How to deal with your butcher

When you think about the best product, it is always made or sold by a skilled technician and has to be to earn the label BEST, but also, it must always be made or sold with PASSION.

Its an odd thing passion, as ewe would often only associate it with art or maybe great Michelin star chefs and not necessarily butchers, but remember without the very best ingredients those Michelin star chefs wouldn't be able to create that masterpiece. The other thing maybe to remember is that doing a difficult, dirty, physically demanding job means (and being one of them I'm qualified to comment) that butchers need to be approached using kid gloves. 

First tip if you want something out of the ordinary is, don't be a turkey customer. What is a turkey customer? - well, this is the person who uses their butcher once a year, walking into the butchers saying "can I order a turkey, the one I had last year was great." Clearly your butcher hasn't thought of or dealt with any other samples of meat since Christmas last year.

The turkey customer will get what they ask for, but throughout the year if you want something special, ask for well aged mutton leg or beef onglet for example (picture below) and make sure the turkey customer gets pushed to the back of the queue.

Seventeen century mutton and oyster sausages

Our culinary history is a fascinating subject and in food terms, a gold (or graphene) mine.

A few years ago, my friend, the world renowned food historian Ivan Day, and I decided that we would make an old surf and turf recipe - Mutton and Oyster sausages. 

The recipe, if that's how ewe would describe it, was in an accounts book of the kitchen in a Cumbrian Big house which was only able to tell us the kitchen purchases (the ingredients) and had no measurements or methodology. Ivan was able to extrapolate from the existing knowledge of future versions of this recipe so that we could make them. 

We used the best quality Herdwick mutton, the freshest Colchester oysters and some spices that I had never heard of like long peppers. 

It was the most amazing sausage I have ever tasted, and I have tasted a few sausages during my thirty seven years in butchery. The problem as ever with things like this, is that they were made to be consumed on the day and have no shelf life .....it’s a shame, as I am sure given a chance, that they'd be venerated in our high end Michelin star eateries across the world.

Luing Cattle

Luing is a small island off the west coast of Scotland and the farmers there have a breed of cattle second to none. 

The Luing cattle are a small, just above belt buckle, high breed of cattle, and, a cross between the iconic Highland cattle and the beef short horn. Both these breeds of cattle individually produce magnificent beef but the crossbreed is better adapted to the windswept Isle of Luing. 

One of the advantages amongst many is its carcass size - if ewe like your sirloin steak rare (as ewe should) a thick Luing steak won't break the bank. In comparison, to get a thick rare steak out of commercial cattle like British blue it would have to be at least 450g (about a pound in weight). Do the math.

Watch out for Luing in proper shops will keep ewe informed.

Agriculture today

On the train to and from London I’ve been noticing in quite a few fields, the reeds and the rushes left over from recent months of imitation wetlands all over the country. Here we have a reminder of how finely balanced the farming systems around the world are, and, for those of us involved in agriculture, the continuing awe at how a high tech society like the UK can be so easily slowed to a crawl by weather. 

Yet more evidence of the importance of considering food farmers as the essential, respected parts of society that they are. 

The Wild Lake District

It is assumed by tourists who come to the picturesque Lake District that it is a natural untamed environment  - not a bit of it! 

Within the UK, our environment has been shaped by centuries of food and forestry production and the Lake District is no exception to that - the hill sides were deforested to accommodate the iconic and stout Herdwick sheep. Some of the best lamb and mutton in the world (and as an expert I say that without fear of contradiction) is produced from the Herdwick sheep. In Elizabeth I’s time Herdwick mutton was known as the Queen’s mutton and was the best ewe could get!

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Sloe Gin

It is my duty to tell ewe that this drink sneaks up behind ewe and pounces!

Sloes, the fruit of the blackthorn, are a small, purple, plum-like fruit found wild in hedge rows up and down the country.

There's no better use for them than for making into sloe gin. As a fruit they are dry, bitter and not very appetising but, made into sloe gin it’s like drinking fruity nectar - deceptively alcoholic and perfect for adding a taste of summer to the winter evenings.

The harvesting process is particularly easy but timing is crucial as it is best to harvest the fruit after a decent frost (this breaks the skin and helps with the infusion)..... soon after this the fruit will fall off on its own.

Here's a way of ensuring the fruit gets the frost treatment - pick them a week earlier and put them in the freezer. Remove them after checking that the skin has broken then, leave the fruit gin and some light Muscovado sugar to infuse in something like a Kilner jar for a few weeks, decant the precious liquid and put into bottles. 

Store in a dark cupboard for consumption later to chase away the winter cold. 

Ewe can even keep the used sloes as a bitter cherry for addition to cocktails. My mate Graeme the chicken man said it was "incredible."

Antibiotics resistance

There is an ongoing argument about the state of antibiotic resistant bacteria and as ever the overall picture is a complicated one. 

The worst kept secret in agriculture pharmaceuticals is that prophylactic antibiotics are widely used as a growth promoter and disease inhibitor mostly in pig and poultry production.

Consequently those antibiotics are passed on through the meat to us... not news to us insiders but it in my opinion this fact should be on banner disaster news headlines across the world! 

Can ewe imagine a scenario with your doctor saying “I am sorry that chest infection has no cure”? I can.

Even in the face of little hope, one major start would be to remove antibiotics from agriculture - a difficult thing to achieve, but not an impossible one. To start the change of antibiotic resistance, pork and poultry production would have to be more extensive. We would get lots of advantages from this, like better animal welfare and better quality of meat but it would cost more, so we’d eat less.... Eat less Eat better seems a win win to me.