The pleasures of opening a new pub... and introducing livestock!

As avid meat eaters who passionately care about where the bacon in our sandwich or hock in our pies comes from we relished the opportunity in rearing our own pigs.

Few things can beat the satisfaction of growing or rearing your own produce and free range meat from animals that have been produced with love and care knocks the spots off the cheap and flavourless packs you find in the supermarket. Having picked ours up as weaners from our friends at Sandy Lane Farm, whom we have known for many years and enjoyed greatly the flavour of their glorious free range Oxford Sandy and Blacks at our deli, Jacobs & Field we knew theirs would be the obvious choice for us.

Now, being city dwellers we have, between us owned a dog and two goldfish but relished the challenge in being smallholders. We constructed their home at the bottom of the garden in a disused patch of land where a bouncy castle once stood, a fence was erected and a pig arc added to give them a place to sleep.

Pigs 1 & 2 (we were warned not to give them names!) got settled in rather nicely and soon the 10 metre square patch of land resembled a muddy scene from the Somme, but our two porkers were more than content. Thriving on a diet of organic feed and over ripe fruit and veg they soon began to grow and there point of us keeping them was drawing to a close.

“Daddy, what’s going to happen to the piggies?” was a question often asked by my daughter, explaining that sausages don’t grow on trees nor do they appear in the weekly Riverford box by magic (she has learnt first hand how our sausage and ham consumption in the food chain happens). We chose a small, local abattoir in Long Compton to do the slaughter for us, who were very patient towards the pair of unseasoned smallholders!

They were recommended to us by a pig-keeping friend and we found them to be extremely helpful and the whole process was swift and clean. Did we feel guilty? Of course, we would be worried if we didn’t!

We felt enormous respect for the animals we had lovingly reared and we felt reconnected to the food chain that we are involved with. Our animals were collected the following day and we set to work butchering them into the correct cuts. We had always planned to use our pork for curing; belly and back as bacon. the shoulder and front leg or “picnic ham” and the rear legs as a continental air dried ham not unlike spanish serrano. All the trimmings would find there way in to a spiced sausage or “Wolvercote chorizo”!, perfect for a bar snack or sliced on a pizza from our woodfired oven!

Talking of which we finally had an opportunity to fire our outdoor oven up last month and hosted an event with Sophie Grigson’s cookery school where she cooked up some lovely autumnal dishes and a delicious potato & anchovy pizza. A future dish we will be serving? I think so!

TRY IT Jacobs Inn, 130 Godstow Road, Wolvercote, Oxford OX2 8PG Call 01865 514333