‘The idea,’ said Wendell Berry, ‘is that, when faced with abundance, one should consume abundantly, an idea that has survived to be the basis of our present economy.’
One of the joys of working on a book is – counter-intuitively- getting up at 5.00 am to do the requisite reading for the day’s work. That quote is from his The World Ending Fire, which is required reading if you want to relocate your inner pastoralist. He wrote it back in 1980, but it still echoes truly today.
Take a Tesco superstore, and their half-articulated boast that they stock 40,000 separate products. Just think about that number for a moment. Relate it to the number of things in your house, in your life, even, and then try to imagine all the energy, packaging, transport, air miles and waste that has been a part of bringing them to your table.
The other day, I spent an hour in aisle 4 of my local superstore, until the polite man from security was referred to me by the tannoy system, checking out all beef and beef derivative products that I could find. Some were out of stock but, just on the beef alone, I lost count at 52. Anything from five different types of steak to roasts, mince, burgers and diced cuts. Pausing briefly to point out to you that if you research Tesco’s idealistic brand of ‘Boswell Farm’ you will find that it is no more than a marketing construct whose meat could have come from anywhere, there is something else that should interest you here, and it’s not just Tesco.
The vast majority of what they sold came from the upper back end of the cow, the so-called prime cuts. These are the bits, like rump and fillet steak, that maybe float traditionally into your brain when preceded by the term ‘beef’. They make nice margins for the supermarket, and have a nice fast stock turn for the people running the supply chain. From the consumer’s point of view, they are easy to plan a meal round, simple to cook (unless you are me, apparently), and they taste pretty good.
But any butchery business will tell you that the biggest issue with presenting a cow into the food chain is that 15% of it is dead easy to sell, whilst the other 85% is considerably harder. This is because, in our attention-deficit, ‘time poor’ world, we like to bring things to the table that have taken the least possible amount of time to get there. Plus, we are as easily led by the idea of a ‘nice steak’, as we might have been by Boswell Farm.
Part of my solemn duty in researching this book, is to eat my way around the 38 primal (as opposed to prime) cuts of beef that are listed in the AHDB’s Meat Education Programme. Suddenly, into my life have flowed half-remembered terms like underblade, clod shin, flank skirt and brisket, and the funny thing is that, cooked properly, all of them almost invariably have more flavour than the expensive top back bit of the cow, where the muscles do less work. Not just that, but they cost about a quarter of the expensive bits, and you will delight the butcher when you ask for them.
It is not for nothing that unimaginative, overpriced restaurants sell little more than a steak (which any half-competent chef would struggle to get wrong), whereas only the very best will tackle a bit of blade, or a heel muscle, where it takes effort and inspiration to get it right.
Try it. The very best meat dish I have eaten in my life was about five weeks ago, some slow-cooked shin on a mirepoix, with boiled potatoes. I could have gladly gone to sleep with it in the pan. Home-made recipes are personal things, so if anyone would like it, please let me know….
…..which brings me on to a terrible discovery and admission. I have recently learned that anyone who responds to the email that brings them this blog, is fated to a life of being ignored. I don’t ever receive them. If you have feedback, (or if you want to comment privately, or possibly to support Caroline and I in redecorating our flat, a la Boris), please use the comment section at the bottom of the blog. You would have to be appallingly rude for me not to appreciate it.
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