What better lunch can a girl have than a good sausage smeared in a healthy dose of fat.
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Salame sotto grasso by Picco.
My Sunday afternoon was blissful one in allowing me to combine my two longest standing passions: a bit of quality meaty fat and a farmer’s market.
Picco’s salumi at my local Harringey farmer’s market. Now, one at a time.
I got interested in Picco’s salumi for the simple reason that all – yes, all – of the pork they use for sausages is free-range British pork. Now you can throw the meat ends of elitism (of preferring ‘local’ to ehh continental) at me, but the simple reason is that I like the confinement of being limited, the boundaries. One is forced to creativity in a way that is otherwise is too liberal with opportunities.
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pic of sodahead.com
My recent keenness in vegetarian and vegan dishes(eg here) has sprung out of the same desire to experiment with edges and limits. how decadent of me. The worlds of plenty and all that? And yes, you can draw many similar conclusions to our (and I do say ‘our’ in its broadest sense quite purposely) modern-day kinky interest in s & m and fairtrade macademia nuts.
Back to the proper meat though.
Picco has a peculiar (how could I resit) story. The company started some 80 years ago by an Italian family. Very recently taken over by two young – British – chaps. All the sausages are made by hand, in their tiny production unit in Islington. All the recipes so far are Italian – soon Eastern-European to be added (yay, bro). The meat and muscle are all local.
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Picco’s selection of salumi.
I went for the garishly beautiful salumi smeared in fat, done so to preserve its tenderness. I found the flavour – compared to many other beautiful ones, such as the ones with fennel, Jamaican pepper and local Italian wine – particularly interesting, mellow, gullable.
One of the guys who now runs the company is Matt (the cappy above), who studied on the MA Anthropology of Food with me in SOAS. Additionally nice to see your co-students (?) doing well, with sausages. As part of my actual job (for the Soil Association) is to assist caterers with sourcing more ethical products, I’m going to try and set Picco up with some of our catering contacts. Oh the joy of brockering.
My Sunday sausage buying was particularly pleasant as I visited my local Harringey market for the first time. Situated just off Green Lanes, minutes away from all the glorious bustle of Turkish feeding joints, the market is a fairly new addition to the market ‘scene’ in London.
Preferring to call themselves a food market (as few traders actually grow food), the guys have done really well, in a relatively short period of time. On Sunday, lively live music, hoards of WMCF* blissfully incubating benches. I intend to go back, with or without my own WMCF hoard.
In the meantime, I came back home and sat down to one of the bestest lunches of all: salumi, good bread with titbits. tomatoes and green oranges (preserved, from Green Lanes) in this case.
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The lunch of sliced salumi grasso.
*White Middle Class Family
