Who was it that decreed gammon steaks should be round?
Some culinary Nazi in the dim and distant porcine past must have made a draconian ruling.
As a result, order a gammon steak today and, almost without exception, it will be a bubble-gum-pink disc. A bland meat frisbee.
To further put your snout out of joint, it’ll probably be proffered groaning under the weight of some nasty, cheap, tinned pineapple, also conforming to this bizarre disc fetish.
The pig – a noble and cruelly misused beast, deserves better.
Rejoice then in the piggy paradise of pork perfection that is the Wheatsheaf pub in Braishfield.
Here in rural Hampshire, home of the hog, owners Peter and Jenny Jones have raised a herd of 38 rare breed squealers, which snuffle and wallow and generally make complete pigs of themselves on land at the back of the beer garden.
They look as happy as, well, as a pig in… And it shows on the plates served inside this quirky back road boozer, which are filled with various juicy pieces of the happy truffle hunters.
Served with all the reverence traditionally accorded a piece of fine steak, my Wheatsheaf-style gammon arrived pleasingly free of even a hint of suspicious roundness.
Far from being flat and thin, it was a hefty piece of meat poking out pale and fleshy-pink from beneath a couple of poached eggs I had asked be placed on top. I’d spied the hens outside and figured the eggs would be from them.
Across the other side of the table it came with the traditional pineapple. But this was no artificially sweetened slice – instead a hefty lump of fresh fruit perched at a rakish angle on top.
The meat itself was sweetly salty, dense and moist and just about the most intensely piggy thing I have ever eaten.
Pricking the poached eggs so the darkly yellow yolk flooded over the plate, I mopped it all up with forkfuls of fries with scarcely a thought for my rapidly hardening arteries. The lot was washed down with pints of the ever-glorious Bowman Ales from Droxford.
Just fantastic and it’s all wrapped in a pleasing ethical glow.
It’s local, it’s high animal welfare and it’s supporting rare British breeds, perhaps counter-intuitively, by eating them!