So dependent were people upon pork, that when folk moved
into the cities, they brought with them their pigs to rear. There wasn’t enough
space for absolutely everyone to keep a pig, many simply had to get their fix
of pork from one of the many city piggeries.
Mediaeval pig slaugher
Pigs were often let out of their pens to have a good old
rummage around the vicinity of the household, gobbling up scraps of food and
other garbage; very useful in a time when waste wasn’t collected up and taken
away like it is today. Inevitably, pigs escaped, and they could be seen on the
city streets eating anything and everything they came across. It became a huge
problem – they didn’t just eat rotting food, but also human excrement from
gutters, as well as the blood and pus collected in barber-surgeons’ buckets.
They became feral and ferocious, with reports of errant hogs eating babies! London’s
Shepherd’s Bush was particularly overrun.
Saint Anthony
This problem was compounded by the fact that in many cities,
pigs came under the protection of St Anthony, Patron Saint of pigs and
swineherds. If you were unlucky enough to live in a city where Antonine monks
also dwelled, it must have felt it was the pigs’ city not yours. In many households,
the runt of the family pig’s litter was named St Anthony’s pig.
It didn’t take people long to realise that if pigs were
eating diseased and rotten matter, then the pork from the pigs that we ate in
turn would be very poor. Indeed, pork was teeming with parasites such as
tapeworm and trichinosis. Parasites love pigs, it seems, and even with our modern
hyper-strict food regulations, we have only recently been able to sell pork
that can be cooked a little underdone safely.
When Jane wrote English
Food in the 1970s, she complained bitterly of the state of pork products in
the UK; sludgy sausages made from mechanically-retrieved meat and inert rusk, and
grey pork pies were (and still are) standard fayre. However, these foods can be
some of the most delicious produce in Britain, and when made properly, we
excel. Luckily there are small-scale local butchers everywhere who make their
own sausages and pork pies to a high standard, we just have to root them out
like any self-respecting hog would.
Making Cumblerland Sausage
Although as a nation we consume a lot of pork, there are
just eight recipes in the Pork
section of the Meat,
Poultry and Game chapter of the book, but this is not because Jane was
shirking her responsibilities but because most of the pork we consume is in pie
form is cured in some way, therefore most porcine recipes appear in other sections
of the book. The mean score for the section is an impressive 8.1 – the second
highest score so far – her recipe for #415
Cumberland Sausage is sublime and
scored full marks from me, and she introduced me to the delights of #373
Faggots and #336
Brawn.
Wrapping faggots in pig's caul
Jane managed to
cover quite a lot of ground in just eight recipes, but it did mean that a few
were missed out. If the book were to be reprinted, I’d like to see a few more cuts
represented; pork belly, hand of pork, cheeks, chitterlings and pigs’ ears don’t
get the look-in they deserve. What’s more, there are no recipes for sausage
casserole, pork in cider, pulled pork (a British, not a U.S., invention!), Scotch
eggs, pork scratchings, hog’s pudding or a good quality country pâté such
as a nice pâté de campagne.
The gruesome initial step of brawn-making
As mentioned already, this section is a very high scorer with a
mean score of 8.1 (and a median and mode of 7.5 and 7 respectively). There were
no disasters, the lowest score being a 7, with classics such as #415
Cumberland Sausage (which scored
full points), #290
Roast Pork with Crackling and #82 Toad-in-the-Hole driving up the
final mark.
As usual I have listed the recipes ordered as they appear in the book, along with
the scores I gave them and hyperlinks to the original posts.
#415
Cumberland Sausage 10/10
#82 Toad-in-the-Hole 9/10
#35
White Puddings 7/10
#34
Black Puddings 8/10
#373
Faggots and Peas 7.5/10
