A question I am frequently asked these days is, ‘do you miss farming?’ To which the answer is a resounding, if not slightly guilty and regretful, no.
Now let me declare from the outset that I was never a Farmer farmer. I never relied upon tilling vast swathes of land to put bread on the table. I never had to milk huge herds of Holsteins twice a day, every day to keep the lights on. I never had to battle with supermarket buyers for a fair price for my produce in order to make an honest living.
No, I was a smallholder. A gentleman farmer, some might say, with a mere 26 acres in the Blackdown Hills in Devon to tend to and who had, initially at least, the gift of being able to farm what he wanted, when he wanted.
To start with, farming proper wasn’t even on our horizon. We had moved to the South West with vague notions, like many, of ‘doing a River Cottage’. There was mild talk of getting a few chickens, some ducks even (we had a pond, after all, and it would be a shame not to put it to good use), but nothing more.
And then we went to say hello to Colin and Annie.
A few weeks after moving in, and being a well brought up young couple (or so I like to think), Lucy and I wandered up the hill to introduce ourselves to our nearest neighbours as the replacements for Tony and Edith.
After a cup of tea, and for reasons best known to posterity, the boys and girls split and I found myself walking with Colin through his farmyard. A giant Berkshire sow, standing tall on her hind legs, trotters draped over a half opened stable door, watched me beadily. For the briefest of moments, we locked eyes before she let rip with an enormous snort.
‘She likes you,’ Colin said in that mysterious Devonian way that could equally have meant she either approved of my company or was eyeing me up for dinner. It was difficult to tell.
‘She’s beautiful,’ I replied, meaning it, entranced by the speed and dexterity with which she then disappeared from view. A peal of lusty squeals suddenly filled the air. ‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked.
‘That’s her brood. Hungry, I reckon.’
We wandered over and in the manner of proper, contemplative Devon farmers – and in a manner I was to repeat countless times over the years – both leaned on the gate to inspect life within.
To those unfamiliar with pigs, and in those days I was, a large sow in her post birth pomp – lying on her side and with her giant udders swollen to wobbling with milk, a squiggle of piglets madly fighting for her teats – is a sight to behold. There’s something about the immediacy of so much vibrant, almost thrashing life that took (and still) takes the breath away. I was mesmerised.
‘Blimey,’ I said, unable to generate anything more profound.
Colin half turned stiffly, a paternal pride to his twinkling eyes.
‘She’s a beaut, ain’t she?’ His smile widened. ‘We got a couple goin’ spare if you fancied ‘em?’
The question was asked so innocuously and so softly, almost as though it were the most natural thing in the world for one Devonian to ask another, that I hesitated for not one second before replying.
Twenty minutes later back down the hill in the warmth of our farmhouse, I put the kettle on.
‘Colin and Annie are lovely aren’t they?’
‘They are,’ my wife replied, bustling around me in the kitchen.
‘And those piglets were just gorgeous weren’t they?’
‘They were,’ she added happily.
I paused, waiting for the right moment to drop my bombshell.
‘So did you really like them?’
She paused and looked at me, smelling the first faintest whiff of a rat.
‘I did.’
I smiled broadly.
‘Good. Cause I bought two. They’re arriving on Tuesday.’
Lou merely smiled back, somehow guessing – as women only can – that I’d fallen prey to some sort of porcine spell that I had been powerless to resist.
We called them Derek and Clive and after they lived out their time with us we had a brief dalliance with a pair of Large Blacks called Rupert and Roger before finally finding our companion breed for the next 6 years, the venerable British Lop, one of the most endangered of all British rare breed pigs.
One sunny morning (and it really was sunny; that’s not just the screenwriter in me), I drove over to Ian and Maggie Todd ‘s farm near Honiton to pick up a trio of ten week old Lop piglets. Little did I know it then as I manhandled these three fiery bundles of kicking, screaming and merrily pissing all over me joy into the back of my Land Rover, with squeals so loud I had to wear ear defenders, that that day a love affair with the Lop was born, one that endures to this day.
Polly, Guinevere and Elsie settled in very quickly and before long became a much loved fixture of farm life, their happy grunts of joy never failing to put a smile on my face as I walked up the hill to feed them at the beginning and end of each working day.
Before long, we decided that buying in weaners wasn’t what proper farmers did and so brought in a Lop boar, Cornish (pictured, top with me), to “service” (as the wonderful euphemism has it) our newly minted breeding sows.
‘He’s quite large,’ Jerry, our farm manager, said down the phone on the day of Cornish’s arrival. ‘But he’s a lovely gentle fella. And got the biggest pair of bollocks I’ve ever seen.’
‘Right,’ I replied in between takes from a recording studio in Soho, assuming this was merely another example (in a long line) of West Country hyperbole.
Except he was right. On every count. In fact, if anything, he had undersold the sheer majesty that was Liskeard Cornishman 45, to give him his formal pedigree name.
Weighing in at a not insubstantial 250kg, Cornish was a giant by any measure and most certainly had the biggest pair of goolies I’ve ever seen on an animal that, even on a cold day, just about required a wheel barrow to transport them about the place.
But it was his temperament that immediately set him apart from even our own extraordinarily docile and friendly Lop sows. With kind eyes hidden by the giant ears that give the breed their name, he was quite simply the most gentle and affectionate creature I had ever met; more labrador than lion, tabby than tiger. It was love at first sight.
Without any fanfare, he got down to work and before long a litter of healthy and robust piglets arrived, one of which we picked out and kept as a possible future breeding boar, naming him Dan Cole after the English rugby prop whom he uncannily resembled.
After a couple of months, and with his work done, Cornish returned home to carry on his arduous duties, leaving a giant, pig-shaped void in his wake. Very quickly we began to miss him. Terribly. The way he would chase me with the feed bucket (he could outrun me); the way he would snortle loudly whenever he saw me pass by, demanding attention; the way I would then inevitably head over to tickle him as a result. (It wasn’t unusual for my wife to find me in the orchard with nearly a quarter of a ton of pig happily on its side having its belly scratched.)
As the weeks rolled by and the chasm deepened, I began to realise that I missed Cornish for more than just his physical presence on the farm. I missed him for him. For his welcoming, reassuringly placid constancy that both calmed and somehow anchored me to the land in a way that no farmhouse ever could. I needed him back.
Armed with my epiphany, I rushed inside and called his owner. Did she think that Cornish might be able to come back soon, perhaps forever this time? To my eternal surprise and immense gratitude, Becci was delighted by the idea. She needed to get another boar in to avoid cross breeding and so a deal was struck and a date set for the great man’s return. Christmas, as far as I was concerned, had come early.
A week or so before his return, my phone went. It was Becci again. Instantly, I knew from the tone of her voice that something was seriously wrong.
‘I’m afraid Cornish has…’
She didn’t get any further into her sentence before collapsing in a heap of sobs.
Cornish, she went on to explain, had died very suddenly in the night. She had gone out into the yard that morning to find him on his side. He had had a heart attack. He was only three.
I cannot begin to tell you the sense of desolation I felt. He hadn’t been with us long, wasn’t even ours. But a bond – a love even – had been indelibly formed in that short time. Cornish was a kindred spirit, a gentle soul. He deserved a good home and a good life and I was going to give him both. With his untimely death, it was as though I had been robbed of all spiritual purpose in (farm) life.
For days I wandered listlessly about in a state of shock. He had been such a character, epitomising the very best of the breed’s nature: kind, mischievous and fun. I had been looking forward to his return and now he was gone forever. In that maelstrom of incomprehensible grief, I felt his loss as keenly as if he had been a blood relative.
And then, one morning as I stood mournfully in the orchard regarding my litter of rapidly growing pigs, a glimmer of hope emerged. A stout piglet, snortling gently in that Lop way and covered head to toe in mud, sidled up to me. It was Dan and before I knew it he had begun to scratch himself against my leg in exactly the way his father had (although without the immediate threat to life and limb that came with a Cornish cuddle; Dan was still only about 20 kilos at this point).
I looked down at his guileless blue eyes and wondered whether my old trick would work on son as it had on father. I bent down and began to scratch him, first on his withers and then reaching underneath to his belly. As his legs gave way and he rolled onto his back, the gentlest of gurgling spring snortles filling the air, a smile as wide as Chesil beach broke across my face.
Cornish lived on.
***
Now, it may seem odd to be including a recipe for roast pork after this most unashamedly sentimental of pieces. A deliberately unsentimental act, you might say, to balance the emotional books.
And, in many ways, you’d be right.
My intention, however, isn’t to shock or be clever in the way that – invariably male investment banking – visitors would try when they would greet our sheep with the words “mint sauce”. No, all I am trying to do is remind people, me more than anyone perhaps, that whereas there is no harm in anthropomorphising one’s animals, ultimately, you need to remember you are rearing them for one reason and one reason only.
Too often, we are happily complicit in forgetting – and the modern food marketing industry goes to great lengths to aid us in this – that there is a link between what is running round the farm yard one day and what ends up on the plate the next.
Killing for the plate is a choice – and a difficult one at that – and once you’ve squared that uncomfortable moral circle, once you’ve joined those brutal dots, as it were, you begin to think even longer and harder before you send them to their fate. It also makes you more determined than ever to ensure that any animal in your care is both raised and killed well.
Roast Pork
Shopping:
One 2kg spare rib (rolled shoulder) of pork
Salt
Herbs of your choice
For me, the spare rib provides the best flavour of all roasting pork joints whilst at the same time has the benefit of being the most forgiving to cook, along, perhaps, with the belly. It’s something of a misnomer, however, as there are no ribs in it. It is merely a boned out shoulder which is then rolled up. This devilishly simple confection also has the further benefit of being insanely easy to prepare. The only thing it really needs is time.
There is a lot of misplaced fear around roasting meat in general and pork in particular. For some reason, people seem to view even slightly undercooked pork as akin to serving fresh ebola and so proceed to overcook it to a criminal degree. Mercifully, a spare rib roast, having plenty of hard working muscle and fat at its core, is a very hard joint to do that to. In fact, it rewards long, slow cooking.
Turn your oven on to about 220/240 degrees. Meanwhile, take your joint out of the fridge and allow to come up to room temperature. (I tend to take it out of its packaging, especially if it’s been vac packed, the day before to give the skin a chance to dry out.) Pour a good glug of olive oil into your hand and rub into the skin. Then salt the skin liberally and, if you want, rub in your herb of choice. I usually use either thyme, rosemary, cumin or fennel whereas my wife goes a stage further and rubs in crushed garlic and star anise. The choice is yours.
Put into the hot oven, on as high a shelf as you can, and leave for 20 minutes. This helps scorch the skin and start off the whole crackling process.
Now turn the oven down low, to about 140/150, move the joint to the lower part of the oven and leave well alone. For a 2kg joint I tend to leave it for at least an hour and a half. But, as I said at the top of this recipe, the beauty is with this particular cut, you can leave it for as long as you like.
Take the meat out of the oven and leave to rest. Again, I tend to leave it for at least half an hour sitting on the worktops covered loosely with foil. If the crackling isn’t quite up to par, then flash it under a hot grill for a couple of minutes. That usually does the trick.
Carve and serve with whatever accompaniments take your fancy which in our house can range from a risotto Milanese to salad to boiled new potatoes to steamed spring greens with lashings of butter. Again, whatever takes your fancy.