Читать книгу Eating for England: The Delights and Eccentricities of the British at Table - Nigel Slater - Страница 37

Sawdust and scrubbed wood, the wince-inducing scent of fresh blood, men in white coats with Brylcreemed hair and hands like sausages – the traditional butcher’s shop was where you went for black pudding for breakfast and a nice chop for your tea. You stood in the cool of white tiles and pale oak butchers’ blocks bemoaning the heat outside, or the state of the pavements, or the price of elecrticity. The butcher’s was where you came for a piece of beef for Sunday, or just a bone for the dog and a natter.

Those butchers that are left have a queue only on a Saturday now. There is little time for gossip, and gone are the animals hanging from hooks, which together with the telltale drips of blood on the floor reminded us that our chop was once something that walked and blinked and farted. Today meat is presented to look as little like an animal as possible. Perish the thought that anyone could ever link the lamb on their plate to the gambolling jelly-legged teddy bears in a spring meadow. The headless deer hanging up at Borough Market in London comes as a shock nowadays, sending shivers of Bambicide down your back. It’s the hacked-off head that does it, the bloody, gaping neck and the fact that the poor animal always seems to be tied to the fence in a leaping position, as if it was butchered while happily leaping a moss-encrusted log. When Jamie or Hugh kills an animal on television now, it creates an outcry, as if pulling the guts from a pig’s carcass has nothing to do with the sausage in our sandwich. The death of an animal for food seems all the more barbaric now that we are kept as far away from the act as possible. In the city it is rare even to spot a pheasant for sale with its feathers on.

If you eat meat and have a local butcher, cherish him. Buy your eggs from him, and your bacon, your butter and your chutney. We need to put as much money in his till as we can if he is still to be there in five years’ time. Otherwise a decent pork chop will be as rare as hen’s teeth.