It was in a farmers' market in Cheltenham last autumn that I came across the sort of discovery guaranteed to brighten my morning. Among the breads, vegetables and cheeses was a small stall selling Scotch eggs. Not ordinary Scotch eggs, mind - these were not the battery-farmed, greasy offerings you find in supermarkets. Handmade, free-range and made with pork from traditional-breed pigs, these were proper Scotch eggs. And there were more than 40 different varieties of them.
“We started off with five flavours,” says Neil Chambers, who founded the Herefordshire-based Handmade Scotch Egg Company with his wife, Penny, in 2003. “There was the Classic Mac, which is the traditional one. Then there was Smokie Joe, which is saddleback pork and smoky bacon; Black Watch, with black pudding; Scrumpy, which is pork, apple and sage, and Vegetabularian, with chickpeas, cheese and onion.”
Their success surprised even them. Selling mainly through farmer's markets and mail order, the company still shifts up to 7,000 eggs a week - at between £2.45 and £3 each, not bad going for what is essentially a snack food.
But the Chambers' Scotch eggs are one example of a growing trend. In recent years the UK has enjoyed a boom in the gourmet food market. What was once regarded as traditional, cheap and cheerful grub has now received a luxury makeover - numerous varieties of artisan breads, hundreds of farmhouse cheeses, fruit and veg that is not only organic but also biodynamic. It is no longer enough for a sausage or pork pie to be stuffed with abattoir leftovers; now they are made from choice cuts of meat from a rare-breed pig with an impressive pedigree.
In many respects what we are seeing now is an extension of the trend that first started with wine. Back in the 1970s most people in Britain were content with a choice of red or white, or a bottle of Mateus Rosé if they wanted to push the boat out. Then, in the 1980s, wine merchants such as Oddbins opened the floodgates by importing Australian and other New World wines, and soon everyone was talking about not just grape varieties and regions but also concepts such as terroir and Grand Cru.
Chocolate and coffee underwent similar metamorphoses as our national consciousness expanded beyond Nescafé and Dairy Milk. The term “single estate” began to be applied to coffee and cocoa beans as the idea took hold that where and how something was produced could have a distinct effect on its quality and taste. Now the trend has snowballed. We have grand cru beers, breads made from organic stone-milled flours, meat and poultry traceable to individual farms. A cheesemaker in Wensleydale is as likely to talk about terroir as a wine-maker in the Medoc.
The question is, how much difference does any of this actually make? Few people would dispute that, after the BSE and foot-and-mouth outbreaks, a greater awareness of what we eat is a good thing. But there are those who would argue that the main attraction of gourmet foods isn't so much taste as exclusivity - the cachet of buying something a little different. So are we becoming more discerning in our tastes or just turning into food snobs?
“We're caring more about what we eat,” Alan Porter, of Speciality Farm Foods, agrees. “We're wanting to know more about it because of the food scares that have been floating about. But I think people are also caring more and more not just about the food but about the people who are producing it. We don't just want to know that Farmer Giles reared this cow that produced this milk, we'd quite like to know that Farmer Giles has got a decent lifestyle as well.”
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