pig

Length: 2 mins Having just discovered a great new butcher, Adrian at Franklins Farm, near Sandy, this was the result. A superbly juicy rendering of their Gloucester Old Spot pork: Pork Braised in Sherry with Tomatoes and Chorizo Chop the pork into largish cubes, remove the… Read More »Friendly fabulousness from Franklins Farm

Length: < 1 min “The poetry of butchery.” “This is an ancient art.” “Respect the animal.” This man loves meat. He loves the craft (for craft it definitely is) of butchery. He loves the animals that he butchers and then serves in his restaurants in Panzano. And to hear… Read More »The MAD-ness of “Carne e Spirito” and Dario Cecchini

Length: 3 mins Tripe… A word that you might have only heard from your granny. Along with “offal” (which some folk seem to think rhymes with “awful”) and “gizzards”, it is one that has been known to send American friends run screaming for… Read More »What a load of tripe.

Length: 2 mins Give them shelter from the weather but let them out to roam across the fields & pastures. That’s how pigs were always treated until the comparatively recent advent of factory farming and a lot of people are currently now, and… Read More »Out damned spot(s)…

Length: 3 mins I can’t lay any claim to being a great chef but still enjoy trying new tastes, new textures, flavours, smells, ingredients. I decided to use Tom Kerridge’s recipe for the piece of pork belly we’d again bought from Brian at… Read More »Chef Kerridge and a great piece of Mangalitza belly pork

Length: < 1 min On Friday we picked up some of the Berkshire Pig pork from the Old Weston Garden Farm small-holding, located only a few miles away from our village. We’d seen the pigs (they also have some Gloucester Old Spots which I’m writing… Read More »Some good words about fat (or lard)…

Length: < 1 min We didn’t get a chance yesterday to grab one (or more) of their truly excellent hot-dogs from Herman Ze German’s place in Old Compton Street but this omission will be remedied very soon… Popped quickly into the Wellcome Institute gallery… Read More »Pigs in The Smoke

Length: < 1 min An interesting piece on BBC Radio 4’s “On Your Farm” this morning; talking about The British Lop pig that I wrote about before, being bred at Trevaskis Farm in Cornwall, farmed by the Eustice family (in a strange quick of fate,… Read More »Buy & eat them today – way down West

Length: < 1 min It’s the first day of 2014. I’m 4 hours into the Johnnie Mountain recipe for Slow Cooked Belly Pork so, whilst waiting for this to come to fruition, I’ve ordered the “The Pig: A British History by Julian Wiseman”, to check up on the history… Read More »More Essex goodness (or The Croshaw throwback)

Length: < 1 min Thanks to my son, who bought me this for Christmas, we’re now working our way through the great recipes from Johnnie Mountain’s “Pig: Cooking With A Passion For Pork”. Photographs and success (or failure) stories to follow… You can follow the… Read More »Cooking the pig the Mountain way

Length: 2 mins Smell is reputedly one of the strongest and most evocative of the senses available to us humans — this note about the smell from a piece of mortadella reminding the writer of the same food his mother gave him as… Read More »When aromas set you off and running down memory lane

Length: < 1 min

Length: 2 mins The title? Firstly a reference to a T-shirt in the States, trumpeting the undoubted virtues of the Duroc breed. And also a note that the British Saddleback was crossbred from the Essex and Wessex varieties and has popped up in… Read More »They do rock – with tough ancestors from Essex

Length: < 1 min And not for the first time… Here’s the BBC report via YouTube People sound surprised that the boar is doing what it does in the woods…. From the BBC Sports News site: Wild boars have caused havoc at the home ground… Read More »Wild boars wreck Forest of Dean football pitch

Length: < 1 min We drove up to Cold Overton in Rutland to meet up with Jan McCourt at his Northfield Farm and to talk about his great Lop pigs — a breed rarer & more threatened even than the marvellous Mangalitsa — about… Read More »Northfield Farm; talking and buying

Length: 4 mins Chef Besh is a hugely well known name on the US culinary scene and originates from the Deep South and is, understandably, wedded to N’Awlins. We ate regularly at one of his restaurants, The American Sector, whilst working in New Orleans. The… Read More »“On the wooly Mangalitsa pig”

Length: < 1 min Not literally. Nothing like that. In the old days on the farm, we’d use a spray can of indelible (and psychedelically garish) coloured paint to mark the pigs to show if they’d been wormed or de-tusked. This however is somewhat different.… Read More »Branding the Mangalitza

Length: < 1 min I’m busy writing up more history words in conjunction with Brian Codling and it’s becoming a bit of a marathon, albeit a labour of love. So, as a sort of stop-gap for all you porcine fans champing at the bit… Read More »The many and varied parts of a porker

Length: < 1 min Courtesy of the hugely enthusiastic, incredibly knowledgeable, very helpful & delightfully informative, Brian & Sylvia Codling at Rectory Reserve, we spent a morning looking around the rolling Wold hill-side pens, being sniffed at, snorted & drooled over and generally enquired… Read More »Mangalitza curly coat goodness