Pork epiphany

I have had quite a weekend of it. First there was the roast belly pork the gent cooked: 3 hours at 140 degrees, atop a pile of onion and Granny Smith apples. The crackling was sheared off in one piece and put under the grill to, well, crackle, and everything served with (perfect) mashed potato and cabbage. The resulting meat was completely succulent and the fat, layered between the meat, plentiful and juicy but not at all gristly or difficult.

I didn’t anticipate that the joy would continue into the next day. For a train journey down to Sussex I was given a baking-parchment wrapped sandwich of cold pork, lettuce and mustard on Ottolenghi bread. And a separate packet whose contents were given away as it unravelled, the paper becoming increasingly transparent with grease, until the cold crackling slid out.

It has to be the best sandwich I have ever eaten. And, possibly, the largest.

My father cooked on Sunday night. I was given the options of a vegetable curry or ‘beans etc.’, there being a glut of runner beans in the garden. I chose beans etc. of course, and the 'etc.' this time was a little joint of gammon, roasted under a tin foil blanket.

This time the fat presented itself in a wide halo around two thirds of the meat. As it had been covered to cook, the crust was jammy and sticky, instead of crunchy, and I wasn’t sure I would like it. As a child, pork fat was my anathema - for the hideous oyster-texture as much as the gristly bits. So I cut a wobbly flabby bit of fat with its sticky edge, dipped it in the juices swimming in the plate, and ate it. More tasty than the meat itself, salty, melting. Converted. Hidden in the kitchen, pretending to carve seconds, I rather gorged on the fat, cutting it away in chunks and eating it with my fingers. And to think I used to feed this ambrosia to our chickens as ‘leftovers’!