'I'm an urban dickhead to some extent,' says Rose Grimond, 28, when I meet her amid the bustle of Borough Market in London, opposite Brindisa Spanish Foods (her role model) and next door to Neal's Yard Dairy, which sells the Grimbister Farm cheese that her company, Orkney Rose, promotes.
It's a modern, metropolitan take - self-deprecating, wry, slightly shocking - but her words don't describe the Rose Grimond I get to know two weeks later in the Orkney Islands. What she means is that she lives and works just off London's Bermondsey Street (the epicentre of epicuria), surrounded by brasseries and shabby-chic gastropubs such as Garrison and Village East, knows her Ramsays from her ramsons, can rustle up a frittata and probably mixes a mean caipirinha. Yet her passion for food and its provenance has kept Rose's feet on the ground and her feelings in touch with the land, especially the haunting, heather-strewn hills of the land where she grew up.
In Orkney, her second home, where her grandfather, Jo Grimond (leader of the Liberal Party from 1956-1967), was MP for 33 years, she morphs easily from Bermondsey Boho to Barbour Babe. This is where she spent much of her childhood, staying in the Old Manse, her grandfather's grand house surrounded by the Glebe, a 100-acre farm, where she returns every few weeks for a breath of Orcadian air.
Dressed in waxed jacket, dark gabardine trousers and wellies, she meets me at Kirkwall's tiny timewarp airport in a vintage cream Austin dating from 1928. 'It's not mine,' she says, introducing me to George Bailey, its owner, 'but I wanted you to arrive in Orkney in style.'
A month previously, Jamie Oliver had done much the same thing, posing for photographs with Rose beside the Austin and meeting her suppliers. 'He came up here with Sainsbury's because they want to buy British,' says Rose - and the Orcadian foods she sells from her stall at Borough, and to London restaurants such as Roast, Chez Bruce and the River Café, are among the very best in Britain.
'There's organic heather-reared lamb, fantastic beef, wonderful scallops, smoked salmon, cheeses, oatcakes, jams, chutneys, honeys,' she enthuses, as we pull up at New Holland Farm to meet Tony and Elizabeth Bown of the Orkney Organic Meat company, purveyors of rare-breed pork, beef and lamb.
As Tony talks passionately about Tamworth boars, Oxford Sandy & Black sows and Shetland cross lambs sired by Suffolk, Texel or Cheviot rams, Rose poses for our photographer in the Austin, peering through the back window and clutching a ginger piglet and its jet-black sibling.
'It's like a weird wedding photograph,' quips James Scudamore, Rose's fiancé, mindful that they are due to marry in July. It will be a society wedding for sure. Rose's maternal grandmother was the actress Dame Celia Johnson (Brief Encounter) and was married to Lt Col Peter Fleming - brother of Ian, author of the James Bond books. Her paternal grandmother was the sister of a life peer, daughter of a life peeress and granddaughter of a hereditary peer.
James, 31, thick-set like a rugby player with a foppish flop of blond hair, is a novelist who last year published The Amnesia Clinic - set in Ecuador, where he spent some of his expat childhood (he also lived in Japan and Brazil). Like Rose, he went to Oxford University, leaving with a first-class degree in modern languages. Rose read English at Oxford, then went to drama school in New York - the Atlantic Theatre Company - and became an actress, touring for five years and sharing an agent with Ruby Wax and Jennifer Saunders. 'The Soho House type of culture,' she says, slightly wearily.
'I'm a good actress but it wasn't loving me back,' Rose admits, over a starter of caramelised hand-dived scallops with chillis, expertly cooked by James at the Old Manse where we are staying. Stage work was scarce, Rose says, 'and it wasn't my future, sitting around in my twenties waiting for the phone to ring'. She gave up acting to work for a while at the Economist where her father, the Hon Jasper John Grimond, is foreign editor.
While subsequently working for Frances Cairncross, high sheriff of Greater London ('a ceremonial hangover, the oldest non-elected office after the Queen's'), she was told she was 'exceptionally organised' and indispensable. 'I burst into tears,' she says, theatrically. 'My talent wasn't with King Lear!' Newly aware of her flair for organisation, she left her job to set up Orkney Rose last year, and the company began trading in September.
It's more a social enterprise than a hard-nosed business, I glean, as Rose explains that Orkney has one of the UK's lowest economic growth rates. 'The aim is to support 20 local producers,' she says, in an accent that is more Oxbridge-actressy than aristocratic. 'If they can't sell their food, they have to sell up.' Then she uses another well-turned phrase - 'If it's not sustainable, it's not obtainable' - before laughing, and admitting she stole it from her PR consultant.
Rose is clearly someone who gets things done, and all day she has been phoning around for extra scallops ('There are five boats, but the divers spend 70 per cent of the time not meeting demand because of the weather!'), picking up jars of honey, driving down to the Jolly's Fish warehouse, on a grey industrial estate outside Kirkwall, to make sure the week's consignment for Borough Market has made it on to the flight to Inverness, from where it will go to London by train.
By now, she has kicked off her shoes and is slopping around in stockinged feet, hipster trousers and an old cardigan, cooking up 'Westray crab, parsley from the garden, garlic, chilli, white wine and vermicelli' to follow James's scallops. Her mother, Kate, was never an enthusiastic cook, she says, and she is the only one of three sisters with a passion for food. 'I care about it more than anything,' she says. 'I wake up every day thinking about it.'
Orkney, she explains, is 'a culinary microcosm, with no urbanisation and no imports'. Talking to Rose and to Murdo MacLeod, our photographer from the Isle of Lewis, it's clear that Scotland in general and Orkney in particular have kept a close connection with the land you don't see in England. Many islanders still keep a cow, and Veira Russell, a trawlerman's wife whom we later meet, makes 'squeaky' cheese (like a cross between a feta and a cheddar, young, fresh and smelling of the pasture) in the garage next to her ordinary semi. 'While the kids are at school, I make cheese,' she says.
It's such a refreshing antidote to the scale and pace of London that you can see why Rose feels therapised in Orkney - and, judging by the warm reaction of the islanders, the self-declared 'urban dickhead' will always be welcome there.
'My grandfather was buried in Orkney,' Rose says, adding that 'the whole of Kirkwall was lined with people' as hundreds attended his funeral at St Magnus Cathedral in 1993. 'I thought, "Bloody hell, what are all these people doing for grandpa?" I was young, so I wasn't really aware of his political achievements; I just knew him as this sweet old man who liked the garden, not as one of the creators of the welfare state - but I do remember my dad's cousin, Helena, coming up for the funeral. She brought some foie gras as a house present.'
I look at Rose's features - the strong eyebrows, almost too dark for her skin and hair colour; the broad face and slightly pointed chin; the puckish demeanour - and realise she is talking about the actress Helena Bonham Carter. Rose is fairer and more conventionally beautiful, with pale green eyes that are almost luminous, but the family resemblance is nevertheless striking.
As James selects another bottle from the cellar, Rose gives a hilarious precis of her lineage. 'Grandmother [Laura Bonham Carter] was dynamic' but 'sadly had a stroke and lost her nouns'; she was married 'for thousands of years' to Jo Grimond. Her mother was Lady Violet Bonham Carter - 'who was related to someone called Asquith, who was a prime minister'.
In the barn of the Glebe the following day, Rose's aristocratic bearing and thespian past are fused in a single photograph. She has changed out of her utilitarian rainwear and put on a fuchsia-pink skirt and black skinny-rib jumper, the Bermondsey Boho uniform she must secretly keep in a wardrobe at the Old Manse. Flanked by farm workers Jimmy Brown, 83, and Barry Slater, 66, sitting in battered old armchairs, she stands with arms folded, ankles crossed and head tilted slightly back, looking every bit the fashion model and the lady of the manor.
Jimmy, who took over the farm when Jo Grimond died, has known Rose all her life - as has Barry, who still does the physical work at the Glebe. In this picture are three generations of the Grimond 'family' (four, perhaps, if you count the lamb on Barry's lap) and a portrait of Scottish feudal life.
Esther, Barry's wife, is the Grimonds' housekeeper, looking after the Old Manse when it isn't being occupied by a visiting member of Rose's family. It's a relationship that is symbiotic and benign rather than servile, since Esther is also revered by Rose as the best baker in Orkney, and her oatcakes, gluten-free and made to a secret recipe, are distributed and promoted by Orkney Rose and available at Borough Market.
Outside the pebbledash-fronted Harray Stores, where Esther makes her oatcakes (as well as bere bannocks, or loaves, made from a variety of barley unique to Orkney), she poses for the camera and grapples with 10 griddle pans, watched by her giggling shop girls. 'When I'm especially busy baking bannocks,' she says, 'I do 10 at a time in rotation.'
We visit the water mill where the bere meal for Esther's bannocks is ground. The powdery, chalky flour produces a loaf that is hoppy, yeasty and mealy - 'an acquired taste', says Brian Johnstone, the miller - 'and you're best to drink it with some ale'. Next we go to see Erland Omand, a beekeeper and breeder of queen bees (a specialist job) who sells his Orcadian honeys through Orkney Rose. The heather variety is 'deep amber, aromatic and good with game,' he says; the clover one is 'light, golden, floral and excellent with white meat'.
In the driving rain, Erland endeavours to show us his hives, but the damp and cold have made the bees furious. Clad in his apiarist's hat, veil and protective suit, he suppresses them with puffs of smoke from an incense burner full of smouldering sackcloth. 'They think it's a forest fire,' he explains, 'and the fear makes them gorge themselves on nectar or honey. That makes them sleepy and content. It's a way of calming them down.'
Later we meet Bob Nelson, who grows heritage tomatoes - green sausage, red-and-orange striped Tigerella, Black Russian ('a deep mahogany') and Lemon Tree ('the colour and shape of a lemon') - under glass, convinced that the long daylight hours at this latitude give them their intense flavour. Near the Old Manse, we are introduced to the Seator family, makers of crumbly, fresh Grimbister Farm cheese flavoured with walnut, garlic, chives, even chilli and whisky.
In Stromness, Davy Garson of Flett's Butchers proudly shows me the Orkney Aberdeen Angus carcasses that have been hanging in his cold store for 14 days. 'The longer they're hung, the blacker they turn,' he says.
It's a 'culinary microcosm' all right, and everywhere we go we are greeted with the same civility and respect - and with a quiet reserve, a marked reluctance among the islanders to boast about their produce or even speak much without being spoken to first. That's one reason why they need Orkney Rose, I suppose, though I wonder if this reticence is their natural manner, or simply a throwback to the deferential days of lairds and shooting parties. There is no forelock tugging or kowtowing now - but there is no doubt, in my mind, who is boss.
· Orkney Rose (0560 11 55 643, www.orkneyrose.com). Rose Grimond's stall is at Borough Market, London SE1, on Fridays and Saturdays
