Years ago, walk down any British town’s high street, and you’d find a clutch of entirely predictable shops. A baker, a greengrocer, maybe a fishmonger if you were lucky, and a butcher. The explosive growth of the supermarket and our hunger for the convenience of shopping for everything under one roof with a big car [...]
Go into any supermarket, and most butchers, and there’ll be shelves full of neatly butchered meat, prize cuts of rump, sirloin, tenderloin…the premium parts of the animal. What’s missing is the rest of the beast, all the other parts that don’t make up the standardised, easy to handle, easy to cook cuts that people so [...]
Right, confession time. This was meant to be a Generic Lazy Blog Post. Oh come on, you know the sort, especially if you write a blog yourself. Sometimes us bloggers hit a brick wall and just don’t know what to write about. We just scratch and scrabble around for something vaguely interesting to cook or [...]
On holiday in France the other week, we spent a morning wandering round the weekly market in Chablis. There was a little butcher’s van there, a chevaline boucher, a horse meat specialist. I bought a small piece of faux fillet for a couple of Euros, took it home, seasoned it and cooked it. The meat [...]
Good meat is important. If you’re going to eat an animal, the least you can do is to make sure that it was treated well when it was alive, and that you use its meat with care and respect. Can you always do this, though? Do you get a clear picture of where your meat [...]