The sweet, fleshy aroma was truly beautiful. Australians, like me, use the word ‘beautiful’ to describe the things that attract us. We use the word to describe things that are more than visual. Beautiful for us means a scenic vista, an attractive setting, an agreeable coalescence of otherwise random events, a person with an outrageously attractive body, the intake on the bonnet of a Ford Falcon from the late sixties. We Australians apply the word beautiful very easily. This jamón was beautiful to all senses.
I was watching Frank eat jamón. He loved it. He was holding the lonchas gently, his thumb and forefinger pinched, and raised it above his mouth. He angled his head slightly and laid the jamón on his tongue. He chewed a little, smiled and nodded approvingly to Domingo. Domingo smiled too. He knows the effect his jamón has on people.
He passed the plate around. Cesc and Alan repeated the process. Cesc gave a wry half-smile and nodded. Great praise from a Catalan. Alan took a piece, chewed, smiled and nodded his head from side to side as he chewed and tasted. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Excellent.’ Domingo passed the plate to me. He didn’t understand that when I held up a hand I was suggesting that he pass it back to Frank. He pushed it forward. The fat was creamy white. ‘Come’, he said, ‘eat’. The flesh was ruby red. ‘Try some.’ I could smell nuts and mushrooms rising from the plate. ‘It’s good,’ he said. There were small white salt crystals in the flesh that I knew would crunch between my teeth and release a wave of umami. ‘You must,’ said Domingo. The ribbon of fat was as wide as a butterknife, the loncha as thick as a communion wafer. The fat seemed to draw the heat from my tongue, like a tablet of excellent chocolate. The aroma was subtle yet complex, like perfume applied in the morning worn well into the afternoon. Faded roses, forest floor, champignons, a punch of pork, aged pork, and oak, something decayed but in the best possible way. This was held together by a backbone of salt, a clean lactic tang, and round and lingering savouriness. It was possibly the best piece of flesh I had ever eaten. In a rapid piece of self-reconciliation I knew that my time of penance and refection was over. That jamón was a work of art. I had crossed a threshold and there was no going back. My Year Without Meat closed with a single loncha of jamón ibérico de bellota.
17
Return to Meat
Food is simply the vehicle to write about everything else that goes on in the world. It is a Trojan Horse that not only gets food writers such as myself through the front gates undetected, but sees someone take your coat, and offer you a glass of sparkling wine and canapés on the way in. Talking about food with strangers allows one to assemble an almost complete and frank biography of the interlocutor as they talk about their family, hometown or village, parents and siblings, lovers and travels. They are talking about two things they really love talking about, themselves and food.
On that trip to Spain we met an ex-cop and his wife who had a restaurant high in the mountains of Sierra de Cazorla, the source of the Guadalquivir. He shot the game and she cooked it. They presented one dish of andrajos, meaning ‘rags’. It is a hearty dish of hand-rolled pasta served with a simple sauce of beans and red peppers, and in this case a little slow-cooked hare. While the red peppers are a sixteenth-century post-Columbian addition, there is a version made at Easter without the pepper, with just vegetables and lentils. It is a dish that a well-fed centurion in the Roman Hispanian legion would have recognised some 2000 years ago and is described in the writings of Roman scholars. When I find a new dish I compare it with all the dishes I have learned about in the past. Each bit of information interconnects with another. You can almost feel the synapses joining up every time you learn about a new dish. That is the joy of learning.
We had finished our Spanish research and photography. The team had spent over a month in a small BMW and driven more than 10 000 kilometres. At one point, Cesc the researcher had backed the BMW into a post and left a massive dint. When it came time to return the car, quick thinking by Alan the photographer saw him stand in front of the dint while the hire car company attendant checked for scratches. Alan also suggested that we leave with the young lad from the car company all the samples of jamón and sherry that producers had given us. So, overwhelmed with dozens of bottles and kilos of top-grade jamón, he quickly gave us back the paperwork and hawked his stash back to his dark little office.
Frank, Cesc, Alan and myself said our goodbyes and headed off in different directions. I was catching up with a mate in Barcelona and then we were going to San Sebastian for a few days. My friend, Matt Dawson, is a chef originally from Wodonga and was travelling with his dad, John, who claimed he had eaten nothing more adventurous in his life than a parmigiana Mexicana. Matt and I gallivanted around San Sebastian, ordering way too much food, just so we could sample it and get an idea of how the dishes were put together. It’s called culinary immersion education. The sliver of jamón having broken the seal, I was now in arguably the world’s best city for food, and could pick and choose delicious little meaty morsels. A tiny piece of grilled steak at first, then some smallgoods and then some exquisite fish dishes. John didn’t appreciate us leaving food on the table, so made a point of finishing up all the foie gras, lamb sweetbreads, ears, livers, razor clams, and other dishes quite unknown in the clubs of southern New South Wales and northern Victoria.
It was great having John with us, as he could spot culinary pretenders a mile off. We went to one Michelin-starred restaurant in San Sebastian, famed for its modernist cuisine. Afterwards, in the taxi back to town, he simply asked, ‘What the fuck was that?’ A case of the emperor’s new clothes in practice.
There was one restaurant that struck a chord with all of us. It’s up in the foothills of the Cantabrian Mountains, near Guernica. Asador Etxebarri is a simple but costly grill house in an old home in a village, surrounded by rolling hills and apple trees. Down under the home, in what was probably the pigs’ winter quarters, is the kitchen of chef Victor Arguinzoniz. Here he makes his own charcoal from different types of wood, and gently grills meat, fish and vegetables over the glowing coals. It’s good, honest and deceptively simple food that is served in a comfortably appointed dining room in the old-fashioned Spanish style, looking out over the village and the mountains beyond. Good bread. Smoked goat’s butter. Grilled prawns. Grilled peas. Grilled steak. A slowly grilled rib eye steak from what Victor claimed was a 14-year-old dairy cow. Up in the north of Spain they don’t eat a lot of yearling, the way we do in Australia. They like their steaks to have had a life of doing something else before they hit the plate. We’d call it ox. I’d call it the best steak I’d ever had. Lined with a strip of thick yellow fat, the flesh was deep red and interlaced with veins of now liquefied intramuscular fat. The aroma was of beef, bone, and was slightly lactic from the dry ageing, and there was a very faintly grassy floral note. Was it tender? No. The word tender is used in steak marketing to promote grain-fed beef that comes out of feedlots. Good beef should offer some resistance to the tooth but release moisture and flavour as it is chewed. Grain-fed beef is like the 1980s chewing gum Spurt, releasing a burst of fat into the gob then reducing to a gluey paste. Good beef requires teeth, and a knife and fork to cut it into three-quarter-centimetre slices on which the teeth can then do their work. Served with salt, this was the Platonic ideal of a steak. A bench-mark that all other steaks would be compared to henceforth. John was so appreciative of the quality of the meal that, despite his lack of Spanish, he was able to convey his gratitude through rioja-induced mime, charm and use of schoolboy Italian. The matronly waitress was so impressed she sent another steak to the table. And didn’t put it on the bill. That a steak that was so good came from an animal that had lived a full life reminded me of what dairy farmer Vicki Jones was trying to achieve with her herd of older dairy cows. People fly across the world to eat old-cow steak at Etxebarri. I hoped that Vicki Jones’s experiment would succeed, so I could get old-cow steak in restaurants back home.
THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME
I was back in Australia and ‘ba
ck on the meat’. Not the bacon-devouring demon of before but a more disciplined and discerning diner who only ate a little top-shelf flesh. I had eaten the best and there was no return. I was also back doing my usual job of interviewing people about their produce and photographing them for The Age Epicure.
I heard that a couple of small-scale pig farmers were doing something special with their pigs by fattening them on acorns, like I had witnessed in Corteconcepción in Spain. I jumped in the HiLux and headed west towards the Grampians. If you haven’t seen them, they are a spectacular sierra, 1000 metres high, 100 kilometres long, half a billion years old, rising out of the volcanic plains about 300 kilometres west of Melbourne. To the Djab wurrung and the Jardwadjali peoples these ranges are known as Gariwerd. The reason why this country was so attractive to the early settlers was the farming work the Aboriginal peoples had done with their firesticks. They had used them to create a patchwork of freshly burned and recovering grass, so the kangaroos would come and graze on the new green shoots. Daisy yams and orchids were dug up in summer, by the women, for their starchy tubers that were then roasted over the fire. The result was freshly turned earth recycling the carbon from the fires back into the soil. The region is interlaced with creeks and rivers, and was once covered in seasonal wetlands where the Indigenous hunters set their fish and eel traps, fished for mussels and hunted tortoises. I turned a corner and took the long gravel driveway to the Greenvale Farm homestead, where I would meet the interviewees for the story.
I first met Greenvale’s owners Anthony and Amanda Kumnick around 2009. They had just arrived back from living overseas and were settling into their new lives as farmers. Anthony had worked hard in IT and saved enough to come back to the district he grew up in. Amanda was born in England’s West Country. The Kumnicks bought Greenvale and its imposing sandstone homestead and, instead of raising sheep like every generation since Greenvale was first settled in the 1840s, they decided to raise pigs. Not a modern pig farm, with an isolated shed next to a feed silo and waste treatment pond. They wanted to raise pigs in the same manner as farmers had done prior to World War II. The pigs were to run free range in paddocks under the river red gums, with low fences to keep them from escaping. They were to be fed with grain grown mostly on the farm. They were to sleep in small huts made from either hay bales or sheet metal with a deep layer of straw litter.
As recently returned expats, the Kumnicks exuded energy and enthusiasm. Amanda has an infectious smile, and a wonderful turn of phrase delivered with the occasional elongated vowel from her West Country upbringing. As Amanda is loquacious, Anthony remains tacit. A man of few words, he retains his Western District demeanour of keeping his thoughts to himself until they are perfectly formed and really matter. That first time I met them I stayed on their farm with my young family. Our children fed the few house lambs from a bottle and poured buckets of feed into the troughs for the pigs, who grunted contentedly. We talked well into the night, drinking wine from the vineyards nearby. Amanda painted a picture of a farmstay B and B with a network of small producers like them that one could drive to and visit. They were going to sell their pork from the farm as well as at farmers’ markets, cutting out the middlemen, to increase the margins for themselves. We ate their pork. It was roasted with a thick layer of salted crisp crackling. To this day I contend their pork is some of the best in the nation. Life that night was ideal. The Kumnicks knew they were in for hard work but what they didn’t realise was just how hard life was going to get.
This time Greenvale looked very different. A tornado had torn through the farm the previous summer, ripping the top limbs off the ancient river red gums. Tornados were not unknown in this part of Victoria but they had never been this fierce. The weather had started changing. So had the farm. This broadacre grazing and grain property on the banks of the Hopkins River, not far from the Grampians, was looking a lot different. The operation was much larger than when I first visited. The pigs were still grazing under the old river red gums but there were more of them. They were still grazing in paddocks around the homestead but now there were another two paddocks in the farm across the road. The little houses of straw were now more sturdy galvanized iron sheds, shifted by tractor with a front-end loader. Anthony and Amanda had developed the brand further, with striking graphics on the packaging and a range of really good smallgoods.
Part of the herd was now grazing on a different property, near Dunkeld, where another grazier had planted thousands of oak trees. The oaks were now mature and were dropping acorns. The Greenvale pigs were rooting about under the oak trees and getting fat on the acorns. The acorn-fed pigs were sent to Melbourne and butchered by an Italian family, who salted down the back legs and air-dried them for six months or more. The flesh inside was the closest thing to jamón I have ever had outside of Spain. It was ruby red with streaks of white fat between the muscles. The flesh smelled nutty, buttery like hot popcorn, minerally like wet ironstone. The fat was so well formed that it had a low melting point, like quality chocolate. After cutting a small piece off and placing it on the tongue, it felt cool, as heat was drawn from the tongue to melt the fat in the flesh. It was good. Really good. I made a note that they could sell this for hundreds of dollars a kilogram.
Anthony and Amanda had increased the farm in size and scale and they were now value-adding to their product, increasing its value and its shelf life. They were converting their crops on which their pigs fed to biodynamic practices. The Kumnicks were employing people, local people, to help on their ethical farm. The only thing was—it was no longer theirs.
We went back to their farm on the banks of the Hopkins. The tornado had missed the house and most of the outbuildings. Only one shed had a few pieces of twisted iron roofing. It was the old trees that had copped the brunt. Some were uprooted. Most were surrounded by the now brown and dry upper branches, lying on the ground like a demented autumn leaf fall. We walked around these as we inspected a herd of Tamworths. These are ginger pigs with a very pleasant temperament. ‘Personality,’ said the herd manager. ‘When you work with pigs enough, you understand that they have personalities. Not temperaments. You get better results from your animals when you realise that they are all different and have different personalities.’
Amanda walked along the paddock, kicking little tussocks of grass as we went. ‘Anthony and I had to sell the farm,’ she said. It wasn’t working out financially and they had some tensions with other family members. Like many Australian farms, Greenvale involved a few more family members than just the married couple. A few failed crops, financial stress, and the dream turned into a nightmare. The bank called in the loan and was set to sell their home, their land, and break apart the breeding herd, selling the fertile mothers for sausage meat. It was a harrowing time for Anthony and Amanda. They had arrived back feted but now they felt shame as farming failures. Those who have never farmed won’t understand the relationship between a farmer and their farm. It’s not only part of your identity, it is part of you, part of your psyche, and part of your soul. A farmer who has lost their land walks among the community like a leper. There’s pity but also resentment and anger. Because it reminds the rest of the community of their own fallibility. Many farmers are just one bad season away from the bank manager or sheriff.
Just days before the bank was set to take back the keys to the front gate, Anthony did something truly remarkable. He jumped on the Internet and then the phone, and called everyone he knew and everyone he had heard of who not only had money but who had vision. Without pride, ego or a hint of shame, he hawked his farm and business around the financial centres. The quietly spoken pig farmer found hidden erudition when it came time to save his family’s bacon.
A Melbourne family with a trust dedicated to ethical and sustainable endeavours bought Greenvale Farm. They understood the Kumnicks’s vision and invested in the farm, keeping Anthony and Amanda on as managers.
‘You want to eat sustainable food?’ said Amanda, talking openly to me. ‘Sustai
nable food means that there has to be something in it for the farmer. It doesn’t matter how green or organic or touchy-feely or nice their story is, and how they are taking carbon out of the atmosphere and burying it in the soil; unless they are making a living, it is not sustainable. It can’t go on if farmers are going broke. I can tell you that many of the farmers you see, you buy from and you write about at the farmers’ markets and the likes, are doing it very tough. There’s long hours, varying seasons that look like they are getting worse and just so much uncertainty. And what is the media’s obsession with “small” farms? Yes, it’s all very good to have small and ethical farms but if the farmers are not being paid properly, then that is not sustainable. Nor is it ethical. You don’t write about the big farms. But they are part of the community too. They are our neighbours. We know one family who, thankfully, took out crop insurance. The season was beyond a joke and much of the crops they planted failed in the spring heatwave. They were paid out $1 million. That’s just how much it cost to put their crop in! Imagine spending a million dollars not knowing if you’re going to get a return or not. There’s this focus on the small and cute but the reality is the broadacre carrot grower who sells to Coles. The prime lamb producer on 2000 acres. The dairy farmer with 250 milkers. These are people who are taking real risks, just like us. And you try and find a cattle, sheep or pig farmer who says they get better results by mistreating their animals. You can’t. All farmers know that the humane treatment of animals is the best way of getting the best beef, wool, leather, pork, cheese, or whatever, from their animals. That is the real world of food. Big farms. Real farmers. Real people.’
The Kumnicks are continuing on their journey and will soon be ‘closed circle’ certified biodynamic farmers, meaning they will grow all the grain on their farm to feed their pigs. They still hand-sell their pork at farmers’ markets and it is still some of the best on the market. Their plans are, however, to get bigger, increase the economy of scale, and improve the quality of the soil on the farm in the process. They are ambitious. And, knowing those two, they will achieve what they set out to do.
My Year Without Meat Page 19