in western India, which is why it’s a staple of Gujarati and other western Indian cuisines. Dudhi, a type of Indian marrow, appears in various shapes including round or bottle-shaped (when it is called ‘bottle gourd’), and is cooked in much the same way. ‘Peel with a knife, not a peeler,’ says Chadda, referring to its tough skin, ‘and cook it with chilli, ginger, garlic and chickpeas, and eat with chapati.’ The African variety of this gourd has a more familiar name: calabash.

There are enormous, catering-sized cooking pots , and I ask whether there really are families big enough to warrant them. Chadda laughs. ‘Two or three brothers live together with their families, so you need a pot that big!’

The market bustles, despite being a weekday morning, but it’s still very much under threat, as all the photocopied posters taped to pillars attest. ‘Modernise not Modwenise,’ they say, a reference to would-be developers St Modwen Properties. Most traders are staunchly against the site becoming home to a giant supermarket (although Asda pulled out in June, the local Newham council and St Modwen’s are looking for another), but a few cited the grime and mess as reason enough to tear the neglected market down, claiming its tatty state attracted crime. The Friends of Queen’s Market counter this: ‘The constabulary say there is no more and no less crime in the market area than anywhere else in Newham and have given the campaign their full support.’

My first visit to Queen’s Market isn’t going to be my last: I’ve already been back to pick up a cooking pot at a third of high-street prices. It would be a shame to lose a market that not only embraces the diversity for which we love our capital, but lays it out, side by side, basket by basket.

Queen’s Market, off the junction of Green St and Queen’s St, Upton Park, E13. Upton Park tube. Open Tue 8am-12noon, Thur-Sat 8am-5pm. The Friends of Queen’s market are staging a women’s march to save the market on Sat at 11am. See www.friendsofqueensmarket.org.uk/.