Could Have Been...

Tonight's meal, awaiting heat: belly pork strips marinated in soy sauce, salt and olive oil, with half a head of whole garlic cloves, a gravy of reduced chicken stock, shallots and white wine, and Jersey Royals boiled with mint from the garden and sea-salt. Should be a recipe for culinary heaven, n'est pas? Unfortunately not so. Whilst the gravy and the spuds did their thing, the meat was rubbery and lacking in flavour, ethically-produced as it was. The reason? For some unknown and unfathomable reason, M&S, like so many other chains, deem it necessary to sell pork belly without the skin, and crucially, concomitantly, the layer of soft fat that lies beneath.

Two things, then: the nicest bit - the skin as crackling - and the layer of fat which permeates the meat itself, offering up incredible flavour and tenderizing the otherwise rather dry and over-chewy sub-layers, are both missing from what is otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, a cut of meat far superior to fillet steak. I won't be buying pork belly from anywhere else than the only real butcher left around here (in Menai Bridge) in future, and it will always, henceforth, be in my favourite form: the whole piece, cooked slowly over cider and finished at pace under fierce heat to produce that crowning, toothsome glory that is pork crackling...