Local food

The local food movement, which is of great interest to all of us or certainly should be, is a very complex issue. 

While we all applaud the new drive toward "localism", it is the duty of those at the artisan/production end of food to move things on a bit. 

The strides we have made in the last few years are really quite amazing, and now, the much more difficult thing to achieve will be to move "localism" outside the foodie fraternity.

The hardest nuts to crack would be those people for whom value for money and cost are the biggest motivators. The problem with this group is not their unwillingness to act, but the lack of the right tools to do so; tools like education and the means to generate the raw material to cook with - you might say, the ultimate conundrum of the chicken or the egg. 

When we do crack it, the food culture will change beyond all recognition. Maybe then we'll be able to look back with pride, at all the many people who fought so hard for this change in so many ways, remembering that it was the many individual drops of rain into a bucket that eventually filled it.

Pig Swill

One of my youthful memories is of Mr. Mulgrew in his mazda pickup collecting the kitchen waste (or pig swill as it was known) from the local hostelries. Normal kitchen waste would be taken home to feed his omnivorous pigs, and this would make the pigs a little over fat but choc full of flavour (not dissimilar to the much vaunted rare breeds pork of today's Artisan butchers).  The first reason for not feeding the pigs of today entirely on swill is the modern requirement for uniformity of size and fat cover of the animal. It has been ascertained that the way to get more uniform carcasses is to spilt the feed into twenty percent cereal ration and eighty percent swill. There is also a concern for balancing the carbon footprint generated by cereal/ soya consumption, but the consensus is that there is no way to entirely cut out the soya consumption by pigs straight away.  The second reason, is the disastrous Heddon-on-the-wall foot and mouth outbreak.  This made legislators run scared from swill feeding, and an EU wide ban on swill feeding pigs very quickly followed.  It seemed at the onset of the ban that most people hadn't considered the crime of food waste to landfill as an issue .... This issue always has in my view, been one of the most important food and farming issues. Thankfully, it's also a view that many sections of the media now seem to be adopting.

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!