Category Archives: Meat History

Pork Scratchings – scratching a living

Posted on February 7, 2012 | 2 Comments

Recently, there seems to be a bit of a thing about Pork Scratchings.  Perhaps people are latching on to my own method for making them at home ?  My earlier recipe is here.

Mmmmm .... hint of caraway seed added

So a bit more information on the subject is required …..

  • Pork scratchings originated in the early 19th century, when the production of meat began to be industrialised. The term literally means the scraps from the slaughterhouse floor.
  • An estimated 20 million packs of pork scratchings are sold each year as bar snacks. The Black Country in the West Midlands is the epicentre of the industry.
  • There are 606 calories and 2.9g of salt per 100g of pork scratchings (Source: Mr Porky’s, sold in 20g packs).
  • Traditionally, scratchings are fried and made with the softer, relatively hairless skin with attached fat, behind the hock (back foot) of the pig; crackling is roasted or baked, and can be made from a wider portion of the pig.
  • Before cooking scratchings, hair must be singed off and the skin blanched in boiling water to open the pores. Some swear by this to optimise crackling levels when roasting pork at home.
  • International versions include pork rinds and cracklings in the USA, grillons or grattons in France, chicharrones in Central America and the Spanish Caribbean.
  • 99 per cent of scratchings sold in the UK are made with Danish pork. Before recent changes in legislation, this was not revealed on labels.
  • When fried, the skin of the scratching hardens. All UK brands carry a label warning that contents are suitable only for people with strong healthy teeth.

There are also a couple of excellent websites devoted to Pork Sratchings with more on the history, recipes, reviews etc …. click on the logos

Enjoy.

Charlie the butcher

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Posted in Charcuterie, Little extras, Meat History, Pork, Uncategorized

Haggis time again

Posted on January 17, 2012 | 1 Comment

Yes, it is haggis time again. Last year around this time I gave you a bit of background history and some recipe and serving advice so have a little butchers here ….

This year has been a bit milder some we are hoping for a better supply from the highlands but it hasn’t always been that way ….

This once popular sport amongst the nobility and gentry of Britain and Europe reached its peak in the early 1920s with gentlemen converging on the stately homes of the North Yorkshire Moors from all around Europe during haggis hunting season.  Back in those days, when large haggis herds roamed the Moors in abundance, a hunt would last for several days, with literally dozens of haggis being shot (or hagged in hunting parlance) in just one session.

A good days work

A typical haggis hunting session would consist of the beaters, or haggillies to give them their correct name, taking their haggis hounds, an all but forgotten breed of specialised hunting dog, onto the Moors and herding the haggis towards the carefully positioned haggis hides.  In these hides the hunters would wait patiently until the traditional cry of ‘Hag Ho!’ went up from the chief hagilly, at which point they would take up their gun positions and attempt to hag as many of the small but elusive creatures as possible as they stampeded past.

A typical haggis hunting party

In the intervening years between then and now there have been several unconfirmed sightings of haggis around the Moors, but the sad truth is that the haggis were hunted out of existence on the Moors and are now confined to the Highlands of Scotland.

So we have to rely on haggis being rustled across the border …

Haggis smuggling (a reconstruction to protect the identity of the smugglers)

Following my posting last year about Burns Night especially the traditional address to the haggis you might want to take a butchers at this nostalgic clip

Charlie the butcher

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Posted in Game Calendar, Meat History, Offal

Good listening

Posted on November 28, 2011 | Leave a comment

A great little show on BBC Radio London aired last week to coincide with the Meat Traders Journal “Best Butchers Shop 2012″. This is the award that I won last year for managing the best shop in the South of England. Ed, the editor of MTJ has done a great job plugging the trade, nice one mate and thanks also to Robert Elms. Click this link or cut and paste below.

http://www.meatinfo.co.uk/news/fullstory.php/aid/13424/__Audio:_London_butchers_the_focus_for_BBC_radio.html

Charlie the Butcher.

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Posted in Little extras, Meat History, Media

Tagged

I would like Santa to bring me a Berkel bacon slicer

Posted on November 27, 2011 | 2 Comments

I don’t suppose my ideal Christmas present is on everyone’s list but I’ve always wanted a big bad boy bacon slicer and the Berkel is tops.

Perfect, but how to gift wrap it ?

Wilhelm van Berkel, was born in Holland on 5 February 1869, son of a pub owner and brother of a butcher. He was the inventor of a cutting machine with a movable meat table. This way meat products could be cut neatly and regularly Up until that time butchers were kept busy slicing with 16-inch long carving knives.

Van Berkel had worked his way up from a butcher’s boy to become the owner of three successful shops. Then he began the deliberate search for a winning way to slice sausages and other meats mechanically.

This quest took years, often working through the night, ruining costly pieces of meat and starting many times over. During his search he saw the attempts of others who had devised mechanisms for slicing meat. No matter how ingenious these were – with spiral or elliptical knives – they could not be put to any practical purpose at all.

Van Berkel’s search was eventually rewarded. His find was the concave knife and an upper table sliding automatically towards the blade. He succeeded in constructing a prototype which more than proved its worth in his own pork shop.

He realised at once the far-reaching possibilities of his invention. He applied for a patent and immediately began to consider ways of mass producing his slicing machine.

This invention was set to revolutionise the butcher’s trade, where quality of cut and the speed of the slicer were very important.

By 1898, Van Berkel has started production at factories based in Rotterdam, and soon slicers were in demand all over Europe. Master butchers simply could not believe that hand-sliced meat or sausage could be matched or even excelled by a machine !

With his experience in the trade, Van Berkel confidently took to the road to win over all the butchers. He skillfully demonstrated the results that could be achieved with the slicer, and reassured butchers they would be fully employed coping with the increased business generated.

Van Berkel’s foresight and commercial spirit quickly led him to foreign markets. Berkel Ltd was established in London in 1908 and was manufacturing slicers in England for a period after the first World War. In America, Berkel started manufacturing as the U.S. Slicing Machine Co. Inc. in 1909. By 1915, the company had outgrown its facilities in Chicago and moved on to La Porte, Indiana.

Now part of Avery Berkel, slicers and food processing equipment are still sold under the Berkel brand throughout its companies and distribution network.

Van Berkel’s Patent Model A was the first commercially produced slicing machine to come out of the Rotterdam factory in 1898. This somewhat clumsy looking machine is today a museum piece. A hundred years ago it revolutionised the butcher’s trade across Europe, though it was anything but cheap to buy. The price was often more than the total value of the inventory of many a butcher’s business.

After the 1st  World War Van Berkel also started with the production of balances and related products for the butcher and the Food Industry. Sale offices and factories were built in several  countries, in the United States under the name Slicing machine Co. Inc. and in United Kingdom under the name of Berkel Ltd.

Here’s a clip in which Emilio Mitidieri discusses and demos one of his antique Berkel meat slicers on The History Channel’s “Modern Marvels: Cold Cuts”, from his showroom in San Francisco’s Mission district.


There’s also a super-cool animation here demonstrating how a Berkel works !

Charlie the Butcher

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Posted in Breakfast, Charcuterie, Christmas, Knives, Meat History

Dick Turpin, butcher and highwayman.

Posted on September 19, 2011 | 1 Comment

We are just coming up to the  anniversary of a famous historical figure who also happened to be a butcher.

Richard “Dick” Turpin was an English highwayman with his exploits being made famous following his execution in York for horse theft. He is also known for a fictional 200-mile ride from London to York on his steed Black Bess, a story that was made famous by the Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth almost 100 years after Turpin’s death.

He was born at the Blue Bell Inn in Hempstead, Essex,  the fifth of six children to John Turpin and Mary Elizabeth Parmenter. The anniversary is of his baptism on 21st September 1705.

Parish Register - Dick Turpi is the 5th name

Turpin’s father was a butcher, and also an inn-keeper. Several stories suggest that Dick Turpin may have followed his father into these trades; one story hints that as a teenager he was apprenticed to a butcher in the village of Whitechapel, and another suggests that he ran his own butcher’s shop in Thaxted. Testimony from his trial in 1739 suggested that he had a rudimentary education and, although no records survive of the date of the union, n about 1725 he married Elizabeth Millington.

Following his apprenticeship they moved north to Buckhurst Hill, Essex where Turpin opened a butcher’s shop.

Turpin most likely became involved with the Essex gang of deer thieves in the early 1730s. Deer poaching had been widespread in the Royal Forest of Waltham, and in 1723 the Black Act (so called because it outlawed the blackening or disguising of faces while in the forests) was created to deal with such problems. Deer stealing was a domestic offence that was judged not in civil courts, but before Justices Of The Peace; it was not until 1737 that the more severe penalty of seven years transportation was introduced.
The Essex gang needed contacts to help them to dispose of the deer. Turpin, a young butcher who traded in the area, almost certainly became involved with their activities. By 1733 the changing fortunes of the gang may have prompted him to leave the butchery trade, and he became the landlord of a public house, most likely the Rose and Crown at Clay Hill. Although there is no evidence to suggest that Turpin was directly involved in the thefts, by summer 1734 he was a close associate of the gang.

Charlie the butcher

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Posted in Meat History, Uncategorized

Talking tripe

Posted on April 5, 2011 | 4 Comments

There’s not a lot going for tripe with its name being used to talk about nonsense. No more than a handful of restaurants ever serve it.

Various types of tripe

Beef tripe is usually made from only the first three chambers of a cow’s stomach: the rumen (blanket/flat/smooth tripe), the reticulum (honeycomb and pocket tripe), and the omasum (book/bible/leaf tripe).

Cow's stomachs

The reason is that it is a hugely misunderstood ingredient. Elsewhere in the world, tripe has retained its gastronomic dignity. The Chinese have a score of ways of cooking it, the Italians and Spanish adore it and the French have such classic dishes as tripe à la mode de Caen which is treated as a culinary masterpiece.

This is in contrast to the collapse of tripe eating in Britain. It was at its most popular from late Victorian times to the 1950s, when it was a tasty, cheap and nourishing source of animal protein.

The decline in the popularity of tripe coincided with growing economic prosperity from the mid-1950s onwards. As poverty declined an ingredient associated with poorer times was rejected.

This falling off in retail sales in the late 1950s and early 1960s, came at a time when there was no restaurant culture in Britain which might have been able to introduce it to new audiences or at least save it from near-extinction.

It sounds fanciful today, but 30 years ago there was a restaurant chain in the north of England which featured tripe almost as a signature dish. The romantically-named United Cattle Products (UCP) restaurants had cold tripe salads, tripe and onions and steak and cowheel pie permanently on the menu. Sadly, neither the company nor its restaurants survived.

Tripe has remained a popular ingredient with the older generation who enjoyed it in harder times, but for a younger audience tripe is a bit of a curiosity or simply a pet food.

Tripe dressing

One inevitable result of the decline of interest in tripe eating in the UK is the decimation of the tripe dressing industry, (dressing being the quaint term for the practice of boiling and preparing cattle stomachs for sale as tripe).

 

Most major towns used to have at least one tripe dresser,
but now there are noThose were the daysmore than a handful left in Britain, mostly in the north of England where tripe eating is still popular.

 

 

 

 

A surviving tripe shop in Leeds Market

There are very few places where you can buy it these days but ask at your local butcher.

 

 

 

 

British cooking of tripe has remained loyal to a very small number of recipes, most commonly lightly cooked in a thickened, white onion sauce. This dish is always served with creamed potatoes and a dusting of fine-ground white pepper.

Less common is tripe fried with bacon; creamed tripe with a toasted potato topping in cottage pie style; or, creamed tripe with celery instead of onions.

Tripe has also been eaten cold in England, served simply with sliced tomatoes or a full salad. Brown malt vinegar is sprinkled on the tripe to give some acidity.

All is not lost for tripe. A very slow, but steady increase in its use in restaurants, most noticeably among those pushing down the rustic route, has begun.

Tripe is a versatile ingredient and will absorb other flavours yet still retain its own character.

Click here for an interesting range of tripe recipes and here for a traditional tripe and onions recipe.

Charlie the Butcher

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Posted in Beef, Meat History, Offal

Bacon Connisseurs’ Week

Posted on March 20, 2011 | 1 Comment

Happy Bacon Connisseurs’ Week to you all.  It starts on Monday 21st March.

From dry cured to Wiltshire cured and maple cured to oak smoked, Bacon Connoisseurs’ Week 2011 celebrates the vast range of lip-smacking, quality bacon available for us to savour.  This year’s Bacon Ambassador is the one and only Oz Clarke. As the most recognised wine critic in the UK, Oz is lending his sophisticated palate to help explore the many flavours and uses of one of Britain’s best-loved ingredients. “Whenever flavour is needed, bacon delivers. Ask any chef across the nation and they will agree. Bacon by itself or bacon to add flavour, is unique.”

Bacon sarnie ..... mmmm

Click here for more information including some handy advice on curing bacon, various cuts and recipes.

Charlie the Butcher

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Posted in Breakfast, Meat History, Pork

Good news for Cumberland sausages

Posted on March 20, 2011 | Leave a comment

The coiled Cumberland sausage is to have its name protected throughout Europe after winning special status.

Cumberland sausage ..... mmmm

Jim Paice, the Food Minister, said that the sausage had been awarded Protected Geographical Indication Status. “This should be a significant boost to Cumbrian producers, who will now be able to prove that their product is the real thing.”

Traditional Cumberland displaying the PGI mark will have been produced, processed and prepared in Cumbria and contain at least 80% meat and be at least 20mm thick to achieve the characteristic coarse texture.

Cumberland sausages, which date back to the 16th century, are the 44th UK food and drink product to be given this protection. You can find the full list of PGI protected UK products here.

If you want to know a bit more about the history of sausages have a look here at one of my earlier posts.

Charlie the butcher

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Posted in Meat History, Sausages

How about a goose ?

Posted on December 15, 2010 | Leave a comment

Before being overtaken by turkey, goose was the preferred choice for the Christmas lunch table in England and more recently there are signs of it making a bit of a comeback. Goose meat is richer and darker than turkey. It has a higher fat content, but a lot of the fat melts away during cooking leaving deliciously tasty and succulent meat.

Although not cheap, goose makes a wonderful treat for any special meal. In addition the goose fat collected during cooking makes the best roast potatoes and is almost worth the entrance price alone. Goose has a wonderfully rich, buttery flavour, bordering on the beefy, thanks to its grass diet. It’s certainly a fatty bird, but don’t let that put you off – the flavour is worth it.

The common domesticated goose is a descendant of the greylag goose (Anser anser) still found in the wild in Ireland, western Scotland and some other parts of Europe The most popular strain of commercial goose is the Legarth, a white-feathered bird with a high meat-to-bone ratio. This breed is very well-suited to free-range grazing. The Embden is another white variety that shares similar characteristics. Geese, by their very nature, are all free-range, but some will, of course, be better reared than others.

Free range Legarth geese

HISTORY

Geese were bred in ancient Egypt and goose liver was loved by the Romans. Goose has always been important in French cuisine where it plays a key part in traditional dishes such as cassoulet, confit d’oie and foie gras.

In Victorian times, the homes of the poor often had open fireplaces for heat and cooking but not with ovens. So many families, like the Cratchits in Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol, took their Christmas goose or turkey to the baker’s shop.

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, first edition 1843

Bakers were forbidden to open on Sundays and holidays but would open their shops on these days to the poor and bake their dinners for a small fee. Dickens mentions Master Peter Cratchit and the two younger Cratchits going to fetch their Christmas goose from the bakers.

Bringing home the Christmas goose

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavor, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular were steeped in sage and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone, — too nervous to bear witnesses, — to take the pudding up, and bring it in….. from A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens first published by Chapman and Hall on 19 December 1843.

Christmas dinner at the Cratchit's

TIPS
BUYING
Fresh geese are available from specialist suppliers and quality butchers. You may need to order in advance, particularly around Christmas. Geese are quite big-boned and so choose a larger bird than you would a chicken (allow at least 750g per person). Having said that, smaller (younger) birds are the most tender, so two small geese are preferable to a single huge one.

Choose plump-looking free-range birds.

STORING
Keep refrigerated, giblets removed, for 2 or 3 days.

PREPARING
Scoop out any excess fat from the cavity and put aside for roasting potatoes. Rinse the goose inside and out and pat well dry. Prick the skin to enable the fat to be released during cooking (try not to pierce the flesh) and rub the skin with salt and pepper.

Place breast side up on a rack over a roasting pan. Roast at 220°C for 30 minutes followed by around 2½ to 3½ hours (depending on size) at 180°C. Baste the goose every 20 to 30 minutes and remove the fat that accumulates in the pan or it will smoke furiously (the fat can be stored in the fridge for a few days, or frozen). If parts of the goose seem to be browning too quickly, wrap them in foil.

The goose is cooked when a skewer in the thickest part of the thigh reveals clear juices (the flesh may still be slightly pink). Remove from the oven, cover with foil and rest for 15 minutes or so before carving.

Charlie the Butcher

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Posted in Christmas, Fat, Goose, Meat History

Thanksgiving – Turkey Day

Posted on November 23, 2010 | 1 Comment

It’s all getting busy in the build up to Thanksgiving Day on Thursday 25th November with the requests coming in for the traditional turkey, in fact in  USA it is often called Turkey Day.
For us it provides some interesting possibilities for our own take on a Christmas turkey recipe.

'The First Thanksgiving' by Jean Louis Gerome Ferris

Traditionally, this famous American feast celebrates a meal held at the site of Plymouth Plantation by the Pilgrim Fathers who settled in Massachusetts in 1621 and ‘gave thanks’ to God for helping them survive a particularly harsh winter.

This celebration occurred early in the history of what would become one of the original Thirteen Colonies that later were to become the United States. Thanksgiving was modelled on harvest festivals that were common in Europe at the time.

Thanksgiving in the United States was observed on various different dates throughout history. By the mid 20th century, the final Thursday in November had become the customary day of Thanksgiving in most U.S. states. It was not until December 26, 1941, however, that President Franklin D. Roosevelt, after pushing two years earlier to move the date earlier to give the country an economic boost, signed a bill into law with Congress, making Thanksgiving a national holiday and settling it to the fourth (but not final) Thursday in November.

But back to the turkey and some suggestions for Thanksgiving and Christmas …

Free Range Norfolk Bronze Turkeys

Nowadays, Thanksgiving is widely considered to be more of a public holiday rather than a religious one, and is celebrated with traditional foods served at Thanksgiving meals. Roast turkey, mashed potato, yams, and cranberry sauce are all favourites likely to be seen on the table, with pumpkin pie an extremely popular dessert.

Every newspaper and magazine will be full of the usual cooking advice so I’ll keep it simple and point you towards what I think are the best ideas ….

Turkey recipes.

I’d suggest that you visit the folks at ChowHound for the full American ….

Nearer to home you should try these great suggestions at Delicious Magazine

Charlie the Butcher

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Posted in Christmas, Meat History, Poultry, Turkey