Piggywigs

Just took delivery of some Berkshire piglets. Bedded down in the straw
to keep them warm.

weaners

I took Polly and her sister to the abattoir on Monday morning. They
went without any fuss and were handled carefully and respectfully by
the staff, who deal exclusively with smallholders and rare breeds.
They had a couple of apples each to see them on their way.

I picked up the carcasses this morning and brought them back to the
Primrose for butchery. As with their brothers, the meat is beautiful,
firm and rosy pink, with just the right amount of pure white fat on
the back. I did feel a twinge of regret as I submerged Polly's head in
a bucket of brine, but only for a moment when I called to mind the
succulent "fromage de tête" she was going to provide.

Then I took the hams I had made from the earlier batch out of their
brines - two from their beer and molasses and two from the dry salt
cure - the "wet" ones will be smoked and cooked soon, but the "dry"
ones were wrapped in muslin and will be left to hang for a minimum of
8 months before eating. I'm counting the days.

I went out to the piggery in the afternoon to see the three "weaners"
that were delivered earlier. When I looked in the pen I couldn't see
them, and thought maybe I'd got the day wrong. Then I saw a tiny snout
appear from behind the ark, twitching and sniffing the air. All three
were huddled up hiding but they soon came out to say hello. They're
about the size of a Jack Russell and it's amazing to think that Polly
and her siblings were that size only 6 months ago...

day of reckoning...

Well, it had to happen. The pigs reached the age and weight where they
are at their best for eating. A lot of careful planning went into
preparing them for the final day - for their own sake and for the sake
of the quality of the meat, it is extremely important that their
journey to slaughter should be as stress-free as possible. We elected
to use the abattoir at the University veterinary school, which is
small, efficient and within 15 minute's drive of the farm. The trailer
was brought into the field the day before and the pigs were encouraged
climb in and out and generally get used to it. We then built a run so
that the following morning they could leave their pen and climb
straight aboard - the last thing we wanted was to have to chase them
around the field before loading. Monday morning I turned up with a box
of ripe pears as bait and with some trepidation we opened the pen. As
they had been unfed that morning a few pig-nuts were all that was
needed to persuade them up the ramp. Once aboard, they settled down to
breakfast while we hitched the car up. I was concerned that the
unfamiliarity of being transported would worry them, but in fact once
we started moving they lay down and fell asleep for the whole journey!
On arrival, after demonstrating my incompetence at reversing with a
trailer, they were so comfortable that I had to get in and push them
out. They were then walked to their holding pens, where they stay for
half an hour or so before slaughter. It was all very quiet and calm
and indeed quite surreal.

When we were happy that they were settled, we left and returned three
days later to pick up the carcasses. Any concerns I might have held
over the quality of the meat were dissipated the moment I examined it
- all those months of fine food had paid off handsomely. The meat was
firm and pink, with a fine layer of pure-white fat on the back and
smooth dry skin - ideal for crackling.

I have spent the past few days butchering and starting the process of
preserving. So far we have two dry-cured (prosciutto-style) hams on
the go, two Wiltshire hams in a beer and molasses bath, sweet-cured
bacon - off next week to be smoked at the Valley Smokehouse in Dundry,
terrines of excellent brawn, scratchings and crispy ears in
breadcrumbs. Sausages, chorizo and salamis will follow. The loins are
already on the menu and have been very favourably received.

We have another weaner arriving next week, and so the process will go
on - she'll be ready just before Christmas - watch this space...

our bar

People often ask us where our wonderful bar top came from - 6 inch
thick solid larch with massive iron bands and weighing about 3/4 tonne.

Years before we opened the cafe, we were sailing the Caribbean on our
3-masted ketch Primrose when she foundered in the legendary hurricane
Norma. She went down quickly but luckily the rudder came free and we
were able to cling to it and, surviving the storm, we made landfall in
Tortuga Bay after three days, wet, parched and exhausted. The rudder
stayed where it had beached for several years before we decided to use
it as the centrepiece of our new business venture.

We travelled back to Tortuga Bay in 1993 and with the help of one-eyed
Captain Bob, a local stalwart, we managed to persuade the crew of a
tramp steamer to haul it back over the Atlantic for us - you may
remember seeing it being towed up the river Avon on Points West.

Much sanding and varnishing later, it ended up where it is today,
doing sterling service in the Primrose Cafe since we opened and with
no doubt many more years' life left in it. It's never forgotten its
origins, though, and when it's dark and windy outside and all the
customers have gone, you can hear it creak and groan and, if you put
your ear to the metal and listen carefully, you can still hear the
sound of the waves...

salt

I read with dismay in the Independent recently that plans are afoot in
the city of New York to ban the use of salt in restaurants "in any
form in the preparation of food for consumption by customers, whether
on or off the premises". Now, you may think that what happens in the
city of New York isn't relevant to us here, but beware – much of what
happens in the good ole US of A eventually makes its way over the
pond, especially knee-jerk nanny-state legislation promoted by a
legislature anxious to be seen to be doing something proactive for the
well-being of its citizens.

Nobody would deny that the overconsumption of salt is detrimental to
health but to impose a blanket ban on its use in restaurants is both
disingenuous and short-sighted. Salt has played a huge part in our
history – so highly prized was it in ancient times that Roman soldiers
were paid in it (hence the word "salary" – derived from the Latin sal
for salt). The British would never have become a great sea-faring
nation without the preservative properties of salt – how else could
our sailors have stayed at sea for months at a time? I'm sure their
lives were hard and many died young, but probably not from salt-
related coronary heart disease. My own grandmother lived to the ripe
old age of 87 and I remember vividly the Georgian silver cruet on her
dining table and the ritual sprinkling of almost everything she ate
with a few grains of salt. What she never did, however, was to eat
anything processed – and herein lies the real culprit for our
overconsumption of sodium chloride: processed foods and fast food rely
on huge amounts of salt (and sugar) to make their products even
vaguely palatable. One randomly picked single portion Birdseye ready
meal contained 90% of the adult RDA – add a good squirt of ketchup and
a pack of Pringles and you've doubled your daily recommended allowance
in one go.

A blanket ban on the use of salt in restaurants is not going to make
the problem of its overconsumption go away. The uncaring majority will
still eat their way to an early grave on junk food and crisps. The
real losers will be the ones who care about what they eat and those
who cater for them when they go out. Who can resist the sublime taste
of a few flakes of Maldon on a pat of Lescure unsalted butter? Will we
no longer be able to serve the delights of a confit de canard or a
salt-baked seabass? And what about crackling, bacon, ham and countless
other foods that rely on the judicious use of salt to make them shine?
Are we seriously all to be reduced to the bland mediocrity of hospital
food?

You may think it's never going to happen, but just beware; I for one
wouldn't be surprised to find myself forced to cook without salt in
the not too distant future, seeing my customers disappear to the
toilet to snort a line of Saxa, no doubt cut with baking powder by an
unscrupulous dealer, or the furtive man out in the street, accosting
prospective patrons – "Psst! Wanna buy a wrap of Maldon?" Imagine the
TV news headlines – "Customs today seized a shipment of Himalayan
Mountain salt with a street value of £15m…". And I suppose some
restaurant mergers would produce appropriate names - how about All Bar
Salt?

Personally, if this hideous piece of legislation ever makes it over
the Atlantic, We should kidnap the vote-hungry minister responsible
and force him, like the king in the fairy tale, to eat all his meals
prepared without any salt whatsoever – he'd be crying for mercy within
24 hours….

Well,I did get a bit of a shock today. I tiptoed into the field with a
box of goodies, camera at the ready, because I wanted to photograph
the piglets waking up and emerging from their arks. I put the box
carefully down on the grass and as I did so I was knocked for six by
Megpeg, who had escaped from her enclosure and charged at me from
behind. Needless to say, she had no aggressive intentions toward me,
but rather saw me as an obstacle to getting at all the food I had
brought. Before I could get up and dust myself off, she had stuck her
greedy snout in the box and wolfed down a slice of chocolate and
orange cake I had been saving for her mother, complete with the
Terry's Orange segment stuck into the icing for garnish. I managed to
lure her back into her enclosure with a couple of Cox's Orange
Pippins, which I then gave to one of the others out of spite.

The big treat of the day was a couple of dozen overripe hass avocados
which the piglets devoured in seconds, together with some coriander
stalks and a couple of onions - a kind of deconstructed guacamole.

bowled over

escape

Went on the River Cottage "pig in a day" butchery course last week,
which was most informative and instructive, learning to use every part
of the carcass - as they say, the only part you can't eat is the
squeal. With the help of master butcher Ray Smith, we made sausages,
hams, salamis, chorizo, roasts, pancetta, bacon, stuffed tenderloins,
liver pate, faggots, brawn et al and still got home in time for tea.
However, this did mean that I started viewing our pigs in an entirely
different light, measuring them up for the different cuts and feeling
them all over to make sure they're laying down a good store of fat...

Perhaps sensing the possible threat, two of the pigs made a bid for
freedom. They had evidently formed an escape committee during the
night and tunnelled under the wire. Having made it to the field,
though, the sight of all that lush green grass evidently made them
abandon their plan and when I arrived in the morning with Poppy they
were busy ploughing it up with their snouts. A couple of slices of
ginger cake was enough to coax them back into their pen.

I brought a rather nice sticky toffee pudding for them, made in the
best Sharrow Bay manner by slicing it in half after baking and filling
with treacle sauce before allowing to go cold and then reheating with
yet more sauce over the top. The pigs thought it was good, too.
Poppy, of course, was green with envy and stole a Hobb's House crusty
baguette out of the box, slinking off to a corner of the field to
nurse it undisturbed.

For the smaller pigs I had brought some rather nice lemon sponge
puddings (no suet, of course, Heaven forbid!), which had fallen off
the end of the menu and needed hasty consuming - the piglets obliged,
naturally, by consuming them hastily, before tucking into the fruit
box. I also sneaked an almond croissant to Polly when the others
weren't looking and she very generously shared it with her sister.
Poppy, as usual, was green with envy and made a complete nuisance of
herself, trying to get at the food first, snapping at the piglets and
being thoroughly beastly. She even chased them into their pen when
time was up, which actually made my job a lot easier as they're not
the easiest animals to round up.

cake

For some reason we seem to have been discarding a lot of cake
recently, the main beneficiaries, of course, being the pigs. Mother
pig came out to greet me as usual and was particularly grateful when I
gave her a considerable piece of chocolate fudge cake, courtesy of a
celebration cake Grace had made which involved a lot of hollowing out
- see picture

Polly and her sister enjoy an almond croissant

mangoes

Now that the thaw has set in, the pigs' living space has reverted to
its normal state - ie knee-and in places thigh-deep in thick glutinous
mud. The piglets are ok with this, but mother pig rarely ventures off
the concrete area where her ark is sited, because if she does, she
sinks up to her udders in seconds and might well disappear without
trace like the floundering villain in "Hound of the Baskervilles".

Still, it's nice to visit them and see them basking in spring sunshine
- their snouts taste the air the moment I appear to see what I might
have for them today - less than there might have been as the bloody
freegans have raided the veg box I was saving for the pigs, taking all
the apples. Luckily the best stuff was hidden under a layer of slimy
lettuce which they declined to move, Clifton's freegans being of the
more sensitive variety and not liking to get their hands dirty.

Anyway, I gave the pigs curly kale and cavolo nero, but they ignored
it, rightly suspecting there was better to come. They tried an very
soft avocado with some garlic, a kind of deconstructed guacamole, in
best Michelin-starred restaurant style; then they had a few dried
apricots but when I produced some large Ecuadorean mangoes which had
"gone over" they went into raptures and devoured them with little
piggy squeals and grunts of pleasure - so fast that not even Poppy the
greedy labrador who currently holds the world record for speed-eating
could have matched the rate at which these disappeared. As mangoes,
they went. Very fast indeed

The pigs are again under a fresh blanket of snow. I struggled up the
hill with a huge basket of fruit and plonked it down for them, gasping
for air. There were apples, bananas, plums and grapes - it felt like a
hospital visit to a huge family of porcine invalids. There were also
teacakes and - dare I admit - Rhodda's Cornish clotted cream (a kilo
of it...)I did think twice before bringing this last item and not
because it was two days out of date, though still good. Then I
remembered that Parma ham is made from pigs that have been fattened on
the whey from parmesan production, and very tasty it is too. And as
for the old adage that a moment on the lips... well, a lifetime on the
hips is exactly what the pigs need and I don't see why they should be
any less spoilt than their Italian counterparts.

I did hear somewhere that Gordon Ramsay complained Sarah Boyle has a
face like a pig - how insulting, my daughter said, coming from someone
with a face like crackling...

snowed-in pigs

It's been impossible to drive up to the farm and see the pigs for
nearly a week now. They live at the top of a very long, narrow winding
lane which the snow and ice has rendered virtually impassable to
vehicles. Not that this has prevented plenty of people from trying,
though. Each day I've walked up there I've encountered someone
valiantly (or stupidly) trying to negotiate the hill. You can see by
the frantic skid-marks who's got the furthest - maybe someone should
install marker posts and award points... They usually get so far up,
lose traction and then their car begins to slide gracefully but
inexorably, like the rock of Sysiphus, back down the slope. We stopped
to help the first few, but we've become inured to the sight now and
just trudge past on our way to the farm, laden with treats.

Mother pig, I have decided, is a true epicurean if you strip away the
hairy wrapping. She waits in crocodile sleep whilst I attend to her
offspring in the other pens, the twitching of her tail the only
giveaway to her alertness. Only as I approach her pen does she come up
to greet me, a porcine Clement Freud, snuffling at my bag to see what
might be inside. Today, when I spread out the contents, she inspected
them all before deciding on a crust of Hobbs House 100% organic rye
sourdough, closely followed by a slice of our own home-made soda
bread. She moved on to a pile of apple cores - the remnants of a spicy
apple and currant chutney we made yesterday - and finished with a
generous chunk of ginger cake which I'd found lurking in the bottom of
the freezer. After she'd chomped her way through that she cast around
for remnants and then her eyes lit on me asking was there any more?
When I said there wasn't she turned mournfully away and went back to
her ark, having a last look on the way for perhaps that elusive post-
prandial truffle.

On the way back we came upon a place where the road was covered in a
sheet of ice, perhaps from a burst water main. I had great fun
throwing sticks for Poppy and watching her scrabble around like some
elephantine Bambi. I got my come-uppance though, when she came
charging towards me, lost her footing and then rolled into me, sending
me arse-over-tit down the hill.

odd one out

Spot the odd one out - someone definitely thinks she's part of the
family...

Pigs in the snow

Have spent the past two days walking over to Long Ashton to feed the
pigs. The snow has made driving impossible - they live at the top of a
very long and winding road and conditions have been treacherous -
even Poppy the dog, with four-leg drive, had problems. We encountered
more than one car slithering back down the hill, gently out of
control. The upside has been crossing Ashton Court at 7am under a
blanket of virgin snow - we could have been the only beings in the
world - it was utterly magical!

The pigs seem entirely unconcerned by the weather, but they definitely
await our arrival now - as we round the corner of the barn, Myfanwy's
snout is poking out of her ark, tasting the air to see what we've
brought (lemon cake this evening) and the two female piglets, in their
own pen now that all have been separated from their mother, are
extremely vociferous, squealing and grunting for attention. It was so
cold the water in their troughs was frozen solid and I had to break
the ice with a sledgehammer. I took them 10 kilos of bananas which Reg
the Veg had thrown out and they scoffed the lot in seconds.