Norfolk Our Food

British food is about more than what we put on our plates.

Our landscape, our climate and our history

define what we grow and where we grow it.

Ah!

This is the mustard that built empires.

Each place, each region, each food has its own story to tell.

How many hop flowers do you need for a pint of beer?

-Just a couple.

-Just a couple.

So like these two, that's a pint?

I'm exploring Britain to discover how our soils and seas

have shaped our tastes and traditions.

How our food is part of who we are.

Those were the shoes that were put on the cattle.

-So they would fit those...

-They really shoed cattle?

-They did.

Alongside me on this journey

are historian Lucy Worsley,

archaeologist Alex Langlands...

Actually, if you look just a little bit closer,

you can see all the signs of a working landscape.

Botanist James Wong.

And horticulturalist Alys Fowler.

This really is the most delicious fish.

Oh, you can taste that it's been somewhere, that you know,

it's had an adventure.

This is the story of our food.

This time, we're in Norfolk.

Out on the very eastern edge of England,

this is a county where local, seasonal foods sit alongside

large scale crops, harvested for the nation.

A county of enterprise and tradition,

held together by a watery transport network.

So how do I make it go that way?

You pull that that way.

I'm going to be travelling by quite the nicest heavy goods vehicle

I've ever encountered.

Sailing a wherry

deep into the beating agricultural heart of Britain.

But my journey begins in the far north of the county.

I'm starting here, on the Norfolk coast at the crack of dawn.

In search of a very local delicacy indeed.

Here, you're going to need that. Let me get your other strap.

Who normally dresses you in the morning?

My mam.

Well, give her my love, will you?

This is how most days start for John Davies.

Come on, Giles!

Fishing for crab off Cromer.

Very elegant.

It's one of Britain's few remaining longshore fisheries.

This means they fish along the shore, There's no harbour.

The boats launch straight off the beach.

So you've got a lot of sat-navs here, then.

Do you not know where we're going, then?

I have a little idea where we're going.

You've got pots out, presumably,

and this is going to tell you where they are.

Yes, all my pots are marked on that screen.

And that's where we're now heading to.

It can't tell you how many crabs there are?

Can't tell me how many crabs

and it can't tell me if there are any crabs there.

In years gone by, you worked some of the ground

your father and grandfather worked.

Your father and grandfather were fishermen?

Yeah, we go back eight generations, and not a lot's changed since then.

The pots have changed a little bit

but the basics of it are still the same.

Cromer crab is one of Norfolk's most famous foods.

There's going to be some surprised crab in there.

Technically, they're a species found across Western Europe

but the crabs along this particular stretch of coastline

have a reputation all their own.

They're smaller, sweeter

and have been part of a very seasonal way of life for centuries.

How old are these fellows?

It varies. Some like this are eight or nine years old.

All I can tell you is, it's not going to get any older.

So why here? Why Cromer? Why are there so many here?

It's a fairly unique seabed here for this part of the coast.

It's a very flinty bottom, quite a lot of chalk.

And the crabs seem to like that.

As a small crab, they can hide in the crevices.

Is a Cromer crab a kind of small crab?

Yes, they are quite a small crab.

We have one of the smallest,

if not the smallest, measure in the British isles.

And that is a special Cromer measure.

That is a special Cromer measure.

Which is 115mm, and you measure that across the back of the crab

and that would just be legal size.

Does it make them more delicious that they're smaller?

I think they're sweeter tasting, yes, I must admit,

but I think a lot of that is to do with the seabed as well.

Do you want to pick it up, have a look at him?

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, no.

No.

Male and female crabs are called jacks and hens

and are easy to tell apart. Apparently.

That's a male crab, a nice jack crab, here you are, you hold that.

Just hold him up the back. He's not going to hurt you.

Keep your thumb out of the way. Just flat of your hand.

All right?

And that's your female crab. You can instantly see the difference.

You've got the broader apron, where the male has got a narrow apron

and bigger claws.

Yeah, it's almost like a drawing of a male...sexual...

Yeah. He's quite fortunate, because he's got two.

But we've only got one.

-Speak for yourself.

-The female has got two vaginas.

Does he put them both in at the same time?

I would imagine so, yes.

So it's even more difficult than it is for most other animals.

Which ones are we keeping?

We're keeping the male because he's got a good hard shell,

there'll be meat in that. The female will be virtually empty.

Ay! Sorry, he's fine, he's just squeezing my wrist. It's OK.

I'm still listening.

So this one's got to be returned straight to the sea, unharmed.

I'm afraid that one has got to end up in the pot.

For a long time, Cromer crabs

were just part of a Norfolk fisherman's haul,

a springtime feast.

But as cod and herring stocks dwindled,

the longshoremen started to specialise.

Their traditional double-ended boats

made it easier to haul pots in a swell.

And the expansion of Cromer as a Victorian seaside resort

opened up a whole new market.

Tourists came in on the newly built railway, and crabs went out.

They were no longer a local secret.

They were a brand.

These are all too small?

Those are all too small, you can put them back in, Giles.

Historically most crabs were sold live,

but today customers prefer them cooked and dressed.

John is a rare survivor in a business where costs are rising

and the number of crabs has fallen.

The catch is cooked overnight

and ready to be sold the next morning by his wife, Clare.

-Hello.

-Hi. Pleased to meet you.

That's a dressed one.

And what's gone? Is it all there, the brown meat and the white meat?

Underneath, you actually have the brown meat.

And then the white meat - all of the legs and everything else.

So you pick that out, and that goes on the top.

On a good day, in the height of summer,

we can sell between 200 to 300 crabs.

It's a delicacy, really. They're so fresh.

They're caught, they're cooked and they're presented

and you can buy them within a matter of hours.

-It's a taste of the seaside.

-It is, yes.

-It's a taste of Cromer.

I consider myself reasonably competent

when faced with a boiled crab in a restaurant.

This is where all the hard work is done.

But Tracy is in a different league.

How many can you do in an hour?

I can do 20 in an hour.

Very technical machinery you've got here.

Girl, boy, girl.

It's just terrible knowing.

Like that?

-That's it.

-It's quite a moment for me.

I'm just going to eat a bit of brown meat, just to see.

Pure brown.

Little bit powdery.

Rich, buttery, a bit like sort of foie gras.

That yellow bit looks hardcore,

do we know what part of the crab that is?

No, I don't think so, just the brown meat.

Smoother, mild, like the froth on a cappuccino.

Not even remotely fishy, properly creamy, almost dairy.

I mean, Tracy's doing a beautiful job. I've made a terrible mess,

but it's incredibly beautiful stuff.

It's incredibly gorgeous meat, it's incredibly sweet,

it's incredibly healthy.

It's incredibly local and sustainable.

You go out on the boat and it comes back

and, you know, 24 hours later you're eating it.

Beyond Cromer, the shingle coastline shifts and changes.

Salt marshes blur the edges between land and sea.

To the west, the tide retreats twice a day to a never ending horizon.

It can feel like the end of the world

but it's full of edible treasure.

Along the coast, Alys Fowler is discovering a place where

wild food is still very much part of daily life.

You'd never guess that I was standing on the shoreline

because the sea is almost a mile away

and this is an awesome vast landscape of almost all sky,

and when you first come here it's slightly flat

and almost a little dull until you get into it

and then it becomes this embroidered tapestry,

this miniature world of diversity.

Small channels let the seawater flood in on each tide,

and only specialist, salt-tolerant plants can grow here.

This is sea beet

and you eat it much like you would spinach or Swiss chard

and here is horseradish, that you'd have with beef

and this mallow here is very good with scrambled egg, delicious.

I eat tonnes of this stuff.

But this is the plant I've come here for.

It's known as poor man's asparagus, glass wort, even crab grass,

but more commonly as marsh samphire

and it's an incredibly trendy thing to eat these days.

You find it in London restaurants and fishmongers,

but out here in Norfolk

people have been eating this for a very, very long time.

There's a reason I'm not picking these plants.

Much of this coast is protected,

and the advice from the trusts that manage it

is that visitors like me shouldn't pick its wild harvests.

But local people have used this landscape for ever,

and they have commoners' rights.

If I'm going to taste samphire, then I'm going to need it picked for me.

-Hello!

-Hello.

Gary Mears has lived along these marshes all his life.

What are you looking for when you're picking samphire?

The main thing is that it's fleshy rather than spindly.

If it's fleshy, it's got more taste on it.

Samphire is a curious plant.

Close up, it looks like a succulent cactus.

You can eat it raw.

Oh, my gosh, it's so salty.

-Very good for you, full of iron.

-Mmm.

It's delicious, actually.

Samphire is a pioneer species,

one of the first to establish its roots in a salt marsh,

stabilising the mud so other plants can move in.

It's a glue that helps hold the landscape together.

It's also part of the fabric of life here.

At one time this marsh, from here down to Cley,

would have supported 150 different families.

How? Gosh!

With bait digging and cockling, with samphire picking.

You'd have spells where the crabs were shooting their shells

or breeding, and you would subsidise it with this.

Then you went herring fishing and that would turn into bait digging

and that would turn into reed cutting.

It's amazing, isn't it?

You can basically seasonally live off this landscape.

Cockles called stookey blues were also collected by the locals.

That was nearly all women who came out here in adverse conditions,

who were absolutely hard as nails.

Gosh.

With an apron, and picked cockles with a little dinner fork.

In the middle of winter, with bare legs.

-It doesn't bear thinking about.

-No, it doesn't.

Samphire is a summer treat,

usually picked from June till August.

-It's more than a food. It's a part of a way of life.

-Come on, Alan.

While some supermarkets now sell samphire from Europe,

and expensive restaurants give you a sprig beside your Dover sole,

here, samphire is traditionally picked for what's known as a feed,

to put on the table as an everyday supper.

-You just leave a little bit of the woody piece at the bottom.

-OK.

To hold on to when you eat it.

A lot of people round here just eat it as a vegetable with meals,

-you know, you just steam it.

-Can we try some, then?

-Yep.

Gary eats Samphire by holding it by the stem,

and running it through his teeth.

Delicious.

You end up with a mouthful of soft, warm, salty flesh.

Mmm.

Oh, wow, it's a totally different thing when it's cooked.

It is. It really is.

-It's sort of sweet. And salty.

-Lovely.

It is really good.

Samphire comes from a time

before commercial agriculture and supermarkets,

a time when, if you wanted vegetables,

you went out to pick wild ones.

So what does it mean to be able to come out here and pick?

I think it's something which country people do have to defend

because it's one of the most natural things you can do in the world,

so as long as I can come out here, I will come out here.

The local, seasonal foods of the coast

are just the beginning of Norfolk's story.

This county is also the beating agricultural heart of Britain

and to make large scale farming work, you need to be well connected.

In the east of the county,

that meant the incredible inland transport network

of the Norfolk Broads.

A flooded manmade water-world,

dug out for peat and drowned by nature.

I'm going to follow the River Yare inland to Norwich.

Today the Broads are a haven for wildlife and tourists.

But this was once a working landscape,

filled with working boats.

I think that's my ride, which looks very strange,

like a boat coming through a field

and, er, that black sail is more than a little bit sinister.

-Hi.

-Hi there, Giles.

Do you want a hand?

Yeah. If I could throw you this. Don't miss it.

Well, you didn't miss me.

Henry Gowman is skipper of the Albion.

He and his crew are going to show me

how Norfolk used to put food on the table.

So what sort of a thing is this, then?

This is a traditional Norfolk wherry

and it's as rare as hen's teeth, almost.

Only two left of the 300 that used to sail the broads.

Got to hope the other one sinks, then?

No, we wouldn't wish that on anybody. Blimey.

Albion was bought by The Norfolk Wherry Trust in 1949.

In the early years the trust tried to keep her working,

but today she spends her time taking out landlubbers like me.

There's nothing here that remotely refers to health and safety.

We're not about to put up any guardrails at all.

If you keep your wits about you, which I'm told you have.

HE LAUGHS

You never know. Not boat wits.

The Albion was built as a workhorse.

The decks are removable to reveal one big hold.

Lots of cogs and gears going round,

so don't get any clothing snagged up in the gearing.

She was registered to carry 35 tonnes of cargo.

Everything from turnips to coal.

Do not ever, ever put your hands on here.

But even so, could be operated by just one or two people.

Well, I can swim, if that's any consolation.

That's not much help on the broads, really.

It's full of broken trees, all kinds of things.

Dangerous place to swim.

I don't have to come at all, you know.

A wherry's basic design is believed to date back to the Vikings.

With no engine, she relies on just one sail.

With the black sail of death hoisted...

Why is the sail black?

To start off with, they were white, but they decayed a lot.

Then they decided to coat them with herring oil

but they then found that that made them attractive to rats,

so they then coated them with coal tar, coal dust.

What, on top of the herring oil?

-Yeah.

-And the rats didn't like that.

No, but I can't imagine the crew would have liked it either, really.

Well, the smell must have been...

So this one presumably is just painted black?

We cheated. A touch of modernity.

The landscape here is so flat. It's just river, reeds and sky.

And the occasional derelict windmill.

Technically speaking, a wind pump.

It would once have had sails, that one.

It would once have had sails, it would have been draining water

but has been superseded by the little building alongside,

which is a diesel electric pump controlled by radio signal.

The next wind-pump along, Hardley Mill, has been restored,

and my wherrymen suggest I jump off for a look around.

Now I think I want to lower.

Despite their best efforts,

we manage to overshoot it by some 400 metres.

Because we have no engine,

we have to enlist a little bit of help to get us back on track.

It makes you think about the skills of the old ferrymen

-without a motor having to pull in.

-Absolutely.

With the wind behind you in that direction,

extraordinarily difficult.

Do you think it's coming back in, then, the mill?

There are over 300 of these scattered throughout the broads

and the idea was bringing water off the land, off the marsh,

to turn it into land for the grazing of cattle and sheep.

-So that would be marsh initially?

-That would have been marsh.

It's amazing to think that they could do that.

There is nothing around the broads which is entirely natural.

The whole thing is man-made.

Including some of the rivers.

And the other thing to note here is that we here, on this river,

are higher than that surrounding landscape.

We are, we are, that's extraordinary.

And that's because all the water's been taken off it,

pumped off there for generations.

And it's settled down.

Yeah. The land has consolidated.

It's faintly like we're flying.

That's right, it almost feels like we're flying.

The flooded landscape started to be reclaimed in the 13th century,

it's been a slow process.

Hardley Mill was originally built in 1874.

Powered by the wind in its sails,

it could pump 12 tonnes of water a minute,

draining the land for cattle and crops.

It's a transformation that's helped put more food on our tables.

Head deeper into this agricultural heartland

and beyond the broads is the modern face of Norfolk.

Vast fields of crops, as far as the eye can see.

This is major commercial agriculture.

And it relies on one thing.

Rich, fertile soil.

Archaeologist Alex Langlands is discovering how Norfolk farmers

made their landscape one of the most productive in the world,

by changing the way we farm.

We just come down here a bit.

There's a bit at the edge of this field.

It's a classic Norfolk field. It's actually enormous.

I can just about make out the other side of it,

but this is what we've come for.

This is classic Norfolk soil,

and it's famous, really, in this country for its productivity.

It's the perfect soil to grow crops in.

But the problem is,

if you keep growing crops like this year on year,

what they will eventually do

is take all of that goodness out of the soil.

The other thing is, you get a build-up of pests

and funguses that thrive on that crop,

so what you've got to do is, year on year,

you've got to change the crops that you're putting in the ground

so that you keep it in good heart.

Farmers have rotated their crops for centuries.

In medieval times, horses like these at Gressenhall Farm Museum,

would clear the land for a different crop each year.

Yup te go, lads, yup te go, yup te go, go on.

And every third year the land was left to lie fallow and recover.

This system worked. But there was still room for improvement.

So Norfolk farmers started to think about

how they could get more from their rich soil.

Left hand down a bit.

I'm with you, I was going a bit deep there, wasn't I?

Animals were a vital part of medieval farming.

They provided fertiliser for the land and natural horsepower.

But they also needed to be fed through the lean winter months.

Gee up.

In the early 18th century, a new idea started to take root.

A four year rotation, with a new crop added.

The mighty turnip.

Wheat and barley were now alternated with clover and turnips.

Clover put nitrogen back into the ailing soil.

Turnips fed the animals through the winter.

Professor Tom Williamson

knows how important this was to British farming.

The critical thing is that you can keep far more animals.

More animals means more meat, but above all it means more dung.

You can get more animals on the land

if you've got turnips in there rather than fallow.

-Yeah.

-Because it's much more nutritious

than the kind of weeds they'd be eating otherwise.

So the knock on effect of that is, having more animals means more dung,

-more fertility, ergo higher yields.

-Higher yields.

It was a simple idea. And one that Norfolk became famous for.

It's still the foundation for modern British farming.

Though one element is missing.

I'm travelling around Norfolk today,

and I'm not seeing a lot of animals.

So what's replacing those in the rotations?

There's a great change happens through the 19th and 20th centuries,

which is, farming becomes more industrialised.

You begin to get artificial fertilisers.

Because you can get fertility in a bag,

you don't need to keep sheep or cattle,

and so in the period of the 1960s, 1970s, farms just shed animals,

you don't need animals any more.

You don't need animals for pulling stuff because you've got tractors.

Right, so you lose horses from the landscape.

You lose the horses.

And you don't need the animals for fertility any more.

Once you don't need the animals, you don't need hedges.

So right through the '60s and '70s,

there's an orgy of hedge removal

and there are bits of Norfolk now which are like a prairie.

The fields and the technology may have changed

but for farmer, Kit Papworth,

it's still all about how productive the soil is.

Computers measure every inch of his harvest

as it goes through the combine.

These are maps of what our yields look like with the combine.

The different colours show the different yields across the field.

We've got a patch of red in here. What does that mean?

Just slightly lower yields.

A waterlogged area or something like that.

Under a tree. And the darker blue areas are high yield.

Extremely high tech, this is.

Absolutely, but this is where modern agriculture is at.

You think what medieval farmers would have given

for this type of technology.

Yes, but they knew their land really well, though.

Because farms were smaller, they knew their land incredibly well.

They're harvesting it by hand. They probably knew what we know now

except that we need the technology to show us.

The horse and plough are long gone,

replaced by satellite technology.

So this is hands-free farming.

Just amazing! I'm doing absolutely nothing here

but I'm watching the chart,

which is telling me that I'm one, two, zero centimetres out

from a line that's drawn from space down the middle of this field.

This is absolute precision drilling.

Crop rotation and turnips might seem like ideas from the past.

But they're still leaving their mark on Norfolk's agriculture.

If you get the chance to come up to this part of the world

and check it out, you will see a landscape

which is really at the forefront of farming, globally.

You know, what they're doing here is producing food

on an almost factory level.

It's quite awesome. In a way, I regret seeing hedgerows ripped out,

you know, and seeing an ancient medieval landscape changed

but at the same time, I can't help but admire

the farmers here for their tenacity

and for the way in which they've turned this landscape

into the food producing machine that it is today.

On the Albion, we're meandering up the River Yare towards Norwich.

So how do I make it go that way?

You pull that that way.

You're heading straight for the bank, so push that right out there.

-Push, push, push.

-Further?

Further, further, further. Otherwise you're going to be aground.

This was once one of the busiest cargo routes on the Broads.

It was absolutely, for hundreds of years,

the only way of getting heavy goods from one place to the other

because the landscape was so, so wet.

You couldn't get a cart about with heavy goods,

so the rivers became the main arterial routes.

The small villages,

if they weren't connected up to the main arterial route of rivers,

what they did was to dig a dyke or a channel

from their village to connect to a river.

-A slip road.

-Absolutely.

With a good wind behind her,

a wherry could make around eight miles an hour.

Whole industries grew up along the riverbanks.

So what's this big horrible thing here?

This big horrible thing here is hugely important

to all the agricultural areas around that grow sugar beet

and this is where sugar beet is brought to be processed into sugar.

It's a big Norfolk thing, is it, sugar beet?

Huge. Huge Norfolk thing.

This is where sugar beet production started.

This is where sugar started to be produced in this country.

This place has been going for over 100 years

and sugar beet was delivered here by wherries,

so the wherries would moor up at the bottom of the farmer's field

and the farmers would load up heaps of sugar beet.

It's now brought here by lorry.

This is a register from Cantley Works

and what's fascinating, really, is the names of the craft.

These are names that would have occurred in the skipper's family.

Ben? There's a boat called Ben. There's a boat called Hilda.

And she's brought in 25 tonnes of sugar beet

and they've paid her 6 shillings and four-pence.

Nobody got very rich doing this, did they?

No, they didn't.

Albion was actually the last wherry

to deliver the very last cargo of sugar beet to Cantley.

-To that very place.

-That very place.

And they probably stopped in that pub for a pint to...

-Absolutely no doubt.

-..to sign her off.

Sugar beet might not be delivered by wherry any more

but it's grown all over Norfolk.

To the north, near Brancaster,

botanist, James Wong, is uncovering the roots of this 20th century crop

that tastes much better than it looks.

I can safely say I have never seen this many geese before,

it's almost like a biblical plague.

These guys have come all the way from Iceland,

where they spend their summer.

All to Norfolk, just for one thing,

and it's the same reason as I'm here.

They're here to check out the sugar beet.

For farmers, the beet tops are a useful distraction.

They keep the hungry geese away

from their valuable crops of winter wheat.

These are small pieces of sugar beet

that have been left over from the harvesting.

And you can see quite clearly the nibble marks,

where they have been pecking away at all these pieces.

And really, this is a brilliant source of calories for them.

Very few things in nature

are packed with up to a fifth of pure sugar.

Sugar has always been precious and, until the 19th century,

all of ours came from sugar cane grown in the tropics.

But now an incredible half of it

comes from this rather grubby looking root,

which is grown right here in Norfolk.

Sugar beet is a biennial plant,

which basically means its lifecycle is two years.

It's sown one year and sprouts from those seeds.

And in that first year, all it's trying to do

is use its leaves to trap the energy from the sun,

convert it into sugar that they store or warehouse

in this enormous root.

And what farmers do is basically capitalise on that

and don't allow them to flower the next year.

They raid this big old energy store and turn it into sugars.

It's almost sort of breaking into a hive and stealing the honey.

For farmer Mark Thompson

the harvest is all about getting the most out of the beet.

So take me through what's going on over here.

Well, the sugar beet is being harvested.

It goes into a turbine, where all the stone and soil is thrown out,

and then into the tank at the back, which empties into the trailers.

We want to get that beet into the factory as soon as we possibly can

to get the maximum sugar yield, maximum weight yield.

We get paid on the weight of sugar within the root.

The light, well drained, alkaline soil of Norfolk

is perfect for sugar beet

but Mark will use this field for other crops too.

So this is all done on a rotation?

This field would have sugar beet one in four.

Between that, it would have a wheat and a barley.

So what are the benefits of it being on a rotation for you?

Well, the rotation allows us to control disease.

If we were to try and grow this crop every year

because it was the most profitable crop,

then we would quickly develop disease and problems within the soil

and the potential yield would drop.

Norfolk farmers have always been ahead of the game.

Turnips used to be the key to crop rotation,

a way to feed the animals through winter.

But as farms became less reliant on livestock, turnips fell from favour.

By the early 20th century, sugar beet was the new crop in town.

It grew well in Norfolk soil,

it decreased reliance on foreign imports and it made money.

Farmers here knew a good idea when they saw it.

Today all UK sugar beet is sold to a single processor, British sugar.

It's different from all my other crops

because there's only one buyer.

In addition, I know the price that I am going to receive

approximately 18 months before I've sold it.

So before you've even planted it

-you know how much you're going to get for it?

-Exactly.

So that must be entirely unique because every other crop

is subject to market forces and it changes every year.

Sugar beet has been on quite a journey.

The crop that grows on Mark's farm is descended from a wild ancestor,

sea beet, a plant found on Norfolk's seashore.

This looks just like it.

Professor Keith Jaggard has spent his career researching it.

If you were to compare that leaf with a sugar beet,

-it looks virtually identical on the surface.

-Yes.

Underground, though, they'd be totally different.

Yes, this would be a root probably as thick as my finger

and spreading out all over the place

and with a sugar content of about 2%,

compared to today's 22%.

The reason sugar beet is such a modern crop

is that it took a long while to work out

exactly how to extract sugar from it.

It took a series of German scientists in the late 18th century

to come up with a process that worked,

and it isn't something you can do at home.

I can't believe we're attempting to do

what they're doing in an enormous factory

in a kitchen and extracting sugar out of these.

-Have you done this before?

-No, never.

-How many years have you been working with these?

-40!

Cantley, the first sugar beet factory in the UK, opened in 1912.

And by the 1930s, the Government was actively encouraging

the production of home-grown sugar.

You couldn't just take sugar beet out of the ground and get it.

-You've got to go through quite a few chemical hoops.

-Exactly.

A lot of chemical hoops to get to the white crystals you buy in a bag.

Norfolk was at the very heart of the industry.

It had the farming skills,

the soil and the transport network to make it work.

In the first stage the beets are sliced,

diced and heated gently to 80 degrees Celsius.

So how much sugar are we going to get out of this?

About one fifth of the volume will be sugar.

Half a cup of sugar, roughly, out of the whole of this mix.

That's not bad.

This creates a weak syrup to which the chemical milk of lime is added.

Starting to seem harder than I thought it was going to be.

And carbon dioxide bubbled through it to help remove any impurities.

So although we're doing this in a kitchen using regular equipment,

this isn't really cooking,

this is really more like an industrial process.

It is industrial chemistry.

But at this point, you couldn't eat this, this wouldn't be safe to eat.

-I wouldn't want to try.

-Exactly.

The mixture is then filtered to leave a form of juice.

How do you get crystals out of this quite dilute syrup?

We need to slowly evaporate some water off.

If it's done industrially, it's done under a vacuum

because that speeds up the water loss process.

And in the kitchen, we're just going to put it in a very low oven.

After five hours, we start to see the formation of the sugar crystals.

It looks like ice is about to form,

these little geometric... almost like snowflakes.

Out of a root we dug up in Norfolk.

I think we should have some sugar.

After 40 years, I've never managed this before.

I've never tried this before!

These little snowflakes are the beginnings of sugar.

Not quite the pure white granules we see in our sugar bowls,

but it's a start.

This is an entirely artificial process we've used.

Natural product, but artificial process to extract it.

Out of a root we dug up in Norfolk. This is crazy.

On the Albion,

we're still meandering up the River Yare towards Norwich.

Henry and Hugh, my wherry skippers,

have suggested making a short detour into Surlingham Broad.

You can turn a 90 degree corner under sail like that, can you?

Yes.

But can a normal man? Only you.

Not like... No! No!

This is no longer a river.

This is a dyke leading to a broad.

Unfortunately, the trees along the dyke

take the wind right out of Hugh's sails.

Since we've come nearly to a dead stop

and the current is slightly against us at the moment,

I think we're going to have to have a little push with the quant

to get us onto Surlingham Broad.

Traditionally, wherries don't have engines, they have quants,

long wooden poles you can punt yourself along with.

Surlingham is one of the 63 shallow lakes

that make up the Norfolk broads.

It looks idyllic, but it's actually man-made,

dug out for peat hundreds of years ago and then flooded.

It's very, very beautiful,

though littered slightly with what these chaps call Tupperware.

These pleasure cruisers.

I like that. I like "Tupperware".

Properly condescending.

Wherries were built with a shallow draught to negotiate the rivers

and broads on falling tides.

Not shallow enough, it turns out.

I think we're stuck.

We appear to have run aground,

a quant isn't going to get us out of this.

I can see panic in their eyes.

We've got a sort of flotilla of boats.

It's like Dunkirk around us, going to drag us off it.

Any chance of a lift to Norwich?

You got a... I'll sit on the back.

'I think they thought I was joking.'

Fortunately, my wherrymen have a neat trick up their sleeve.

They can fold the mast flat to stop any wind

pushing us back onto the mud.

That, and a lot of shoving from some 21st century engines,

finally sets us free.

We've been punting along on this thing,

laughing at all the day-trippers on their Tupperware boats.

They've all come through happily and come through the other side.

They're kind of fine. They're laughing at us.

Ha-ha! Captain Birdseye stuck on a mud bank again.

I'm torn in my loyalties.

Now we're afloat again, Henry has something he wants me to see.

This is definitely too shallow for the Albion.

At the very edge of the Broad is a wherry graveyard.

Two wherries that have been sunk, possibly three,

there's one behind there.

And these have been scuppered for financial reasons?

They haven't rotted away completely.

Not completely. They're made of solid oak.

And roughly when? Early 20th century?

Give or take.

Late 1800s, early 1900s. Times were changing.

Road and rail were taking over,

the economics were all changing

and no point in keeping them, absolutely no sentimentality.

So they brought them to places like this, filled them full of mud,

and sank them to the bottom.

And are the Broads littered with things like this, then?

All over, and lots of people don't recognise what they are.

And over there is the magnificent silhouette of the Albion.

And she could so easily have ended up like that.

Absolutely. Very easily.

I'm actually quite moved.

The Albion might be a bit of an old dinosaur,

but at least she's still afloat and lovingly cared for.

It's time to rejoin the River Yare and head for Norwich.

On the way, I'm hopping off at the village of Brundall

to meet a farmer with a rather unusual crop.

Cheerio, Henry. Keep the meter running.

I shan't be too long.

On the hills above the Yare Valley

lies the Norfolk most people recognise,

the vast fields of wheat, barley and sugar beet.

But occasionally, you come across a field that looks quite different.

This amazingly green crop is not something you normally see

in whole fields.

You see them in supermarkets, you know,

just buy them, take them home, plant them in the garden.

I've got one myself.

You have to plant it in a pot,

cos otherwise it takes over the whole garden.

You probably can't tell what it is because you can't smell what I can,

which is a very minty tang in the air.

This is an exceptionally local variety of mint

called Brundall Mint, after the village by the river.

David Bond has been growing it for almost 20 years.

This is all grown for mint sauce production.

More than three quarters of the UK crop will be here in Norfolk.

Presumably there is something special about Norfolk

that's good for mint.

It's a very good soil type here for growing mint.

Good conditions for growing it.

It grows very quickly when we get warm weather,

and also, we have a large processing factory at Norwich.

Mint does need to be processed quickly once we harvest it, so...

Does it?

Proximity of the harvest to the factory is very important.

You're in something of a race against time.

We are definitely in a race against time.

If you've ever bought a mint plant,

you'll know that it turns black very quickly after picking.

David treats the field as an extension of the factory.

If the factory stops processing,

then his brand new mint harvester has to stop too.

There's only one of these machines,

so it's not something that you're going to see anywhere else.

How much did it cost?

It cost nearly £50,000.

50,000 quid. And how did you alight upon green?

Green was the company colours of the people who make it, so...

-It's rather nice, isn't it? It's a mint green.

-Almost, almost.

The new harvester strips the leaves from the mint without bruising them.

It's a delicate crop, but it grows so fast

that David can get three harvests a year from the same plants.

In the 1970s,

producers here started testing hundreds of varieties,

looking for the right species

to create the perfect jar of mint sauce.

They brought some in from all over the world.

The crops manager at the time, John Hemmingway,

he had some growing in his garden,

which he brought in as well to put into the trials.

-This was just in his herb patch?

-Just in his herb patch.

And that was the one that gave the best flavour

as well as growing the best in this Norfolk environment.

John Hemmingway lived right next to where

I jumped off the Wherry, Brundall.

So he called his little mint plant Brundall Mint.

Will I see that anywhere else apart from in Norfolk?

-No, no, just grown here.

-The French don't know about it?

No, they don't. It's just grown here.

-Are we keeping it secret?

-Not so much now, are we?

I guess not.

Brundall isn't the only variety that David grows.

In this field, he's trialling other mint plants.

Moroccan mint has a more robust leaf.

You know, it tastes slightly like weeds. Dandelion.

And this one is the one we call the English garden mint.

-English garden mint.

-Choose a leaf.

Immediately, wow, but it's not especially minty,

it's sort of chemically tasting.

-So where's the Brundall?

-Here's the Brundall one.

Very chewing gummy, very Wrigley's.

You have to spit it out quickly, otherwise it numbs your tongue.

It can numb your tongue, yes.

But there's a bit of sweetness with the Brundall mint.

There is, peppery and much more interesting than the last one.

I can't go against Mr Hemmingway.

I think he's an acknowledged expert.

I think he's right. The Brundall is definitely the thing.

-Hmm. I'll just eat all of this now.

-OK, yes.

When you have it all together...

I think that sort of mixed herb type thing could go well, actually.

Could go well.

It's like chewing a duster full of pledge.

Can't recommend that. Have you ever done that?

No, I haven't, and I'm not sure I want to.

I thought you were being brave then.

Mint isn't the only Norfolk crop that's grown on a grand scale.

Windmills dot the skyline,

guardians of seemingly endless seas of wheat.

But not all of it ends up feeding people.

Historian Lucy Worsley has picked her outfit carefully

to discover how a foreign import has grown fat on Norfolk grain.

There's eight million turkeys living in Norfolk.

That's half of all the turkeys in the UK.

It seems like a really traditional British dish.

We've been eating turkey for Christmas since the 1500s,

which is surprising, given that they actually come from Mexico.

Big brand supermarket turkeys are part of the modern Norfolk story,

but James Graham's family has been raising turkeys here

for 130 years, and they're particularly keen on

these more traditional Norfolk blacks.

They're the oldest breed of turkey in this country, basically.

These came into this country around the early 1500s.

They're a small breed of turkey compared to the bronze varieties

and the colours that you see around here.

In fact, some people wouldn't even know that was a turkey.

-It looks a bit more like a pheasant.

-Indeed, that's right.

Moving the turkeys from field to field as harvest progresses

is a task that's centuries old.

And it doesn't get any easier.

Stay away from the fence.

No! Oh, you're such idiots.

They seem to go backwards when they're going forwards.

This is great, look, this is true droving.

Throughout history, Norfolk has led Britain in poultry production

because the birds can feed on grain left over from the arable harvest.

Now, this is how they would have traditionally been

reared on stubbles.

Obviously after harvest, there'd be an abundance of corn,

either from combining or, prior to that,

when they would thresh the corn, and reap it.

So it's really efficient, then?

First you grow your grain, and then you get another foodstuff

-out of the field, because the turkeys come in.

-That's right.

In medieval times, geese would have been fattening up in these fields

to get ready for Christmas.

But within a few decades of their arrival,

turkeys were challenging the geese as our traditional winter feast.

Norfolk was in relatively easy reach of the markets of London,

and this is where most of the birds would end up.

For James's mother Pat, it's a family business

and it has a long history.

Originally, they were walked down to London.

In the 16th, 17th century, there was no other form of transport,

so they were walked down the A11 from East Anglia,

all the pigs, the sheep, the poultry.

You imagine it all going down.

How long did that take on their little legs?

Drovers would drive them down the A11, in early October,

and they'd do three or four miles a day, picking up the acorns,

the berries and that on the way. They'd get to London early December,

down to Smithfield, actually, Smithfield Common.

And they'd rest around Smithfield Common and finish fattening up

and then be killed off around 15th December.

By the 1930s, Pat's family had started to kill and pluck on site.

The finished birds were then transported

by steam engine and rail.

Pat and a small team still pluck all the turkeys by hand

and she shows me how it was done in her parents' time.

That's a feather that's still to grow.

They sometimes get left in the skin,

and of course people don't like them.

And that's one of the reasons why the black turkey went out of fashion,

because the white turkey, you can't really see

these little stubs that get left in.

It's gone up my nose!

THEY LAUGH

Plucking isn't the only thing that has to be done by hand.

Well, Christmas-time we do about 2,500...

-Over a week?

-Yes, just over the week.

You have to de-gas them.

-You burped it!

-We burped it.

THEY LAUGH

And so... Can you smell it?

SHE LAUGHS

TURKEY EXPELS GAS

Oh, that's the weirdest thing I've ever seen or heard!

Rather disgusting, but they have to be degassed

and then they will keep and they will hang for that ten days or so.

Oh, my goodness, I've just heard a dead turkey farting!

Yes, you have!

On the Albion, we're sailing on into Norwich.

The river winds out of the broads

and deep into the centre of the city.

Coming up here is Carrow Works.

This would have been the termination of any wherry journey.

They would have turned round here.

There would have been dozens of wherries up here

unloading all kinds of cargoes,

and they would have been waiting here for tides.

So it would have been a really bustly place.

As a working wherry,

the Albion would have made regular deliveries here.

But the dock at Carrow also has a special significance.

This is where Albion was rescued in 1949.

As far as I'm aware, this is the first time she's ever been back.

Really? Do you think she's feeling a bit jittery?

I think if boats had emotions, she'd be feeling a little tear,

a little tear would be appearing.

Ahhh.

We've thrust into the heart of Norwich,

straight just off the Broads.

Over there is Norwich City Football Club, home of Delia Smith.

But this is one food journey that doesn't end with a taste of Delia.

It's there, it's the Colman's Mustard factory,

which is this whole building. And just up ahead there

is where every single pot of Colman's Mustard is made.

The Albion has brought me here to Carrow,

to discover what makes mustard so very Norfolk.

Cheers, Giles.

-Cheerio.

-All the best.

Mustard is a seasonal summer crop

which has been grown for its potent seeds since Roman times.

The fields and fenland around Norfolk are full of it

because it's here that English mustard

really made a name for itself.

Bob Walpole works in a business

that's been part of Norwich history for 200 years.

10,000 tonne capacity in total.

-10,000 tonnes of mustard seed, and it's all in there now.

-Yes.

All the mustard seed in all of this part of England.

I would say a good 90% now.

Jeremiah Colman took the idea of milling mustard seed

and turned it into an industry.

A former flour miller,

he blended both brown and white mustard seeds

to create a particularly strong English mustard.

The business prospered,

and a dedicated factory was built in Norwich in 1862.

By the 1880s, more than 2,000 people worked here,

with another 4,000 earning their living directly through the company.

Of course, they make mustard all over the place.

The French have French mustard, and it's all right.

It tastes mostly of vinegar.

American mustard is put on hamburgers, cheeseburgers, hot dogs.

It's all right, but it tastes very much like the mustard

of the fattest nation on earth.

Then you get English mustard. Ah!

This is the mustard that built empires.

The blend of brown and white mustard seed

used in English mustard is what makes it unique.

The brown seed provides the heat and the white provides flavour.

All the white seed used by the factory is grown in East Anglia.

For nearly 200 years, it flourished in the dry climate

and silty soil, until farmers started to notice a problem.

By 2007, yields had dropped by half.

English mustard was failing.

Agronomist Tony Guthrie had to try and save it.

So he turned to the archives.

So come in here, Giles.

This is the storeroom where fortunately there's a whole,

as you can see in here,

there's a whole range of harvest years of seed.

What an excellent, neatly kept and tidy cupboard.

It's really good.

So what I was looking for was some seed that was bright in colour,

cos if it's bright in colour it gives you an indicator

that it was stored in good conditions and harvested well and everything.

So what I did was found some seed from 1995 in one of these tins.

As you can see here, this seed, even though it's now 15 years old...

Yeah, you can still make mustard from it.

..You can still see that it looks nice and bright and clean,

so we were very fortunate that we able to find seed that grew

going back to '95 when the yields were still...

And this is basically seed from the last time

they had a really good crop.

This was '95, and it was a good crop.

Once Tony found the seed,

he had to check that it would grow into successful plants.

He sent it to the scientists at a research centre just down the road.

They tested the old seed against the modern crop, which was failing.

They discovered that white mustard needs variety to prosper.

The older seeds were all ever so slightly different.

And you can see that in the plants.

All here are different families within the same species.

They're all variations on the same.

But this one here, you can see, is taller

but it's ever so slightly paler in colour to these here.

So we have taller, paler types

and then this one is quite interesting here.

You'll notice that we've got more of a serrated edge to the leaves,

whereas here they're more rounded leaves.

In layman's terms, these two are going to fancy each other

and get it on and make more mustard

whereas this one's not going to want to do it with its cousin,

unless it really has to.

It's a sexier vibe.

You've got it.

You're going to turn off the lights

and they'll create loads of little mustard plants.

Over the years, farmers had been selecting for white mustard plants

with larger seeds.

Pretty logical. Fatter seeds contain more mustard.

But making them bigger hadn't made them better.

White mustard needs diversity to survive.

The old seeds had it, the modern ones didn't.

Finding the old seeds in the store cupboard had saved the day.

This is kind of like Jurassic Park. You know, when they find the...

They're trying to bring dinosaurs back after a billion years.

You've taken an extinct kind of mustard

and leapt forward 15 years and got it growing again.

That's right, we did. Exactly that.

That's brilliant.

Do you think you could do it with woolly mammoths?

HE LAUGHS

Farmers planted the rebooted version of the seed

and harvests went back up.

The English in English mustard was secure.

It seems to me that, you know, in this part of the world,

farming and industry and technology and large-scale production

are all very hand in hand.

That's what allowed this to happen.

We're very fortunate that the farmers have got the soil

and also, we've got the climate.

We've got a very nice climate and rainfall pattern

that help us to produce really good quality crops.

It's all sort of happening in this East Anglian chunk of England.

So we've got the science, you've got the food manufacturers,

they're all based similarly in this area,

but everyone or each company or division is helping one another.

And that's, for me, the story of Norfolk.

It's of an agriculture that's rooted in tradition

but which has moved itself forward.

Of a county that has kept the local and the seasonal,

but has also changed the way we farm.

Next time, we're exploring North Wales,

a place defined by nature and harnessed with sheer hard graft.

I've been walking for half an hour to get to these mussels

and now I'm going to spend the rest of my life here with them.

Oh!

HE LAUGHS

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