Clarissa Dickson Wright on Pork Great British Food Revival

-The best British produce is under threat.

-At the mercy of foreign invaders, market forces...

-..and food fashion.

-Produce that has been around for centuries...

..could die out within a generation.

So together, we're on a mission...

-..to save it.

-We'll give the best tips how to find it, grow it and cook it.

And, crucially, how to put sensational British produce...

..back on the food map.

My name's Clarissa Dickson Wright and I'm going to introduce you to

an ingredient that you may very well never have tasted, rare-breed British pork, and you are going to love it.

From the humble bacon sandwich to the glorious Sunday roast, pork is one of the most popular meats in Britain.

That looks lovely.

I'm passionate about pork, so join me on a sumptuous odyssey

through the forgotten world of our traditional British breeds.

As part of my revival, I'll be meeting one of our rarest pigs, the British Lop.

Our breed secretary described them as being more rare than the giant panda.

I'll be finding out what you think of some of our traditional pork dishes.

-Can I offer you a piece of Lincolnshire chine?

-No, that's all right.

-"I'm a vegetarian!"

And I'll be using pork lard in the revival kitchen to make a wonderful pudding for Sunday lunch.

You only get pastry like this using lard.

As well as revealing my secret for the perfect crackling.

CRACKING

Hear how lovely the crackling is.

Hey! Off we go!

I first fell for pigs when I was really quite small and I came to love pigs,

both for the pleasure of their company and the joy of their flesh.

Here, piggy, piggy, piggy. I'm not going to eat you yet.

Yes, I love pigs. Pigs are wonderful. Piggy, piggy, piggy.

Go out and meet the pigs, look at the pigs, talk to the pigs, but eat them, by all means eat them.

There is no question that we are a nation who loves our pork.

But 98% of all the pork we eat is from commercial pigs,

bred to suit the demands of the supermarkets.

In our drive for profits, have we forgotten our heritage?

Some of these handsome, traditional breeds have been brought back from the edge of extinction

by a few brave farmers. And now it's up to us to safeguard their future.

For the first stop on our revival of rare-breed pork,

I want to discover a little more about our rich pig heritage,

so I'm meeting Richard Lutwyche,

a wonderful pig historian.

You've got to think that everything was dominated by the

local lord of the manor, the squire,

and he would be the only one who kept a boar for breeding purposes.

Whatever boar type he had, if he had a black pig, then gradually in that area,

all the pigs were dominated by the genes and they became black. And so it spread out.

But everybody kept pigs, didn't they?

Oh, they did, certainly in the country. I mean, people had a very close relationship with pigs.

And that shows up in our folklore and our English language, very much so.

My father kept pigs in St John's Wood on a bit of land in Hamilton Terrace.

People said, "Who killed them for you?"

and he said, "I'm senior surgeon of St Mary's, Paddington.

"Who the hell do you think killed them?" So they're our heritage.

We should be proud of them.

'It was a government publication in 1955 that would change the fate

'of our traditional breeds forever.'

Ruddy government, interfering again.

I mean, this...

the Howitt Report,

makes me so angry. Listen to this.

"In the first place, we have formed the view that one of the main handicaps facing

"the British pig industry today is the diversity of the type of pig

"which is found throughout the country.

"The pig industry will, in our view, only make real progress when it concentrates on a few main types

"and, if it were at any time found possible, on a single type of pig for commercial production."

Absolutely.

How angry does that make you?

The sort of pigs they were going for are the ones that

we've now been blighted with in our commercial life,

which are very fast growing, very, very lean and taste of nothing at all.

A single type of commercial pig!

All our heritage, all those delicious pigs. That's what they're asking for.

That's what they wanted. Just one dull, dull type of commercial pig.

Makes me so angry.

After the Howitt Report came out and there was all this move to intensification,

we actually lost four unique, distinct breeds from this country.

Once it's gone, it's gone. It's extinct.

Gone forever. There are people who say you can recreate them,

but it is really just science fiction, it will never happen.

So that was lesson number one.

A history lesson. How we got to where we are now.

If you're still not convinced, stick with me and watch this space.

One of the best ways to get rare-breed pork back on our food map

is to cook it.

For my first recipe, I'm going to cook...

The great thing about rare-breed pigs is the fact that they have a good covering of fat on them.

Between the skin and the fat there is a little line of muscle

which raises the skin and just gives the most perfect crackling.

And you won't find that in a commercial, numbered breed pig.

Start by making the walnut and caper stuffing that will soak up

any extraneous fat and really bring out the flavour of the pork.

Put the garlic and onion onto a gentle heat until they are soft.

I'm now going to add these morsels of bread, day-old bread, so they're not too fresh.

Otherwise it just falls apart.

For texture, I also use walnuts in the stuffing

and then, for flavour, some capers and lemon juice.

These ingredients will offer a sharp contrast to the sweet meat.

Then take the pan off the heat and bind the stuffing by mixing in two eggs.

Leave it to cool and start to prepare your meat.

In order to get the crackling to crackle, you need to score it,

and for that you really need a craft knife.

The whole point of scoring your skin is so that it can rise up into crackling.

If you were doing this with a commercial pig,

you'd be straight through to the meat because there's not enough fat.

Once scored, rub the fat with oil and salt.

And then take your stuffing and put it into the pocket in your meat.

Then tie up the shoulder as tightly as possible.

So not only will you hold your stuffing in, but you will also

form a cohesion in the meat, so that when it's cooking, it'll be tightly bound together.

You may say, "Oh, it's too much trouble!

"It's too much trouble to go out and find rare-breed pork.

"It's a little bit more expensive."

Well, put your children in expensive trainers and watch them grow up without the benefit of good food,

and the better the quality of the food we eat, the healthier we will be.

Good food takes effort and time, and this shoulder will roast in the oven for almost three hours.

But the results are spectacular.

Remove the crackling to reveal one of the many advantages of rare-breed pork.

You see the little ridge of muscle that runs under the fat

and raises the crackling up so you get really good crackling?

And there again you see how lovely and crisp the crackling is.

And let's have a little bit of kale on this

for colour.

And there you have it.

Really nice stuffing, too.

That's very satisfactory.

I don't only want you to enjoy the taste of rare-breed pork.

I want you to fall in love with the pigs themselves.

So I'm taking you to Oakham in Leicestershire.

Here we are at Northfield Farm and I'm here to meet a dear friend of mine, Jan McCourt,

who is almost as passionate about saving rare-breed pigs as I am.

Jan McCourt was once a high-flying City banker, but now he invests in

one of our rarest breeds of pig, the British Lop.

I'm really excited about seeing the Lops.

We've got quite a few more from the last time you saw them.

We've had a couple of litters born and we've brought in a few from the rare-breed sale at Melton,

including a very smart, young, new boar.

Oh, very exciting!

'So it's all aboard as we start our rare-breed safari.'

Hey! Off we go!

When you took over the farm, presumably,

it would have been a lot easier for you just to have ordinary breeds.

When I left the City, I was made redundant and I decided this was

an opportunity, so I opened the farm shop within a very short time.

And the biggest challenge was finding pork, rare-breed pork.

So I thought the only obvious thing to do was to start them ourselves.

There's a couple of our Saddlebacks.

-Yes.

-Good old girls.

'It's wonderful to see these pigs in so much space, a world away from most commercial pig farms.'

-Look, British Lops, surely.

-There you go, yep.

There's our new boar in with one of his girlfriends. Do you want to have a look?

Yeah, why not?

Ah! Look at them.

You can see why they're called "Lop". Look at the ears on her.

Yeah, they're absolutely fantastic.

-Amazing.

-Some of them have even bigger ears.

They'll end up the size of the average, decent-sized kitchen table.

And his ears will be probably twice the size of that.

How rare is the British Lop? I know it's one of the very rare ones.

Well, our breed secretary, in the latest newsletter,

he described as them as being more rare than the giant panda.

More rare than the giant panda!

-Think of it.

-A colourful character in his own right, I don't know whether that's statistically correct,

but when you think that this breed was saved from extinction by just three families in Cornwall,

it's still very delicate.

You're talking in the hundreds of breeding females, not thousands or tens of thousands.

If people understood that the most simple way to save these breeds

is to encourage and support the farmers that are rearing them.

And you do that by saying, "I want to eat rare-breed pork,"

and taking as big an interest as you possibly can.

This is all about passion first. Because one of the things...

-it certainly isn't making money.

-No.

What a lovely rub.

That's a fantastic image of a happy pig, isn't it?

'If I can get you to eat more rare-breed pork, then together

'we will be safeguarding the future of these beautiful animals.

'But before you eat it you need to buy it

'and for that you will need to find a good butcher or farm shop.'

Most people will never see this. They're afraid of this.

They are afraid of it, and I think the simplest way to distinguish it,

go and buy a piece of pork,

particularly a leg of pork from a supermarket.

You might as well chew on that block.

You might as well chew on cardboard or a paper bag

for the comparison.

Once people discover quite how good it is, do they mind the extra cost?

No, I've found they don't, because people that understand,

what they can't afford, they'll reduce the amount.

Because eat less and eat better is fundamental to the whole thing.

You can see the marbling that runs through and that is all important.

No fat, no flavour.

If you cook it with the fat on,

cut the fat off and give it to me, if I happen to be sitting at the same table,

it's the flavour, it's the taste.

'Pig fat has a variety of uses, not least in pastry and, in particular, pork pies.'

This is the hand-raised Melton Mowbray pork pie with our own pork

and, of course, with lard, which is the pig ingredient as well, even in the pastry.

Very good.

It's delicious.

So there you are, the end of lesson two.

What have you learnt from this?

Passion and good husbandry make perfect pigs and farmers make food for you.

You must be convinced by now.

For my second recipe I'm going to make...

Now, this type of pastry

is made by heating together lard and water to a rolling boil.

As the lard and water begin to boil, add a pinch of salt to the flour

and then pour in the boiling liquid.

Begin by stirring the mixture, but as soon as it is cool enough to handle, it is time to knead the pastry.

It cools quite quickly and it's quite important to do it as soon as you can,

so that the fat doesn't cool too much,

otherwise it won't mix in well with the flour.

Now do you see? It's a very soft, malleable crust.

And what I have here is a dolly.

This is a traditional implement.

It comes in all sorts of different sizes for raising a pie crust round.

You just want to mould your pastry up the dolly.

As well as the pie crust, it is vital to remember to shape a lid for the pie at this point.

Once the pastry has been prepared, allow it to cool in the refrigerator.

The lard solidifies and it will help the crust to hold its shape for the damson pie filling.

So here is a ready-chilled raised pie.

I'm something of an authority on raised pies,

because I have judged the Great Yorkshire Pork Pie contest on three separate occasions

and, I have to say, it was one of the most terrifying things

I ever had to do in my life, because I could have lost all my reputation in Yorkshire if I'd got it wrong.

Layer the pie with quince paste, a thick jam that will turn to liquid in the heat of the oven.

Then the damsons.

These have been stoned and frozen to give them a delicious texture.

A sprinkle of sugar will help to sweeten the filling, but the pie should still have a sharp kick to it.

And finally, all I have to do is put the lid on and crimp it.

And then make a little hole in the top to let the steam out.

It takes only 25 minutes for the ingredients to melt together and make the perfect pie.

So the "moment critique".

You see how it's sunk down on itself

and has gone into this rather nice sort of medieval look really, hasn't it?

And...

See, look at that. Look how lovely and gooey and sticky.

And you only get pastry like this

using lard

and you only get really good lard from old-breed, rare-breed pigs.

Mm. Lovely acidity with the damsons.

The real crunchiness of the pastry.

There you are, you see? Terribly simple.

Nice little pie for your pudding.

What could be more delicious?

The great tragedy of my revival campaign is that we are too late for some our rare-breed pigs.

They have already died out.

I'm heading for Louth in Lincolnshire to find out about a massive beast of a pig that is sadly extinct...

the Lincolnshire Curly Coat.

Is it true that you remember the Lincolnshire Curly Coat as a boy?

Yes, I do.

When I was a lad, almost everyone kept a pig down the garden

and traditionally

they were unhappy unless the pig reached 40 stones at least.

40 stone!

And the fat on the back would be that deep.

It's sad, isn't it, that today's youngsters will never have the chance to sit on the back

of a Lincolnshire Curly Coat and never see a pig like that?

Although the Curly Coat has gone, its legacy lives on through the work of local butchers like Jim Sutcliffe.

In Lincolnshire, we used to butcher our pigs very differently,

because the Lincolnshire Curly Coat was so fat that they couldn't get in

very well with a saw to cut down the middle of the spine.

So they had to go through the rib bones,

and that then produced a cut that is exclusive to Lincolnshire.

This exclusive cut follows the line of the pig's backbone and includes the meat on either side.

The chine, when it is released, is a long meaty cut, perfect for curing.

Jim uses the cured meat to make Lincolnshire stuffed chine, a traditional regional dish.

Given that this was a dish that was associated with the Lincolnshire Curly Coat,

was it ever in danger of going out because there wasn't a suitable pig?

I think there was a possibility that it would have done

had certain people not carried on curing a chine no matter what.

And, luckily, there's been quite a good number of rare-breed pigs in the county

to fall back on a substitute.

But I'm quite sure that the stuffed chine probably

isn't a patch on what it used to be when it was made from a Curly Coat and matured for months.

'The pork is stuffed with fresh parsley, before being steamed in an oven for eight hours.

'Only then is it ready to eat.'

That's lovely, really lovely.

I think you should cut me a few slices and I can take it out

-to the people of Louth and see what they think about it.

-Certainly.

And if you can give me a meat cleaver in case they don't like it.

Hello. Can I offer you a piece of...

Chine! Do you know, we were teaching this to children the other day,

all the products of Lincolnshire.

Yes, please. My mother always used to buy chine. Thank you.

I would offer you a piece of chine but I think you've got your hands full.

I've got a spare hand now.

-Well done.

-Oh, that's lovely.

-Isn't that good?

It is. Chine's lovely.

-Can I offer you a piece of Lincolnshire chine?

-No, it's all right.

-"I'm a vegetarian!"

Yes, I can do that with this.

It's great to see that most of the people of Louth still have a healthy appetite for their traditional food.

Before I leave, I want to investigate one farm

which claims to have brought back the Curly-Coated pig to Lincolnshire.

-Good morning. Brian Codling.

-Hello.

-And this is my wife, Sylvia.

-Welcome to the Old Rectory, Clarissa. It's lovely to meet you.

-Lovely old rectory.

So this property would have known the Lincolnshire Curly Coat?

They used to have some here and just at the farm, across the road. Do you want to see some?

I'd love to see some of your pigs.

-Walk this way.

-Thank you.

Well, they're certainly curly coated.

-Hello.

-These three are very good examples of Curly Coats.

They've got lovely thick coats.

So what are these pigs?

These are pure-bred Mangalitza curly-coated pigs.

They're native to Austria and Hungary.

And you have a theory that they are related to the Lincolnshire Curly Coat?

There's some of the Lincolnshire Curly Coat genes in.

We don't know how much, but definitely Lincolnshire Curly Coats

were exported from this country to the Austro-Hungarian area and cross-bred with the Mangalitza.

-And so now you think they've come back to Lincolnshire? Well, they have come back to Lincolnshire!

-Exactly.

It's nice to have curly-coated pigs back in Lincolnshire.

Yes. Very good.

-Delilah's next door to these...

-Oh, right.

Oh, look.

Now, there's a magnificent pig.

Hello, Delilah.

My, my, my, Delilah.

Wonderful, and look at the size of her. Magnificent.

Like the Lincolnshire Curly Coat, the Mangalitza is bred for its fat.

It's a tallow pig, but it produces a very agreeable meat.

Although, technically, not a British pig, it is interesting to see them where the Curly Coats once stood.

For my third and final recipe I'm going to cook...

Start by pouring some anchovy oil into a baking tray with a dash of olive oil.

Into this, place chopped onion and garlic.

The trick with not crying when you peel onions, or chop onions,

is to leave the pointed end intact, cos that is where the gland is that causes you to weep.

There you are, not a tear in sight.

Once the onions begin to simmer, crush the garlic.

One of the advantages of being my sort of weight

is that when you lean on a garlic clove...

..it stays leaned on.

There was a time in my life when I used to get rugby forwards to come and roll out my pastry for me.

I don't need to do that any more.

One met a lot of nice rugby forwards.

When the onions have softened, add the anchovies

and the chestnuts.

Then score the meat.

The secret to good crackling is to rub salt and oil deep into the fat of the belly.

As Fanny Craddock used to say,

rub it as if into the face of your worst enemy.

And then take your piece of pork and just put it on top

of everything that's in there.

Then add some beer to the bottom of the pan, making sure not to cover the skin.

This is providing some liquid just to help cook the pork and to stop things

sticking to the bottom, cos it's going to cook for quite a long time.

It's going to have half an hour in a hot oven just to

set the crackling and then it's going to have about three hours

in a cooler oven just to gently cook away and bring out the flavours.

This pork belly is so simple to prepare, but the results are magical.

Look at that. Doesn't that look lovely?

The extra fat, the texture of the meat

and that indescribable sound of Sundays.

CRACKING

Hear how lovely the crackling is.

Look at that. You see how soft and lovely it is now? See that?

The knife just goes straight into it as though it were butter.

And, of course, the advantage with rare-breed pork is that it will hold together

until it's soft as butter, rather than just fall apart as it would if it was a horrid commercial pig.

Excellent accompaniments to this delicious meat are celeriac puree and wilted spinach.

The final touch is to flambe the sauce with a ladle of brandy.

Brandy, of course, will not ignite until it's hot enough, as those of you who've failed

to ignite your Christmas pudding will have learnt the hard way.

So there we are, you see?

Just pour it into the pan

and it burns off not only all the alcohol but any extraneous fat that you might have.

A few chestnuts and the beer sauce with melted anchovy

complete the plate.

So there we have it, belly of pork with anchovies and chestnuts.

And what more could you ask in life really?

Mmm. Scrumptious.

I would hope that you are now ready to jump up from your sofa and hunt down your local rare-breed supplier.

Of course, you could always keep rare-breed pigs yourself, like these pig fanatics.

As long as you register with Defra, anyone can do it.

Tony York runs a one-day pig-keeping course for the hobby farmer

and he thinks there will be a big increase in the number of us keeping pigs.

I think over the next five to ten years

we're going to see such a dramatic increase in rare-breed

pig keeping and people keeping pigs on a small scale that we will almost

be getting back to those days around the end of the Second World War when so many families had their own pigs.

It's not difficult to keep a pig.

It's very easy. Probably almost the easiest farm animal to keep.

But don't think you have to work alone.

You could form a co-operative, like this group of friends in Staines.

We were all a bit fed up with the quality of the pork we got in supermarkets

and, for me, the biggest benefit of keeping my own pigs is knowing the provenance of the meat.

I know exactly what they've eaten and I know therefore that the meat is going to be good quality.

So there we are, the end of the journey,

and I hope you are now convinced to eat British rare-breed pork

and that you will save lots of species from extinction and enjoy the journey. Have fun.

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