As December seeped in, wet and warm, we booked our three sows into Tottingworth abattoir. Meanwhile, as we awaited the day, we had decided to buy a couple of legs of pork from Tottingworth for hams for ourselves. We prepared them and took them down to our cellar where they would salt cure for a while. When curing hams I go down to the cellar every day to turn them and check that they are fully covered with salt.
The rain pelted down relentlessly and we were surrounded by a sea of mud. All we could do was to stay inside and sit the storms out. The hams had been down in the cellar for a couple of days sitting in their boxes of salt on a high bench. I went down to do the daily turn, only to find that half way down the stairs I could go no further…we were flooded and the hams were nowhere to be seen!
Some nice men with a big pump came out pretty quickly to get rid of the water for us…about 3 ft of it. They worked tirelessly outside in the dark and the rain and all I could think about was making sure they had an endless supply of hot drinks to keep them warm. Eventually they emerged and came to have a quiet word with me. ‘Madam,’ one of the nice men said in hushed tones, ‘we have cleared the water and we are taking an inventory but I just thought I should mention that there appears to be some…er…flesh…in your cellar.’ He looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
‘Oh!’ I said, ‘Hams!’ I had quite forgotten to mention them, ‘…Just a couple of hams, that’s all!’ and realising what they must have looked like where they had come to rest on the cellar floor, I added reassuringly, ‘Really nothing to worry about.’
The flooded cellar has been an ongoing problem over the winter because we have clay soil here and the water table was so high that there was nowhere for it to go, so it came into our cellar. After a while we were told that the water would have to stay in the cellar until it drained away of its own accord to avoid the pressure from the waterlogged land outside pushing our cellar walls in. Our house was being held up by flood water!
The cellar is all dried out now and we are renovating it and sorting out the drainage because it’s a great space for storing wines and preserves and has the perfect humidity and airiness for hanging chorizo and air dried sausages.
Halfway through December when most people are decorating their Christmas trees and tweaking the bows on the gifts that they have wrapped for under the tree, we took delivery of our three sows from the abattoir. Two of them went straight to the Tin Drums and we kept one for ourselves. Mark from the Cottage down the road used to be a butcher and he came up to our house with his tins of cider to teach us how to butcher a whole pig, a lamb and a venison. You have to work really fast doing this and it’s best done when the weather turns really cold, which it obligingly did. Whilst the men butchered, Charlotte (the Tin Drum’s Land Girl) and I prepared salt cures and molasses cures for hams, sweet cures for sides of bacon and pancetta, and herb and spice mixes for sausages and chorizo. For three days we worked late into the night as the snow settled all around us. Dave, in true Heath Robinson style, turned one of our sheds into a smokery and after the meat had been salt or sweet cured, it was cold smoked over hay and oak chips. The results are truly delicious.
The clock was ticking and Christmas was almost upon us. We went out one snowy evening and bought our Christmas tree but when we came to decorate it, we couldn’t find the decorations. They were under water in the cellar. All ruined. We did our best with jewellery and chandelier droplets and salt dough angels but it didn’t look quite right. But word had gone round, and friends from Brighton and the village brought us gifts of baubles and hearts and and ginger biscuits to hang on the tree and by Christmas the tree was the loveliest I had ever seen it. One day just before Christmas there was a knock at the door and Tess who owns the Village Shop, and her cousin Sam, came in bearing the most amazing gingerbread house. It was ‘Gingernash’ – a perfect replica of our home with almond roof tiles, chocolate finger ridge tiles, pathways made of boiled sweets, flower beds filled with liquorice allsorts and a tumble of sweets falling from Dave’s bio-diesel shed which the children were allowed to ‘tidy up’. How kind people are.
We snuggled down for Christmas. In the new year, the snow whirled and drifted and settled all around us. The holidays went on and on and it seemed to the children as if a miracle had happened and school would never open again and they would grow up in a pure white world catching snowflakes on their tongues, sledging on trays and building giant snowmen. We were isolated; there was no way we could get into Brighton even in the Landrover and so we settled down to work on the Tin Drum menus.
Over the past year or so as we have been growing our vegetables and rearing a few animals, we have also been learning traditional ways of preparing and cooking food. At the smallholding we have been working on recipes using the food that we know we can produce ourselves. Last week Stuart - the new manager of Seven Dials Tin Drum, and Greg, Pete and George – the head chefs from all three of the restaurants, came out to the smallholding for three days and we turned our kitchen into a training kitchen.
It was a chance for us all to work together and refine butchery skills, experiment with traditional ways of curing and preserving meat and discuss, develop and cook all the dishes that will soon be on our new menu. At the end of each day we opened a couple of bottles of wine and all sat around the farmhouse table to eat and discuss the dishes.
We are really excited about the new menu. It is the culmination of a real team effort. It will be fine, local, rustic food served with great wines and beers, and we hope you will enjoy it.
