Robin Sutherland was the owner of the Old Compton Wine Bar and a part-time farmer on the Isle of Wight. He also owned a string of Chinese restaurants, for which he grew enormous pigs. These animals were taken, after slaughtering, to one of these restaurants and cut up. The loins were always sent to me, literally filling my fridges to overflowing with wonderful meat. I always wondered why the Chinese chefs opted to send me the loins when they had first choice, until eventually it dawned on me that they actually preferred the belly, shoulder and legs. This made me reassess my attitudes to prime cuts, and to realise that they are only considered the best because they are usually the tenderest and sometimes the leanest. To as gastronomically aware a nation as the Chinese, all the parts of the animal have equal merit in different ways, and appropriate recipes have evolved for them all. This is in marked contrast to British and American cooking which has for a long time concentrated more and more on the ‘best’ bits of the animal. To be fair to ‘Modern British Cooking’, there has been a slight reversal of this trend in recent years.

However, the fact remained that I was stuck with enormous amounts of pork loin and developed this recipe after reading Jane Grigson’s Good Things. In this marvellous book she devoted an entire chapter to prunes, a shock to me when I first read it, because like so many former boarding-school pupils, I had an almost pathological dread of prunes (and of boiled cabbage too). So captivating was this essay on the subject, that I completely missed my tube station when reading it on the way home from Soho one evening.

It is very important that you get precisely the right cut of pork for this recipe to be successful. Ask your butcher to cut an eight-rib section from a loin, and to French trim it. If he seems to be having trouble with this, explain that what you want is for the joint to be trimmed like a rack of lamb (the chine bone removed and the ends of the ribs trimmed to expose them). Make sure that all trimmed meat scraps and bones are included when you collect the meat. The skin should be removed in one piece with most of the fat attached to it, the actual loin itself must still have a thin covering of fat on one side. This recipe does not normally include crackling, but if your guests would be horrified by this omission, by all means ask the butcher to score the skin and include it, albeit cooked separately. A simple method to produce good crackling is given below. Do not be reluctant to boss your butcher around, you are not declaring war, merely giving him the opportunity to show off his skills. Incidentally, I have ordered this cut from the meat counter of my local Sainsbury’s with perfectly satisfactory results.

Finally, pay considerable attention to the quality of the pork. Most pork in Britain is reared to the specifications of the bacon producers, resulting in cheap lean meat with virtually no fat between skin and meat. Pork like this has poor cooking quality, tends to be dry and has at best an insipid taste. Mr Sutherland’s pigs were swill fed and often had up to 3 cm of beautiful white subcutaneous fat. Whilst pork like this may be difficult to get hold of, many butchers and supermarkets are now selling free-range pigs, often from ancient breeds which have not been subject to the nightmarish demands of the bacon companies. Gloucester Old Spot is the breed of pork that I serve today in Frith Street.