Amazing 'artisanal' products

I count my self lucky as a child to have been around family members who grew up in the 1930s and were still buying and using stuff from local families/grocers/companies and traditions before taste and quality began being sold off/merged etc. in short - before supermarkets.

Nowadays it just seems that ‘artisanal’is a catch-all word for ‘not mass-produced shite’ (yet can still be shite as it’s just a gravy-train term for attractively-packaged small-batch goods, not necessarily championed for their quality or flavour - but for being nicely packaged and ‘artisanal’)

It’s a minefield.

My anecdote:

The last good bacon I ate regularly was in the mid/late 1970s (come from a big baconite family). We just bought it from local shop, sliced at the counter.

Over the decades since I pretty much gave up on decent quality bacon. However, around 2016 IIRC I stayed near a small village in Shropshire. There was a village butcher. I noticed how sparse it was. Thought was closed, one day went to get milk and croissant from the Spar and saw the butcher opening shop. I asked if he had bacon. He identified a cold slab with a joint, I nodded and he put it on the slicing machine. Cut to my liking (med/thick). Again, just like old days. I ordered three slices. It was £2 something. The shop was just basically empty of signage, no lights, no rows of packets, no anything really. No, not even plastic parsley. I may as well have have time-travelled to a village butchers 1916 for all I could discern.

Anyhoo, I took the rashers to the nearby holiday residence and cooked them gently in a frying pan. The fat rendered down perfectly, clear like water. The meat cooked in it’s own fat. The scent transporting me back to the 1970s as a child. I could hardly believe it. This bacon was the bacon of all bacon. I dipped thick bread slices in it. The flavour was out of this world. Unsmoked. Not too salty.
Just an amazing taste of a rich, traditional bacon. Decent caramelisation, newr-crisp rind and clear, thin, hot fat. Incredible.

Why incredible? Because this was everyday quality back in my childhood, when we’d get it from the local (tiny) corner shop owner who also kept a small meat counter. It was just ‘bacon’.

FFWD to a few months ago, I passed through a local farmer’s market and spied me a well-patronised ‘artisanal’ farm butchers selling bacon and sausage. I gave in and ordered about 5-6 (IIRC) rashers which cost me £6 and change. Much was made via signage and how the pigs were rare-breed, carefully cured etc etc. I looked forward to cooking it hoping it would render and taste similarly (or even better) than the unannounced, modest old-school butcher in the Shropshire village. You’d think so, paying 30% more?

Anyway this stuff refused to render down and the rind remained chewy, while the bacon tasted overly-smoky and just as tasteless, salty and a bit weird/vomity back-taste, just as the Waitrose etc most expensive offerings. Supermarket bacon is like a different meat altogether to the real deal. And so was this ‘artisan’. In fact it was maybe less enjoyable even than the cheaper shite.

My dreams must now remain in the 1970s as the Shrophire village butchers has since closed. Goodbye old days. Fartisanal prattle will not be believed. I’m actually now glad that pigs won’t suffer for me, as the last temptation has closed shop. I enjoy though that it was an authentic find. Just someone serving tasty food minus buntings, backstories, and fanfares. Supermarkets and car-culture put these people out of business.

Whoever put the ‘artis’ in artisanal was having a laugh. Yech. Harumph. Etc.

You’ve/we’ve all been had since.

(Conveniently forgot that I bought some ‘handcrafted’ (it really is) goat’s milk soap last week from a local honesty shop, and Mrs P says it’s amazing/best soap she’s tried! As a sometimes oldskool self-conscious male I pretended not to notice the quality of soaps. But it really is very good soap 😉)

To wrap up this very very long rambling rant, and in a nutshell:

I love supporting hand-made, small-concern and ethical goods
I love quality, hardwearing, tasty etc.
I (on the whole) despise supermarkets and mass-produced shite with attendant gluttony/greed/environmental destruction/packaging
I bemoan the fact that what often used to be everyday quality is now relegated to ‘luxury’ ‘artisanal’ products which often don’t even reach the standards of what used to be ‘everyday’, and even if they did are nonetheless now reserved for the lucky rich few or those of us who chance upon a rare find and enjoy a ‘luxury’ once every 5 years or so.

‘It's not Terry’s, it’s soft vegetable oils and sugar’

‘It may be ‘rare breed’, but whatever you did to it makes it taste like chewy puke’ [/spoiler]

The best cake is still to be found at the church hall or village fete for a pound a slice, not at the artisanal arseholery for a fiver.

*edit 😳 soz 4 massivrant