My Last Supper by Jay Rayner

Author:Jay Rayner [Rayner, Jay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781783351480
Published: 2019-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

I make a list of the pork preparations I have most enjoyed over the years. I am detailed and meticulous, for this is a serious business. During my road trip in Northern Ireland to find the source of Andrew Rooney’s apparently famed oysters, I had stopped off to see an old friend called Peter Hannan. Together with his brother Jim, he runs Hannan Meats from an unassuming industrial estate in Moira. Hannan became famous in London because of his beef, from shorthorns raised on clover. Famously, it was dry-aged in a room lined with blocks of pink Himalayan salt. I couldn’t quite work out what impact the salt had. Certainly, it would be hygroscopic, removing moisture from the air. Perhaps it had an antibiotic effect, killing off less wanted bacteria from the air which could give long-aged beef that slightly high, funky taste. Either way, a Hannan côte de boeuf really was a special thing. It had won many awards.

However, I found his way with pork even more entrancing. In a part of the world famed for its bacon, he had turned it into a performance piece. He had taken to dumping cured bacon rib cuts, huge meaty things the size of a Sunday-lunch joint, in a sugar pit for a couple of weeks. The afternoon I stopped by, he was in his demonstration kitchen, just across from the shop, roasting up bacon joints for a couple of restaurant chefs who were considering using his meat. He knew how to show it off to its best advantage. The key was to roast it long and slow, below the 140ºC burn point, until the skin had gone a golden reddy-brown. The deep-cured, smoked meat fell apart. The crisped fat dissolved on the tongue. It was rich. It was so rich it made you curse the limits of appetite. As ever, Peter laughed while he sliced it up, nudging the plate towards me with an encouraging shrug and a ‘Go on now’. I did as I was told. Repeatedly.

Then there are the cracklins I was served at the restaurant of Louisianan chef Isaac Toups in New Orleans. Toups, a huge bald-headed man, with a beard like a Siberian forest, likes to play with the city’s culinary traditions, but he stays true to the essentials. His cracklins are one of those: thumb-thick pieces of pork belly, simmered long and slow in fat, and then finished fast until crisp and brown, before being tossed in a mix of salt and spices and served warm. He pushed a large bowl of them across the counter at me, then said I should not eat them all because he had a whole load more dishes coming up. It was a futile request, like trying to get a dog to stop mid-coitus. These demanded to be eaten. First, they shattered under the teeth, before seeming to dissolve into intense gusts of aromatic porkiness. I troughed them.

There’s the dish of small ribs served to me at Baiwei, a pretty basic Sichuan caff on the edge of London’s Chinatown.

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