Kitchen Cupboards #11: Becca Burnett
The wedding caterer, farm shop owner and adventurous home cook with a passion for pairing Asian flavours with local ingredients.
Welcome to Kitchen Cupboards, an ingredient column where, rather than exploring some of my favourite ingredients, I’m taking a peek into some of my favourite food writer, creators and producers kitchen cupboards to talk about which ingredients shape their everyday cooking.
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I first met Becca when she was working as the Front of House Manager at The Compasses Inn in Crundale, here in Kent, which was at the time my favourite place in the world to eat not just because of the insanely good food, but because of the warm, friendly, and most importantly food-obsessed service every time we walked in the door.
Today she’s the driving force behind I think everything except for the actual cooking at Fern and Farrow, the events catering company she runs with her husband, local chef Will Burnett, who, incidentally are the people behind the only wedding catering I’ve ever had that has not just been actually good, but restaurant quality.
As anyone who follows her on Instagram will know Becca is a curious and passionate home cook with a cookbook collection that probably rivals mine and a love for Asian-inspired ingredients. But unusually for Kitchen Cupboards you’ll notice we’re not joining her in her home kitchen, but instead in the new Fern and Farrow Farm Shop in Bishopsbourne, near Canterbury so we could not only talk about how she cooks at home, but also about the process she went through finding the right suppliers and choosing the right ingredients for their perfectly curated new venture.
Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Firstly, tell us about yourself: how did you come to start working in food? I think we first met when you were working at The Compasses [a Michelin guide recommended pub which is now under new ownership]?
Yes, so my first job in food was working for a catering company, so that’s how Will and I met, so I just did that in the summer and whilst I was at uni, and then when we got back from travelling I needed a job and Will knew Rob [Taylor] from The Compasses, and I they needed someone so that started that off, and then obviously that was a really great place to fall in love properly with proper food.
You got lucky with that one!
Yeah, and so that kind of set that off. Will was working and Angela’s, and then he decided he wanted to start his own thing whilst I was still at The Compasses. They were really supportive, and if I needed the odd day off - because at that point we were only doing four weddings a year or something - I could have it. It’s a really supportive and helpful industry to be in because everyone knows it’s hard. It’s also a really nice community so once you’re in it it’s really hard to leave! And I quite liked the pub element of it at The Compasses, it’s a rite of passage almost to work in a pub, at least once.
My Mum said her favourite job ever was working in a pub because it did not matter how miserable someone was when they walked in the door, by the time you’ve pulled them a pint and let them vent about it for five minutes they were happy again.
Yeah, and it’s talking to different people, meeting different people, and making them happy with food, it’s a nice thing to do. So I think that translates then to what we do now, because obviously weddings. Most of the time people are quite happy, so that’s a nice thing to be a part of and you don’t have to deal with the side of it you get in restaurants with, you know, you get rude people sometimes.
So, we’re in your new farm shop and butchery today instead of your home kitchen. When I first came in here you described how you wanted the farm shop to have a small, carefully curated selection: how did you go about choosing items to stock?
We’re obviously really well placed that we’ve worked within the local food industry for a long time, we both worked in restaurants, and also with Taco Bill [their taco truck inspired by their honeymoon in Mexico which occasionally does pop ups, food festivals and appears as the late night option at some of the weddings they cater] we did a lot of the food fairs and stuff so we have met lots of producers, so we had a good idea of who we already wanted to use, things like Carrington’s and stuff that are Kent staples.
Didn’t Dominic [the owner of Carrington’s] used to work at The Compasses?
He used to work at The Compasses, yeah he’s Rob’s friend so there is lots of contacts like that, obviously you know some of the things you just need to keep to the classics like the Kent Crisps, and Kingsdown, and stuff like that. Owlet’s we use through the catering, we did Mother’s Day boxes once, and they were just really helpful. We did a small order and they were just a nice company to work with, so I was like anyone who has been helpful! With our oils, there is obviously Kentish Oils which is the big one you see in all the farm shops, but Will gets ours from Eckley Farm it is so you don’t really see that around, so we wanted a few things that were a point of difference, but also that we’d already used and knew were great, things like the Nonington Flour, they literally mill it themselves, that’s pretty cool, so things like that. I think there is scope for new people coming through, we’ve got a guy who he and his wife have just started making kimchee, they came and dropped a sample off, that sort of thing, and I want people to feel like they can say “oh, we’ve got this, what do you think?” Because that’s quite a nice exchange rather than us searching for them.
Are there any ingredients that you knew, okay, I need to have this that you had to seek out?
Honey took Will quite a while actually, because for a lot of people because they’ve got quite small hives they can’t always supply al the time, so that took quite a while, that was a lot of random posting on Facebook village pages, ‘anyone know anyone with bee hives’!
Yeah, I remember chatting to the guys at LAM about chefs and egg supply, who were like the hens only lay so many eggs, no I can’t supply you with more eggs, this is what we’ve got.
I think that was something that took time, yes, supporting as many sort of small businesses as possible because that’s what it’s about really, isn’t it? But also having a choice. Things like eggs, obviously we have LAM eggs and we also have the Woodland Eggs, because they are two different products. And people buy both, so it’s that kind of balance of having a choice of stuff, but not being overwhelming. But not because we don’t want to include anybody, if someone has a really good product we’ll stock it. We’re not going to say, we already have one of those, but as a starting point it just felt like it should be not an overwhelming thing. And because in here the main focus we wanted to make sure was on the meat initially, this stuff you can gradually add, but the meat you want to be set on from the beginning because you want people to know that’s our focus.
I was really impressed the first time I saw the meat, and I don’t know if it is because I write recipes for a living but you can tell a chef had put it together not a traditional butcher. Lots of butchery counters, obviously butchers love to cook but it’s about their craft, whereas this is very much ready to cook with.
Yeah, well it’s funny because one of the things, I can’t remember what it was, it might even been venison haunch that the boys had been butchering and Will did it and he took all the silver skin and everyone off and put it in the window. You don’t need to do that because obviously you’re selling it, but Will was like you’re not going to cook it with that on so if someone buys a piece of venison and has not cooked it before and leaves that on it’s going to be horrible, so he’s thinking like a chef, not a butcher. And in that regard I think that encourages people to try something perhaps they’ve not done before because if they do take that and cook it it’s going to be lovely, and you know, it’s ready for them to cook it. But then there is also balance, because for us it’s a new thing and a lot of the things like the pre, well I don’t want to call them pre-prepared, but the things that you can just pop in the oven.
The chicken kievs I got the other week were really good!
So yeah, things like that which obviously for us we were like how much of that stuff actually sells? People love it, that was very much Lazlo [the butcher at Fern and Farrow] being like this is something that you do have to do, people come into butchers knowing there is probably going to be something and they’re ‘ooh, what’s that?’ and it goes. And I think that’s a balance between making it look a bit more refined still.
Do you think with those bits you’ve also got the credibility, because obviously during lockdown you had all the different things you were doing where you had pre-cooked meals, people know you do catering, I remember going to Longland and people in the queue for Christmas birds saying they’ve gone and got the box of everything but the turkey from you guys and they were picking up the turkey or goose to complete their Christmas dinner.
Yeah so if people are coming in because they know us, and it’s something that that’s definitely our next thing we want to do is, we want to get a freezer and have a freezer section with meals like we did during lockdown but because we’re about to enter into wedding season we want to see out the summer with our barbecue bits, but when we get to winter that’s what we’ll do, we’ll focus on starting up the freezer because they went so well, they literally got us through lockdown.
I’m really excited about this, because I don’t like ready meals but sometimes after a really long day of recipe developing that’s what I really loved about the chicken kiev.
Yeah, because you know it’s still a whole chicken breast, not mashed up chicken that’s barely chicken anymore. We very much sometimes have to eat for convenience, that’s the ironic thing, isn’t it? You spend all day cooking either for something else or for other people and we get home and go ‘what are we going to have for dinner?’ It’s that ironic thing of working in food and actually quite a lot of the time that being your last thought for yourself because you spend the day thinking about food for other people. I mean it does not really bother me because I don’t find cooking dinners chore, like I know for some people I know it is, it’s like the equivalent of housework, isn’t it? For me that’s not what it’s like, but I completely understand how difficult it would be if that is how it feels. But I also know how even I don’t fancy like cooking something when I’ve been staring at food for 12 hours, so you either just have to have something that’s there, or you have to have crap sometimes. There is not time for a plan.
But yeah, products-wise we’ve left ourselves space in here to add in, because there is always new things, and I think that’s how you keep people interested, isn’t it? You want your standard stuff so people know ‘I can get that at Fern and Farrow Farm Shop’, but you can also be like ‘oooh, they’ve got something new in’. That’s a new side of things I like, understanding what people buy. Things like with the offal and stuff, I do Wednesday’s normally on the till and I love seeing what people buy because, like, the lambs liver is always the first to go. People love it!
Before we started recording we were talking about the different ways different generations shop, do you think that things like the liver are so popular because supermarkets are more geared towards younger generations now and they way they prepare food, and our parents generation started off buying from butchers so it’s a familiar thing to do rather than go to the supermarket? They can otherwise only get what supermarkets choose for you to eat.
Yes, supermarkets choose. They have a monopoly don’t they, so if it’s not in a supermarket you can’t get it. And it’s things you can get excited about buying from somewhere else, places like The Goods Shed are so nice because things like fish and all of those extra little bits, quirky vegetables you can’t always get in the supermarket. I think supermarkets have noticed that there is a shift back now so they are doing better at that, but also because if you put offal in a plastic packet it does not look good in there. It’s all a bit sweaty on the inside. You’re not going to pick that up if you’ve never cooked it before. Whereas if you make it look appealing in with everything else, and it’s not stuffed into corner in its own section and looks scary, people might give it a go.
Something else I like about the meat counter here is that as a cookbook author I know I’m lumped in with the people guilty of things like when they say ‘ask your butcher to do this for you’ or ‘ask if they have the bones’. Butchers don’t mind, but I think maybe if it’s not out there on the counter there is the intimidation factor of asking for it, especially in today’s society, not wanting to ask, so I really liked when I first came in that the leftover chicken carcasses from the joints were there because you feel you can ask for them, because they’re right there.
And people buy them a lot, and that’s really funny you say that because obviously I love my cookbooks, I cook from them a lot, and when we first opened I said to Lazlo you’re going to hate me because I’m going to go through all my books and find the most obscure thing where it says ‘ask your butcher to do this for you’, and I’m going to test you. Because I’m like, I’ve looked at that before and I’m like, they’re not going to do that, or you don’t want to ask them to do that, but that’s part of why you would come in here. We had a really lovely Italian lady come in recently and she obviously loves cooking. She came in and was so excited we had ox cheek. She bought both of them, and she came in again and brought marrow bones, because she’s been buying bone broth and it’s so expensive, and marrow bones are what? £1.50 or something? And she said that it’s so nice to be able to be inspired by looking at the meat counter rather than thinking ‘oh I need a list of exactly what I’m going to have’, so I think it is just difficult to think sometimes because people do cook and eat in different ways from how we do. You know my shopping trolley would have ingredients in it, not boxes of frozen things which a lot of people do rely on. There are some days when you do have to reach for something like that. For so many people it is the other way around from us, so I think it’s about getting people not to be scared of those things. And to challenge the idea that buying like that is more expensive, because it’s not. Actually the frozen stuff quite often is. It might not seem like it, but you can get so much more out of ingredients.
It’s like the reverse Gousto [a meal kit service similar to HelloFresh and Blue Apron] effect, isn’t it?
I’d never used Gousto or anything like that, and Will’s friend came the other day because he was away for the week and forgot to cancel. So he turned up with five Gousto meals we needed to cook because they were going out of date. I’d never seen one before and I was absolutely baffled by it, because obviously there are all these tiny miniatures of cheese, and I was like I get it, I understand why that is obviously a thing, but this can’t be the most efficient way of doing this. For me it felt so inefficient. But because I’ve always been someone who loves ingredients, I love buying something where I’m like ‘ooh, I’ve not used that before’. My cupboards are full of ingredients; the boys always joke that we’ve got a full commercial kitchen, but they’re like ‘we don’t have any of this’ and they look at me and I’ll be like, ‘I do!’ And if you have that stuff which sits in your cupboard forever, you can make something out of not much, whereas if you don’t have any of that stuff you are going to feel uninspired because your fridge has some fairly uninspiring stuff in it and you don’t have anything to make it taste nice.
Moving onto how you cook at home, how do you decide what to make for dinner? I know you’re a big collector of cookbooks and lean a lot into Asian flavours? Do many leftovers or spare ingredients from either the catering business, and now the shop end up coming home with you?