At the Butcher

Friday is the day we usually go to the butcher. The plan is to cook Roast Chicken for 'family supper' (our Sunday lunch - served in the evening). Tomorrow morning (Saturday) the young man and I are going to cook a beef ragu to serve with pasta in the evening and early next week we'll need some lamb as we're going to make kofte. A trip to the butchers is a key event in the culinary week.

I learned to cook in 1974 - I was 19 and newly away from home in my gap year. I learned at the feet of 'les trois gourmands'. 'Simca' Beck, Julia Child and Louisette Bertholle's 'Mastering the Art of French Cooking' was my guide and I cooked my way through the meat chapters and the vegetable chapters whilst gaining the basic skills and acquiring some of the batterie de cuisine they thought essential. I couldn't have had a better grounding. I learned to 'listen to my chicken' and manage my hollandaise and bearnaise emulsions and use my chef's knife; and whilst cooking styles and fashions have changed those techniques I learned are still relevant.

But whilst I learned technique there was one element of my cooking now that was covered only cursorily. First published in 1961 and based on the tenets of 'Cordon Bleu' the book was written for 'the servantless cook'. It assumed (as one would in France in the sixties) that this post-war servantless cook had access to excellent raw materials in their local boucherie, volaillerie, charcuterie, poissonnierie, épicierie, boulangerie and marché.

Also in 1974, Macmillan published Jane Grigson's English Food. Jane was under no such illusion about British shopping. I was sensible enough to acquire a copy of English Food ( and am pleased still to have this first edition). Starting on page one she notes "...tomatoes have no taste. The finest potatoes are not available in the shops. Vegetables and fruit are seldom fresh.". She continues in this vein - exhorting to reader to seek out the best and to encourage local growers and suppliers. On butchers she observes "...the butchers themselves begin to know less and less about the finer points of their trade." Whilst Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall have led these movements in this century they were not the first nor will they be the last to call for quality and locality in their ingredients as well as knowledgeability and skill in their suppliers.

Jane used to spend three months of the year living in France - in a 'maison troglodytic' in Trôo in the Loire valley. The comparison between shopping in France and Britain was stark at that time. Later in 1979 I visited Jane in Trôo. In the morning we went to the marché to buy fruit, cheese, charcuterie and salad for lunch - mostly from the producers themselves - and on to the volaillerie for a chicken. The volailleur knew Jane and he knew his chickens. Where they had come from, how old, what they had fed on as well as their variety and cooking. We bought a fantastic chicken (complete with giblets). That's what I want from a butcher.

And despite Jane's pessimism about butchers in Britain I've been fortunate to be able to find knowledge, quality and devotion in butchers throughout my culinary life. As a student I lived on Nightingale Lane and frequented Dove's on the Northcote Road. Although post 'Up the Junction' Northcote Road was by no means 'Nappy Valley' in those days. But Bob Dove's grandfather set up the business in 1899 and in the seventies he was already focussed on quality. During my student years and the eighties, (as you may have read), Slater & Cook, Bisney & Jones and J & J Dalli provided all the quality I needed. As the eighties progressed Soho butchers closed and I became more affluent my custom spread to Allen's in Mount Street and to Selfridges Food Hall and later Harvey Nichols fifth floor. When I worked for a year at the BBC I was able to get everything I needed at Lidgates on Holland Park. At that time I lived quite close to Moen (before the move to 24) where Garry would get most things that I wanted.

Over the past few years though my butcher has been The Butcher at the Butcher & Grill. The business was set up by the team that opened the fifth floor food hall at Harvey Nichols - so I've known Michael, my butcher for over 15 years. They source from a limited number of suppliers with most of the lamb and beef coming from Highfields Farm. Everything is well hung. I can buy chickens from Packington Poultry and Label Anglais. They make their own sausages but also stock real Toulouse sausages (from Toulouse) and speciality Merguez as well as a variety of Spanish cured meat from Ferju (I have a passion for proper morcilla). Butchered as you want, Michael will prepare a gigot, cut me a porterhouse steak, roll a lamb shoulder in a melon and order boudin or AAAAA andouilettes should that be my fancy this week. If I want a 7kg suckling pig - no problem. Brains, sweetbreads, calves kidney, trotters, a pig's head - just ask. So today we'll have a Packington chicken, Michael will grind us some skirt for the ragu and bone out a shoulder for the kofte and we'll order the kidneys for next Friday. Nose to Tail they're a brilliant butcher - and only 5 minutes from the house.

Merguez, butchers & Soho in the 70s

I discovered Merguez in 1976 when, as a student, I began to explore the delights of Soho. At that time Brewer Street boasted three butchers. Randall and Aubin was a traditional butcher with a ceramic tiled interior and sawdust on the floor; (it later metamorphosed into a twee coffee shop of the same name and now, as a restraurant, bills itself as 'Soho's Hippest Eatery' - sigh!). Slater & Cook, Bisney and Jones was a more modern affair. Essentially up-market with stainless steel fittings behind the white tiled frontage and a substantial catering supply business. One could buy the best sweetbreads here. Alas this too was to disappear as leaseholds came up in the 80s. It became a Fresh & Wild.

But as a student, whilst I used these two from time to time, my everyday butcher was Dalli's - it was the cheapest of the three and always had the most interesting offal. J and J Dalli occupied the corner of Brewer Street and Lower John Street. The Dalli's were Tunisian and it was natural for them to make Merguez - though in the seventies these delicious sausages were not yet widely sold in the UK. They would use lamb shoulder as the base bulked with other lamb trimmings and fat and spiced with home-made harissa, sumac, garlic, paprika and fennel seed. Once coarsely ground and mixed they would stuff the paste into lamb intestine that they had cleaned and tie them off. The resulting sausage was a revelation to this young student and prompted my interest in the food of the Mahgreb. (Interestingly, Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion, who is usually definitive on all things culinary has merguez made with beef. But I can find no other reference to this).

What with the predicted heat wave this week, we're going to start cooking outside on the charcoal stove. Whilst Merguez are often served with Cous Cous I also serve them with potato and that's the plan tonight. Grilled Merguez, cold boulangere potato, bread and a Mechouia (salad of peppers, onions, garlic cloves and tomatoes cooked in the embers) with a bottle of Twentyeight Road Mourvedre 2005 ...



Meanwhile Dalli's too has gone, superseded by another bland coffee shop. I guess Merguez production says it all. Producing the sausage is incredibly labour intensive, but it is sold at a raw material price. Coffee, sandwiches and prepared food can all be marked up by considerably more and that's why today there are no butchers in Soho.