We filmed the process, from learning the technique to doing the deed—my first tentative attempt to provide my own meat for the table; those who have done it since they were kids wouldn’t find it out of place or confronting. To me, it was scary and grim and awful and fascinating all at once. I didn’t want to be too tentative and end up with a half-cut throat. Or a stressed and bruised chicken. And awful as it may seem, holding the bird’s head in one hand, while I watched the body kick in the cone a metre away, was strangely comforting—knowing the bird was dead, despite the reflexes that drove the kicks. It couldn’t be suffering if I held the part that housed the brain, and the legs were still twitching some distance hence. I needed that surety, so this system of cutting the head off a chicken in a killing cone worked for me. It didn’t have the indignity of a bird running headless around the yard. Or the challenge of trying to restrain the body as it thrashed, perhaps getting splattered by blood as I leant over and held it.
As a relatively naive and insulated city boy, I suddenly had blood on my hands. I’d been thrust, head first, so to speak, into the act of killing. This was my first confrontation with what it was like to be the taker of life just so I could do something as trivial as put meat on my table. It was challenging, eye opening, sombre and strange. I didn’t rejoice in death then, and I don’t now. But I do know that little we do as a species—be it house, clothe or feed ourselves—comes without some impact on animals. What is right for me—and I’ve just beheaded fifteen chickens this week as I write—may not be right for you. If you are more comfortable not eating meat, but eat eggs you buy from a shop, you must understand that baby roosters die for you to do so. If you drink milk, the boy calves are often killed in the first few days or weeks of life, just to keep a cow lactating. If you’re a vegan, it could well be that someone shot possums just so you can eat apples. I won’t judge you for making those choices, as I hope you won’t judge me. Though from the hate mail I receive when we show animals dying on television, you probably will.
Animal rights is a strange area of human endeavour. I would like to see the welfare of animals, the need for them to be treated with dignity, as a mainstream meat-eaters’ issue, not left to fringe groups and vegans. Omnivores, those who eat meat and vegetables, can care about the welfare of the animals they eat. It has to be thus. It’s incumbent upon omnivores, actually. And greater change will probably come about when meat-eaters demand better treatment of their pigs, chickens and cattle than if radicals alienate everybody who isn’t making the same lifestyle choices they have made.
Don’t get me wrong. I think the world would be a better place if we all ate less meat, and only ethically reared meat at that. I think vegans are admirable for their ability to avoid meat, honey, leather and wool, and for their staunch stance in the face of numerous societal difficulties. I don’t have such willpower. But I do think animal eaters should expect the beasts that live and die at our command to be well looked after from birth to table, and take more responsibility for the treatment of those animals in the public sphere.
So, we killed chickens on camera. And SBS, a station that has probably shown the same kind of thing happening in a documentary on an African village or Papua New Guinea, was very, very nervous about screening the actual deed. The result? No great turning off of television sets, remarkably. In fact, the ratings were cracking that week. An SBS executive was so gob-smacked by the results that he thought perhaps they should be killing chickens on lots of shows to get the same high number of viewers. Even the news, he suggested, could do with the ratings boost of a few chicken killings.
I’m also bemused (but now I’m a parent, not surprised) that the chicken-killing bit is a really big hit with kids, replayed a little too often for comfort on DVD. Children, it must be said, don’t share our hang-ups about death.
On that same episode of the show—shot during my first long, wet winter on the farm—we fired up the cooker so I could have steaming hot water (it was hooked up to the hot water tank), and sozzled a couple of home-killed chooks in beer in the oven at the same time. We also filmed cooking a turkey at a friend’s place, where she breastfed her son. On that episode we ate abalone and cock’s comb. And to finish off the show, I ran a hot shower, did a piece to camera (fully clothed it must be said), and closed the door on the bathroom so I could bathe.
And what was the first letter of complaint, fired up by an angry viewer within seconds of the show going to air? Did they take offence at the obvious sight of chicken blood? The fact we didn’t show just one chook dying, but three? Or the exposed breast? Was it the fact that I’d left the crop in the turkey by mistake? Or the way we gutted the roosters, or didn’t clean the intestines to fry in the Chinese style and simply wasted them in the compost?
No. It had been pretty dry in parts of Australia, apparently (though at Puggle Farm we were in the midst of the second wettest winter on record). So the complaint, lodged online in the seconds after the show aired, was about the running of the shower and the wasting of my rainwater.
Which just goes to show, you can never please everyone.
Braised chicken thighs with potato, leek, white wine and sage
Serves 5–6
If you can’t get good, truly free-range chicken for this (the most trustworthy label will say it’s organic), cook something else.
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 kg (2 lb 4 oz) organic free-range chicken thigh meat, diced
2 leeks, white part only, cleaned and thinly sliced
4 garlic cloves, peeled
250 ml (9 fl oz/1 cup) dry white wine
500 g (1 lb 2 oz) diced potatoes
1 teaspoon salt plus some freshly milled black pepper
1 thyme sprig
good handful sage leaves
bread, to serve
Heat the oil in a large frying pan over a humungous heat and fry the chicken, possibly in two batches, to give it some colour. Remove with a slotted spoon and keep to one side. Turn the heat right down and fry the leek gently until it softens, adding a touch more oil if need be. Add the garlic and cook for another minute or so.
Pop the chicken back in the pan, turn up the heat and throw in the wine. Simmer well until it’s about half evaporated, then add the potato, salt and some pepper, plus the sprig of thyme. Pour in enough water to come about halfway up the chicken and potato, pushing the spuds down into the liquid a bit. Throw in half the sage, cover and simmer for about 30–40 minutes, or until the meat is tender. When it’s done, throw in the other half of the sage, boil rapidly with the lid off for a couple of minutes, then serve, perhaps with bread to help mop up the juices.
Hogget
There’s an old saying in the country. Good fences make good neighbours. How true it is.
Puggle Farm was pretty secure for alpacas, it seemed, when I bought it. But alpacas weren’t high on the list of things I wanted to rear. Sure, they make nice jumpers, once the fleece has been shorn and spun, but I’ve never really been a fan of the meat. Instead, I opted for sheep quite early on. They’re fairly low maintenance, and don’t have a huge appetite, and I do adore the taste of lamb. The problem is, sheep are a little trickier to keep fenced in. Or so I found out not long after they arrived.
The Huon Valley isn’t like most Australian farming land. There are no wide open spaces. We don’t have fences that go for miles. In fact, the local joke is that down our way we can’t buy fencing wire in rolls more than 100 metres long. There’s no point, because you’ll hit a road, a creek, a corner or some other obstacle before you go 100 metres in any direction. I spoke to a fencing contractor from western Queensland who reckons he usually quotes on 10 kilometres of fencing at a time, typically with only one gate in the entire length.
Anyway, good fences make good neighbours. And sheep need good fences.
The sheep I had in mind for Puggle Farm weren’t just any sheep. I’d grown up on a diet of grey roast lamb and from my reading I’d started to realise that while most Aussie lamb is grass fed
and not grain fed, a positive for flavour and sustainability, nobody ever talked about breed. If you wanted good pork in a restaurant when I was a reviewer, you might’ve looked for Berkshire on the menu. If you wanted good beef, you might’ve asked for Angus or Hereford. But lamb was lamb was lamb. No mention of breed.
And the reason, once you start to dig around a bit, is that lamb is often a by-product of the wool industry. Those shaggy Merinos, which grow some wonderful superfine fleece, are bred for their coats, not their muscle fibre, and as with all animals, we’ve spent a long time selecting different breeds for different things.
So, being a glutton, I wanted a meat breed. Something where the quality of the eating was more important than the quality of the fleece. And I was launching into enough projects to not want to shear my own sheep, spin my own wool and knit my own jumpers. So I ended up on Bruny Island, looking at Wiltshire Horns, a type of shedding sheep that lose their wool naturally, not through shearing. They’re famed for putting on relatively little external fat, and for their fine, sweet-textured meat. They are also legendary mothers compared to some. One Merino breeder I spoke to told me that about 60 per cent of his first-time Merino mothers rejected their lambs, unless he was there to rub the little ones all over their mothers’ heads to create a bond. If he wasn’t there on bad weather days, the first-time mums simply wondered what had come out the back end and walked away, leaving the lambs to die of exposure.
The Wiltshire Horn is a British breed from the 1700s, a time when you wanted good, relatively lean meat from a sheep, and one that could handle some wet ground. They were in favour before the excesses of the 1800s demanded a chop with plenty of external fat. Bred for their meat, there has been no need to compromise the quality of the roasts to get better wool. Wiltshires are also very good foragers, able to extricate themselves from a blackberry bramble because of their shedding wool, and able to find food where some other breeds would fail. Perfect, really, for my place with its occasionally rough edges.
The first time a sheep got out through a hole in the fence, however, I didn’t really love the breed. Hardy and mountain loving, they immediately head up and into the bush when rattled. I spent about three hours trying to get the lone escapee back into my paddocks, of course at the open bit at the bottom of the hill, before exhaustion and Russell, who had been doing a bit of filming of the chase in the absence of Max, helped win the day. We brought home the ewe and all of us fell in a heap. Not least the sheep.
Sheep fencing needs to be good. You probably need ring-lock, which has vertical as well as horizontal wires, because sheep can push through most things.
Fences are very, very expensive. If you’re looking at buying a farm, look at the fences. To get a decent fence built in our part of the world can cost around $1000 per 100 metres. Yes, $100 for 10 metres. You can build them yourself for a bit less. Quite a bit less, but the knowledge, the gear and the time all add up, often working out—if you include your own time—to be more than the cost of a contractor.
I’ve laboured with contractors to save money on fences. I can tell you it does take a toll on the body. I have dug post holes by hand, tried to tension barbed wire, pounded in star pickets and tied off netting onto posts. I have bled from my hands from untold numbers of cuts. Lugged fencing wire up muddy slopes in the rain and tried to learn the hard but precise art of stringing bits of wire to keep some animals in and other animals out. And I am still hopeless at making taut, long-lasting fences without someone experienced by my side.
A friend has a good story about fences and country living. How her dog used to sneak through a hole in the fence, then go and wander about other farms in the neighbourhood. A dog on the loose isn’t a farmer’s friend. They can, and do, form packs after dark, slaughtering lambs for the bloodlust. A dog on someone else’s farm is usually not long for this world.
So, her dog, sadly, was shot by the neighbour when, yet again, it wandered into his paddock after a few warnings. Harsh words were spoken. A country rule had been broken and enforced. Bad blood ensued.
But when my friend found herself suddenly single, with a couple of young kids, this same neighbour—a man of very few words apparently—was on the doorstep one day when she came home. Stacking up firewood he’d cut and split himself.
‘Thought you might be needin’ this,’ he said, with not much more than a shrug.
Now, this, according to my friend, is what community is all about. We don’t all share the same beliefs in my region. In fact we sometimes openly disagree. We don’t all have loveins or bond around the campfire come summer. We don’t visit each other weekly for tea and scones. Just because you have neighbours in the country doesn’t automatically make them your mates any more than your neighbours in the city do.
But we do have community. The bond that says you lend a hand if someone is in trouble, regardless of how they vote, or how crooked their fence is. Regardless of long-standing disputes—or, more likely, if we just have a simple, dispassionate disinterest in each other’s lives—we have a sense of community. We chip in to help each other because that’s what decent people do. Everybody has some skill that is useful in a crisis. You may provide food, or shelter, or knowledge of plumbing. It may be a shoulder to lean on. It may be a strong arm and a shovel. It may be an ability to have a bit of a joke. Or it may be firewood. But that’s how communities are built, not on some idea of utopian agreement, but on that very human spirit of cooperation that has allowed us to live side by side in commune with other people since we evolved.
Just so long as you keep your animals where they’re supposed to be.
I know that good fences make good neighbours. I’ve had apple grafts eaten by one neighbour’s sheep. My 32 newly planted trees on the fenceline eaten by another neighbour’s goat. I’ve had a heifer escape, piglets dig out of their enclosure, seen my chooks and turkeys on the road when they shouldn’t be.
But the reality is that everybody is usually trying to keep their stock both on their farm and in their care. A fence that falls into disrepair is kind of like a car. Livestock are always testing the boundary, and it can be hard to know where the next failing will appear. Sometimes you just have to wait until something gets out before you know that there is a problem.
Our first lamb that we ate on the farm wasn’t lamb. It was hogget. Now, hogget, despite its ugly name, isn’t hog (a BIG pig in the US is called a hog, as is a Harley Davidson). It’s not mutton, either, but it is somewhere between lamb and mutton, so it’s an older sheep. As an animal ages, it can become firmer on the tooth, more flavoursome, and often fatter. So where lamb is often lean when really young, and extraordinarily tender, most of what you will buy in the shops is closer to hogget anyway, because at that age it’s as big as it can get (meaning more money for the farmer) without having cut its second teeth. (For the record, sheep are aged and graded using their teeth. A hogget is also called a two-tooth, because of the two adult teeth that emerge to replace lost milk teeth on the bottom jaw when the sheep is about a year old. At about eighteen months to two years old, they have four adult teeth. At four teeth and beyond they are called mutton.)
So our first sheep we ate at home was hogget, but because it was a sweet meat breed, with relatively little external fat, the flavour was still remarkably delicate and refined. We used it in our cassoulet. Home-killed hogget it was, part of a midwinter lunch we held that first year on Puggle Farm. Ross and I hosted the meal to celebrate cassoulet, all things French, and the curious extensiveness of our food laws.
I needed a requisite cute timber cottage on Puggle Farm, and got it. It’s cosy, warm and well thought out, with a garden that blooms all year. You can tell someone else did all the work here.
The incredible colours of deciduous trees really help make autumn in the Huon Valley glorious. Just cue mist into place to make it incomparable.
A fickle, magnificent beast of a machine, my wood-fired cooker proves the old way of heating up food is half art, half prayer.
Whatever comes from the garden is what usually graces our table, be it kale and quince, or purple carrots and silver beet.
Free-ranging Wessex Saddleback pigs need to keep cool in summer and, because they don’t sweat, they have to have roll in mud. Hence Hedley’s job to fill the wallows.
Sadie’s favourite part of the farm is the garden. When the apples come into blossom, it’s time to get rid of some of the winter weeds. Once upon a time our garden beds were very neat and tidy. Now we tend to favour the minimal weeding philosophy, so they’re never neat, and never tidy, but they are pretty productive.
My big plan to extend our growing seasons went up in a (big) puff of wind. We still haven’t had the heart to replace the poly tunnels (plastic hothouses) that tore in 120 kilometre per hour gusts a few weeks after being built.
We grow lots of heirloom varieties of tomato. Some for salads, some for cooking. Some for eating while we garden. And all of them with a flavour that you just can’t get in a shop.
The transformation from pig to pork is quick and confronting. I felt a bit numb when I saw my first pigs hanging at the butcher (left), but by the time we killed a pig at home a few years later, then butchered and preserved it in front of a crowd, including Ross O’Meara (right), the feeling was more of respect than horror. From one pig we made about fifteen types of fresh and preserved smallgoods, some of which we ate over the next year.
The long table lunch on Flinders Island just about broke our spirit. This fire pit (top), where we grilled the mutton-birds, was within a few metres of the dining table, but there was a deer fence in the way, so it was a 600-metre jog to get to the table. After pulling off a successful meal for over 100 people in a paddock, Nick Haddow, Ross O’Meara and I were very much in the mood for acting the goose. And having a drink.
The Dirty Chef Page 10