Honey, money, and why Corsica tastes like long-chain hydrocarbons.

Hello again. Let's get sticky.

Photo by Arwin Neil Baichoo on Unsplash, which is actually a good way of describing how honey moves off the twiddler and back into the jar.

As a kid with a whole mouth full of sweet teeth, I used to flood my toast with honey, occasionally replacing the butter with clotted cream for a Cornish take on developing heart disease. Now, I’m a grownup and down to just one sweet tooth, I’m more likely to use honey in a pudding-cake, in stir-fry sauces, or to drizzle over the expensive Greek yogurt I’ve taken to buying while committing lifestyle inflation. But the story of honey, as I’ve recently discovered, is more complicated than just being the combined regurgitation of several thousand bees who perform language-like dances over hundreds of miles to indicate where the best nectar is. Honey is also one of the most counterfeited foods in the world.

I learned this during one of my fun Youtube binges when I came across a person who’s actual job title is “honey sommelier”. She told us that up to a third of the honey you see on sale today isn’t actually honey at all: at best it’s some honey cut with cheaper alternatives such as corn syrup or glucose syrup (any confectioners or bakers among you will know that these things are overwhelmingly bland), and at worst it is dyed sugar beet syrup with artificial flavouring. 

The reason for this fakery is simple economics. It doesn’t take a cocaine dealer to tell you that bulking up something expensive with a cheap filler, then selling it as if it were genuine, is a beeline for vast profits. It happens the world over with olive oil, truffles, caviar and other things that Salt Bae might consider using as deodorant. Fakery, though, is bad for food producers, driving prices down and sending real honey makers out of beesnis. A buzzkill, if you will. 

Photo by FlyD on honeynoise.com

Having listened intently to the honey sommelier, I re-examined the honey in my cupboard. It came from Lidl and cost £1.19 for 200g. It falls slightly short of a good colour to aim for for a urine sample, and tastes relatively one-dimensional; sweet, of course, with a little of that classic florality, and hint of aluminium from the lid. The claim on the jar is that it is a blend of EU and non-EU honey, and from what I’ve read, anything imported from the US or China is somewhat more dubious than anything regulated by Brussels. I’m not sure if it genuinely is a hundred-percent honey, and without phosisicated testing equipment, I have little way of knowing. 

So, I let the Honey Woman’s wisdom macerate for a while, and then travelled to Birmingham where I found a beekeeper selling his local honey at a food market. I bought a small jar, wondering (hondering) if it really could be all that much different from my Lidl stuff. Reader, it was worlds apart. The local honey was the culinary equivalent of gazing at an original painting in a quiet art gallery, while the supermarket honey was like buying a postcard print from the gift shop and letting it disintegrate at the bottom of a rucksack.

This Brummy honey cost £2.50 per 100g but the flavour difference was worth far more than the four-fold increase in price - in fact, they would be almost incomparable if it weren’t for overwrought art gallery metaphors. It tasted like if orange flowers had been grown in toffee rather than soil, and watered with an infusion of bergamot peel and rosemary. In other words - in case that was too florid - it was delightful.

Meggyn Pomerleau on Unsplash, although she’s bigger in real life.

After I went to Birmingham, I then flew to Corsica on a press trip, making good use of my time by staying in a fancy hotel and eating local honey on pancakes. Like some of my favourite people, the Corsican honey was overwhelmingly bitter, verging on unpleasant - but boy was it interesting. It tasted like gargled tobacco, bitumen and the sap of an angry pine tree. I did keep coming back for more in the end, but was grateful to have only taken a tablespoon of the stuff to start with. 

I’m hoping to make a honey chart at some point, and do impressions of a slightly dotty honey sommelier myself - especially when I come across really interesting ones like the Corsican goo. Perhaps I’ll even share it with you on a social media app, like Pooh bear in the early days of his marketing apprenticeship for the 100 Acre Wood. 

Should you pay more for better honey?

Everyone has their own opinions of where food falls on the scale of “worth spending money on” and “stick with the basics''. I think most stuff like onions and potatoes and tinned tomatoes and natural yogurt and milk and oats have little discernible difference from the stuff that costs 20-50p more. Bread is worth spending on, as meat, fish and certain other vegetables like mangoes, washing up liquid and pizza. Unsurprisingly, honey now oozes into my category of “worth the dough”. 

So if you haven’t already - go find the punk honey. If you want to bake regularly with it, cut it half and half with the cheap stuff so that you’re not haemorrhaging cash - but if it’s for pancakes or yogurt, or even for something delicate or wobbly like a custard tart, go the whole hog and use 100% of the good gear. It’s worth it just for the taste, but the nice thing is you’re also supporting smaller producers; perhaps the smallest, stripiest producers we have.

Thank you, the end, apart from the next 400 words, which are optional extra bonus words. 

Photo credits Dominik Van Opdenbosch on Unsplash. Branch: model’s own.

Optional extra bonus words: Part I

When Edward Lear wrote The Owl and the Pussycat in 1871, I’m not sure he was thinking about the practicalities of transporting large quantities of honey. If you’re unfamiliar with the poem, here’s the first half of the first stanza*:

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea

In a beautiful pea-green boat,

They took some honey, and plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five-pound note.

The owl, the cat, the sea and the boat can all pass unrumbled through the airport linguistic imagery scanner, but the money bit is where it gets troublesome. I’ve always imagined these belongings as a jangle of coins, covered in honey, wrapped up in the fiver in the same way that one might roll a joint, or carry a disobedient otter in a beach towel. This is troubling: in my mind’s eye the coins slip about everywhere and the honey leaks out of each end of the banknote, straight into the owl’s pocket. 

The more logical way of the owl and the pussycat bringing their possessions on their journey as written would be to wrap the coins and the honey in the paper money like a well-crafted dimsum; either spring roll style, or like one of those lovely little knapsack dumplings that comes tied with a strip of seaweed. But a modern five pound note is now too made-from-plastic to event attempt this sort of deep-fried tomfoolery, and I imagine a larger one from ye olden days wouldn’t quite have had quite enough surface area to take the amount of honey to last a whole voyage - let alone enough shrapnel to buy a decent cocktail on arrival, or pay tax to a passing seal. 

I’m certain that the Owl and The Pussycat would have worked out a better system between the pair of them by the time they sailed away for a year and a day, and danced under the light of the moon - but I think what we can take from this legend is that it’s a great simile for the flavour profile of modern supermarket honey. Which tastes like coins which have been in an owls’ pocket for too long. 

Optional extra bonus words: Part II

Luckily, the poet Edward Lear invented a word which I think describes supermarket honey quite well. That word is runcible. He originally used it to describe a spoon, but it doesn’t have a set, parsable meaning. (When a word is found lurking in a corner without a meaning attached, you can assign it any other meaning you like. That’s the truth because I did a linguistics degree.) 

I happen to think runcible means untrustworthy in an obvious sense. Not maliciously so; it’s different to being slimy or sleazy. Runcible owns the fact it’s a bit rugged and dodgy. You’d still want a pint with someone who is runcible but you wouldn’t give them your debit card to go and buy it with, if you know what I mean. In the same way, supermarket honey is a bit of an obvious villain; a runcible jar. 

That really is the end. Thanks for being here and reading this.

Fliss xx