North Norfolk captured our hearts by stealth. For most of my life, this arcing coastal stretch of East Anglia was somewhere I had never visited, nor ever spent that much time thinking about; a span of English countryside that I mostly associated with Alan Partridge, Colman’s mustard and, in the context of my south London home, an awkward schlep. But then, almost exactly a decade ago, I stumbled through an internet rabbit hole on to an entry for a clutch of self-catering cottages in a seaside village near the gently bougie, wax-jacketed market town of Holt. Decision made.
Soon we were rumbling out across an impossibly wide and flat expanse, bound for the ripe, blustering winds and billowing steam trains of a varied network of time-warp beaches and little towns. Not expecting much, and yet falling a little more in love with each passing moment and meal, with each glistening fistful of perfect chips from No1 Cromer or a tea room crab roll after watching seals nose out of the water at Blakeney Point.
The arrival of a second kid, pandemic lockdowns and juddering personal and professional life shifts – all of these significant markers across the past 10 years have been punctuated by repeat trips to this understatedly beautiful strip of once-alien coastline. And though we have seen this part of the world in many different modes, the phrase that best crystallises my associative excitement is this: samphire season. I had definitely eaten and enjoyed the spindly green sea vegetable before our north Norfolk years, but I don’t think it was until we visited in summer, when samphire is at its abundant, fleeting peak in the tidal mudflats that gird the shoreline, that I appreciated its connection to East Anglian culinary culture, or how special it is when sampled at the source. When summer hits, this briny, delicately beaded marsh grass (locally pronounced more like “sam-fer”) is a comforting ubiquity, lurking on restaurant blackboards, in fishmonger window displays and in the DIY honesty boxes that ornament the wending coastal roads. There is a core memory from a few years ago: sticky-fingered, sandy kids in the car, and my wife Madeleine running from the passenger side to procure one of the last paper bags of foraged samphire from a roadside table amid the marshy, glimmering swelter of a little village called Salthouse.
An improvisatory hodge-podge back in the holiday cottage kitchen yielded butter-fried new potatoes and samphire, alongside vegetarian chorizo sausages: a deeply weird but extraordinarily effective combination in which the waxy starch and fatty, paprika spicing somehow both muffle and complement the salinity of those nobbled green tufts. In the intervening years, I have evolved and refined the pleasure of that moment into a loose recipe, with the helpful lubrication of a potato salad dressing and an optional lily-gilding of fatty fish.
Chop 200g chorizo (vegetarian or vegan, if preferred) into hunks and roast in a 200C (180C fan)/390F/gas 6 oven for 15-20 minutes, until cooked through and golden. Meanwhile, boil 500g good, skin-on small potatoes in a pan of scantly salted simmering water for about 10 minutes, or until they just slip off the tip of a knife, adding 150g samphire for the last two to three minutes of cooking. Drain, halve the potatoes, if need be, and leave to steam dry.
Make a simple vinaigrette with three tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil, a tablespoon of white-wine vinegar, a little salt and pepper (remember to hold back on the salt), a teaspoon of sugar for balance, and a generous, emulsifying dollop of dijon mustard, then dress the potatoes and samphire while they’re still warm. Separately, mix three or four generous tablespoons of very good mayonnaise (I like an elegant, faint cloaking, rather than something too gloopy; again, go vegan, if required) with three chopped spring onions, some chopped capers and cornichons, parsley and dill, then stir into the cooled veg. Serve with the contrasting warmth of the roast chorizo and, if it appeals and you’re not going plant-based, two fillets of fresh mackerel, fried for just two or three minutes on each side.
Creaminess and smoky heat; succulent, marine crunch and herbal freshness. Samphire is an underrated vegetable lightly reframed, a celebration of precious high summer, of hyper-seasonality, and a reminder of how, against the odds, a British-Nigerian city boy fell hard for this sleepy stretch of Partridge country.
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Picky by Jimi Famurewa, is published by Hodder & Stoughton at £20. To order a copy for £18, visit guardianbookshop.com