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Well, of course they do, and I don’t just mean because we produce it at Bray Cured. Britain’s charcuterie scene goes back far beyond the arrival of artisan cured meat producers in the 2010s and 2020s, back as long as we’ve been hunting and gathering on this island in fact. It’s a practice as old as people, and here’s why, and where it’s led since then.
To find the roots of charcuterie in Britain, you’ve got to look at why we do it. Recognising the why makes it obvious that we’ve been at this a long time. We would have to have been.
I think there are three main reasons:
And thinking about why we do each of these things leads you to see why we make the charcuterie we do. We need to preserve meat because we tend to get too much of it at once, especially in the winter. Our best agent for preservation is salt, and so to everything we cure, from gammon, to salami, to smoked salmon.
Maximising yield requires creativity. Not everything can be simply cooked and still be delicious. The bits of time left over from preparing meat for roasting might not be great if you fried them, but as a sausage, mwah.
And if we’re using every scrap, including the offal, then we’re going to have to think of creative ways to enhance flavour. Think haggis or black pudding.
We’ve stumbled across something there. We label salami, air-dried hams and bresaolas ‘charcuterie’. It’s a loan word from French of course, and we tend to repurpose it to mean only those types of products. We might more tightly define those, though, as “continental-style air-dried meats”, which would free up charcuterie for a wider definition, i.e. food that does the job of preserving, using up and enhancing the flavour of everything we can get from an animal.
If we did that, our traditional British charcuterie comes into view.
Climate is a big factor in how different cultures cure. In warmer, drier environments, leaner and smaller products work better. That’s why biltong and jerky emanate from the places they do.
Meanwhile in damp climates, air-drying meat is tricky, and so people tend to pickle, to smoke and to cook. There’s nothing stopping you from curing something to preserve it before it’s cooked, take bacon and ham, for example.
In the areas with temperate climates, neither too wet, nor too dry, air-dried meats of the type we make at Bray Cured could be produced more easily.
Obviously, Britain is one of the damp climates, and sure enough our native charcuterie tends to be pickled, smoked or cooked.
We can trace back from the purposes of charcuterie to the products we made to fulfil them.
Preserving to make them last longer: Bacon, gammon, smoked fish. These were salted to preserve them, then sometimes smoked. Smoking helps to dry charcuterie products, and it’s a way around capricious humidity levels.
Enhancing flavour: Black pudding, white pudding and haggis. In each case, nutritious but not necessarily appetising ingredients are seasoned, spiced and simmered to transform them into something delicious. There’s also a preserving element to these recipes, as their main ingredients quickly go off without these preparations.
Using every scrap: We could recall the black puddings here too, but let’s look at sausages and pork pies. With these two products, every last scrap of meat is prepared in a delicious way, with fat and gelatine (the pork pie) and intestines (sausage casings) used up too. As well as securing DOP status for pork pies (in Melton Mowbray), Britain is one of the world’s sausage capitals, with multiple fantastic regional specialities.
With commercial refrigeration, producing continental-style air-dried meats has become possible year-round in Britain. That, together with our evolving tastes and superb meat, has led to the growth of this part of the industry over the last 20 years. Britain is now producing world class products of this sort, leading to expansion of the British charcuterie scene.
Worth remembering though, that whether you prefer salami or sausage, prosciutto or pork pie, you’re still enjoying the same vibrant British charcuterie landscape, which is now more evolving than it is emerging.
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