Borough Market: Edible Histories

One of The Times Books of the Year 2020

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'Fascinating and entertaining - a pleasure to read.' Claudia Roden


As a nation of food-lovers we have been munching on fruit and veg, drinking tea and coffee and adorning our dishes with oils and spices for generations, but have you ever stopped to wonder how our most beloved foods came to be the way they are now?

In this series of enlightening and highly entertaining essays, award-winning food writer Mark Riddaway travels back through the centuries to tell the fascinating, surprising and often downright bizarre stories of some of the everyday ingredients found at London's Borough Market.

Discover how the strawberries we eat today had their roots in a clandestine trip to South America by a French spy whose surname happened to be Strawberry, why three-quarters of Britain's late-18th-century intake of tea was sold on the black market, and what Sigmund Freud found so fascinating about eel genitalia.

From the humble apples and onions that we've grown on these shores for centuries, to more exotic ingredients like cinnamon and bananas that travel from across the world to finesse our food, Borough Market: Edible Histories offers a chance to digest the charming stories behind every last morsel.

Mark Riddaway is an award winning writer and editor and publisher, having previously won Editor of the Year at the Independent Publisher Awards. His involvement with Borough Market began more than a decade ago, and since 2012 he has been the editor and publisher of Market Life, the Market's bi-monthly food magazine, which was named Best Magazine or Supplement by the Guild of Food Writers in both 2018 and 2019. In 2020, Mark's regular columns in Market Life earned him a place on the Guild's shortlist for its food writing award.