The noble porker: a tale of modern Britain

It could be said that the noble pig is a perfect snapshot for the state of British food as a whole.

Once upon a time, long ago, before enclosure took land away from ordinary people, before industrialisation drove millions out of the countryside and into the urban grime to find work, many homes and smallholdings would have had a pig.

It would have been kept through the year, grazing naturally, before being slaughtered as autumn came on and the nights pulled in.

Butchered, it would have been salted and preserved in many ways, nose to tail, offering food for the winter ahead.

If a more personal connection with pigs died along with the connection most of us have to the land, farming continued.

Like so many parts of our food culture, the post-war era saw an increase in factory farming and, with it, a reduction in the variety of pigs that were reared in the UK.

Many breeds died out, casualties of the growing fear – abject in so many ways – of real, natural fats.

Stand at even a proper butcher’s counter today and you may well hear people wanting lean pork.

We seem to have lost the understanding not only that natural fat is a perfectly good and healthy part of a diet – but also that it is essential for flavour.

With pork too, there’s the added importance of fat providing moisture for a meat that can easily become very dry.

But on an English autumn Sunday, what could be better to consider eating than some roast pork?

Precisely because of the ease with which you can let pork get overly dry, it’s not a meat I cook often. Which in turn, also means that I don’t get much practice.

But on Broadway Market recently, although I’d been considering lamb, Matthew had a lovely rolled, boned piece of loin that caught my eye.

To be precise, he had three rolled, boned joints – only one of them, though, had oddles of fat running through it and not just on top.

So with the clear blue overhead and the trees just moving toward a riot of colour, I settled on that – and then began to wonder just what to cook with it.

What I opted for was to use perfect seasonal ingredients to compliment it.

So first, I made up some sage butter – easy enough: a little dried or finely-chopped fresh leaves, blended into some softened butter and then allowed to harden again.

Next, the oven was set to 220˚C (fan).

I took the joint and with a bit of careful knife waggling, made a few gaps for the butter.

The skin (which had already been scored) was salted and then it went into the roasting dish with just a little fat (lard, of course) to start us off.

It then got 20 minutes, before the temperature was reduced to 170˚C, and is cooked for a further 30 minutes to the 500g. My joint was just over 1.1kg.

After that, you ratchet the temperature back up to 220˚C and give it a final 10 minutes, before taking it out and letting it rest for up to half an hour.

That allowed perfect timing to do a few roast potatoes (in lard, in another dish), to which I added a few (rinsed and drained) cannellini beans for the last few minutes. The beans cook magnificently in lard, taking on a wonderfully creamy quality.

I’d also taken two dessert apples, scored them around the middle, removed the top part of the core, filled the small cavity with more of the sage butter and then ‘lidded’ that with the top of the scoop-out core and stem.

They cooked with the potatoes, once those went into the oven after their par-boiling. And, of course, they need around 45-55 minutes.

The juices from the meat were mixed with plain flour, before some decent English cider was added (not the very best, but not Strongbow or Diamond White!).

The crackling was beautifully brittle, with an feather-light pillow of fat beneath it; the meat was tender, perfectly cooked through and delightfully moist.

Everything else worked well – and the gravy was the real deal. The whole combined for a perfect autumn feast.

Now that’s what you do with the noble porker.

Homage to the humble crumble

Although Friday was National Apple Day, this fruit has dominated my culinary efforts for the past week – not, though, any other activities. I’d have to be beyond terminal boredom to have done this.

Leaving the apple pie to our friends across the Pond, for whom it has its own special cultural meaning, let’s turn to the humble crumble.

With Sunday’s belly pork cooking away ever so gently, I pulled out Delia’s Complete Cookery Course and turned to the section on puddings.

There is the basic recipe for a crumble topping, with my own calculations beside it for the reduced version for two people.

So, take 25g of diced, unsalted butter at room temperature and rub together with 75g of plain flour, using your hands.

The thing with this is that you need to do it as quickly as possible, so that your hands don’t get over hot and melt the butter further.

Once that’s done, mix in 25g of brown sugar.

That’s all there is to it – your crumble mix is ready to go.

I took three small apples out of the basket, peeled, cored and sliced them quite chunkily. They went into a small pan with a few drops of water and about one heaped dessert spoon of brown sugar, and then were cooked gently for a few minutes until softened.

I had decided to make individual crumbles rather than a large one and greased two small ramekins.

The fruit went in and was patted down, before the crumble mix was sprinkled generously on top, and in they went to a oven preheated to 160˚C, where they stayed for around 40 minutes, before being eaten, from the little pots, with a little very thick double cream on the side.

And they were nice – although I wasn’t completely satisfied with the topping.

Then came the quandary: there was still loads of the topping mix left. What to do? Throw it away, freeze it or …?

I decided to make another one the following day.

One of the things about learning to cook in the home, as opposed to professionally – and perhaps it’s particularly the case when you start late in life – is that you don’t get constant practice on any one dish.

You’re trying to vary what you eat; you’re trying new things. And personally, I obsess about serving up a variety of meals; that it’s some sort of duty to provide a wide range.

It’s only in the last year that I’ve really found that I’ve cooked a few dishes often enough now that I can do so without recourse to a recipe book.

But since we’ve never been a big pudding/dessert household, every time I get the urge to make something, it’s almost like starting from scratch again. And with a big gap until the next time you do it, it’s also difficult to remember any lessons you might have been aware of the last time.

On Monday, I nipped into Waitrose after work for a cat food run. Since they had some there, I picked up a large Bramley cooking apple. Unfortunately, while there are still English strawberries around (grown in polytunnels, presumably), there seems to be a shortage of blackberries, so my plan of a mixed crumble fell at the first hurdle.

Back at home, I prepped the apple and popped it in a pan with the same amount of sugar – and then had the idea that adding some of the left-over cider from Sunday’s belly pork roast, instead of water, might be a neat idea.

The fruit was cooked gently but for a little longer (not deliberately – I wasn’t timing it). Cooking apples – which had gone out of favour a few years ago until a TV chef had caused their revival – cook down much faster. It was pretty much a compote before I knew it.

But there’s no great problem with that. Instead of the cliché of nutmeg, I added a little ground ginger and then decanted the mix into the buttered ramekins for baking in the same way as the day before.

Feeling a tad lazy, I had also bought a tub of custard – there isn’t even any Bird’s in the cupboard. When the crumbles were nearing completion, some of that was whacked into a pan and gently heated through.

Perhaps because the cooking apple had been pre-cooked for longer and had, therefore, collapsed into more of a pulp, it was hotter – seriously, piping hot. Using ginger as the spice works perfectly well.

And so to Friday. After I’d found some blackberries (currently losing out in the shops to blueberries, which seem to be this year’s faddy fav), it was time for an apple and blackberry crumble.

But this time, I also changed the topping proportions, using 100g plain flour and 50g butter, with 25g sugar.

And I made sure too that the sugar was demerara – it had been a soft brown sugar in the previous versions.

The fruit was precooked with just a little water and a dessertspoon of that soft brown sugar, until it was just softened.

Decanted again into ramekins, it was topped and cooked for 45 minutes at 160˚C (temperatures are for a fan oven).

The topping on this version was much more as I expected and wanted – far crumblier, if you will.

The fruit combination is a classic for a good reason – and the inky colour from the blackberries is magnificent.

This was the best of the week – and was the perfect argument against my addiction to variety and for trying things regularly.

An apple a day ...

It’s apparently National Apple Day today – which seems like the perfect excuse to look at this wonderful fruit.

When you look at an apple, it’s hard to believe it holds such a prominent position at the heart of bad things within our culture.

Not only was an apple the fruit with which Eve tempted Adam in the Bible, but it was also the method of delivering poison to Snow White in the fairy tale of that name.

In terms of religion, it seems that the poor old apple has been at the core of the story of the Fall simply because of a misunderstanding of Latin.

But once that had happened – well, that was it. The prominent larynx in men is known as the ‘Adam’s apple’ from the rather picturesque idea that it had been caused by the fruit of forbidden knowledge getting stuck in Adam’s throat.

Different languages and interpretations mean that what Eve handed over might have been a grape, a tomato (originally considered poisonous), a pomegranate or even a fig – the latter being a long-standing symbol of female sexuality, which at least makes more sense than blaming a Granny Smith.

And after all, in apparent contradiction of all this, we also have the little saying about an 'apple a day keeps the doctor away', while being the apple of someone's eye is hardly an insult. On the other hand, bringing taking an apple to school for teacher might make you unpopular with your fellow pupils.

In A Taste of Britain by Laura Mason and Catherine Brown, there are nearly 50 varieties listed in the index, with some lovely, evocative names, such as Dabinett, Howgate Wonder and Sweet Coppin.

Mark, my organic veg supplier on the market, told me the other week that there were once thousands of different varieties of apple grown in the UK – possible evidence that it wasn’t really a source of great knowledge – but we’ve whittled it an awful lot in recent decades.

To be honest, until around seven years ago, I was only barely aware of a miniscule number of them.

The change, when it came, was simply the first autumn of the revived Broadway Market.

Now obviously I knew about Cox Pippin – and if pushed, I’d have been able to name a Granny Smith, Golden Delicious and possibly Braeburn. But even though time can play distorting tricks on memory, I cannot think of any other that I would have been familiar with.

But now I’m familiar too with varieties such as Spartan and Russet – while there haven’t been any Granny Smiths or any Golden Delicious in the house for years, let alone any Pink Lady.

When I was growing up, ours was not a particularly fruitily inclined household.

There would be a small glass of fruit juice at breakfast and banana sandwiches on the normal Saturday morning.

If it were an abnormal weekend when we were having a full-blown brunch, then it would begin with a half of grapefruit in a bowl, the segments already having been cut away from the pith and skin by a special, serrated knife, ready for the sugar-sprinkled fruit to be consumed with teaspoons.

As a slight aside, it possibly says something that, while my mother taught me almost nothing about cooking, when I went away to college, I was sent with one of the grapefruit knives as well as a serrated tomato knife.

But to return to our subject – it was never a place where there was a fruit bowl around, so I never gained a habit of just picking up and apple and biting in any more than I gained a habit of picking up a piece of confectionary and nibbling away when peckish.

Food was far more formal than that – always needing to be portioned out by my mother at the properly appointed times.

When we lived in Mossley, we had a couple each of gooseberry and blackcurrant bushes. My mother would make crumbles and something that I remember as a Charlotte – although it was nothing like any dish I’ve seen a recipe for since.

What I remember – albeit vaguely – was something more like a crispy crumble topping. Perhaps it was breadcrumbs and coarse brown sugar combined? I shall have to ask.

We’d also occasionally have a fruit salad, which would always involve sliced banana and grated apple, along with whatever else was around, including tinned peach slices and those little mandarin segments.

She’d make fruit flans sometimes too, with fruit set in jelly in a bought sponge flan case.

And then there was rhubarb, which could also be made into crumbles when it wasn’t being stewed gently and served hot with Bird’s Eye custard or cold with your breakfast cereal.

But now is certainly the season of the apple, and I cooked a piece of belly pork on a ‘trivet’ of onion and apple halves on Sunday, with decent quality cider to form a sort of jus with the fruit and the juices from the meat.

It worked rather well – but with the nights pulling in and the temperatures now having fallen to something much more seasonal, there is nothing like a proper English pudding to warm and comfort.

And so began a little experiment to see just how to make a decent crumble. Watch this space!