Reading Time: 2 minutes Grass-fed or pastured meat and food from farm shops is expensive. Is that right? It may be slightly more expensive (for good reason) but if you want thrifty, nourishing food, take advice from cookbooks of your grandmother’s and great grandmother’s era. You may not have your own, so I mean metaphorically speaking, as traditional nose […]
Animals
On Drover’s Roads, Prehistoric Settlement and Ancient Landscapes
Reading Time: 2 minutes We recently excavated a rare kind of Iron Age settlement in Warwickshire. From out the ground came evidence that pointed us to our age-old habit of walking with animals. Our site sat in an ancient landscape, most likely riddled with drover’s roads and ancient byways, connecting places of a similar type. Herders traded livestock north […]
Herdwick and Swaledale Yarn, Local Cloth, Local Landscape
Reading Time: 3 minutes Herdwick and Swaledale Yarn; local yarn for local cloth. Actually this isn’t local yarn to me, but it’s locally distinctive yarn. It’s shorn from sheep able to weather windy hilltops andĀ cold winters of northern England. With their slightly kempy (hairy) woolly coat, they produce a durable, hardy yarn that’s more likely to make it into […]
What’s the Softest British Wool? Could It Be Ryeland?
Reading Time: 10 minutes As I drove up the track, I saw Helen. She waved at me from behind a full-sized skip bag of, what could be, the softest British wool – Ryeland wool. Fifteen Ryeland fleeces in a big sack. We exchanged talk about the journey over, then she said ‘I decided I might as well add in […]
Charcuterie in the Pantry: The Meat Cure
Reading Time: 5 minutes Charcuterie in the pantry or larder. That’s what charcuterie has always been made for. For thousands of years we’ve been dry-curing and smoking meat (before we could import food from all around the world) because we needed to keep going in lean times. And lean times they were, as we had to produce from the […]
Store Cheese in the Pantry – Ditch the Fridge
Reading Time: 7 minutes Cheese: take the milk, skim off the curds (solids) from the whey (liquids), press, ferment and age. Hey presto, you have a solid form of milk. We’ve long used this to extend its life and get us through lean times. A tradition thousands of years old. Store cheese in the pantry, and it’ll taste and […]