Cornwall, Where Old Traditions Are Giving Way To Something New

Cornwall has always been a place apart from the rest of England—a proud and fertile province where the pasture meets the sea . But now the old traditions are giving way to something new, as the next generation of chefs, farmers, and fishermen transform their pastoral corner into a culinary eden.

- Jeff Chu

One day last summer chefs Tom Adams and April Bloomfield splashed through a stream and then crossed a field behind Coombeshead Farm, their 18th-century Cornish farmhouse. Adams, of London’s celebrated Pitt Cue, and Bloomfield, a British native best known for her New York City restaurants the Spotted Pig and the Breslin, have turned the property, which is set on 66 acres of gently rolling hills near the village of Lewannick, into a five-room inn and restaurant. They were expecting a dozen dinner guests that evening, and the afternoon’s mission was to forage ingredients—wild sorrel, blackberries—for the meal.

We stopped under an oak tree reputed to be well over 600 years old. “I wonder what this tree has seen since day one,” Adams said. Consider: it would have been 150 years old when Queen Elizabeth I ascended the throne, nearly 400 when the American colonies broke free from Great Britain. Adams shook his head. “How insignificant am I?”

The land doubles as a buffet, if you know what to look for. I didn’t, so Adams narrated. We passed wild watercress, common hogweed (whose seeds taste of citrus—more orangey than lemony), and pineapple weed, which Adams plucked, rubbed between his fingers, and held to my nose. It offered an instant olfactory trip to the tropics. The sorrel we gathered would go with pig’s-head rillettes. Blackberries were destined for an arranged marriage with Cornish cream. “Such abundance,” Bloomfield said.

Returning to the farmstead, we skirted a streamside forest. Suddenly, Adams and Bloomfield unleashed a litany of expletives more typically heard in the heat of professional kitchens than the cool of the Cornish shade: “Holy sh**. Oh my god.”