Preparedness for when

greenbee

milasavesmoney wrote: »

Maybe margaritas for Mar?:D

No. Absolutely not. If you give Mar margaritas, you can deal with the resulting mayhem.

[Deleted User]

nuatha wrote: »

but never sheared a sheep

I should hope not.

Any farmer will tell you, once you find a pretty one, you keep it for yourself, and don't share it with anyone.

GreyQueen

So that's what happens Ooop North on those cold winter nights...... I'd had my suspicions.

Sheep; sunday roasts ambulating in the raw materials for some nice knitwear.

nuatha

Bedsit_Bob wrote: »

I should hope not.

Any farmer will tell you, once you find a pretty one, you keep it for yourself, and don't share it with anyone.

We're a caring, sharing community in these parts.

GreyQueen wrote: »

So that's what happens Ooop North on those cold winter nights...... I'd had my suspicions.

Sheep; sunday roasts ambulating in the raw materials for some nice knitwear.

More on the warmer spring nights (and summer and autumn) or so I'm told. If you know how cold winters can be up here, then you'd understand not exposing any part of the anatomy unnecessarily.

Sunday roast with about enough fuel for a rare pit roast - add some dry heather or bracken for well done.
If only mint or ramsons would grow on the Uplands, you could pre flavour the meat

GreyQueen

I've put a chunk of the allotment down to mint, gives the horsetail some competition. Lovely stuff and so very easy to grow, almost as much fun as the feral chard, which I just pull bits off at random.

Tell ya, buy a single pkt of rainbow lights chard and allow it to set seed in your garden and you will have feral chard like mine and never ever have to buy a salad as long as you live - it overwinters quite happily.

milasavesmoney

Is mutton popular there? It's not really eaten here, only lamb...and in our part of the US, only available at Easter. Well, we are cow country (western states) after all.

mardatha

In Scotland at least, lamb (mutton is called lamb nowadays apparently!) is always popular although expensive. Traditionally Scots didn't eat much pork, so beef and mutton still sell. I absolutely love lamb and would eat it 5 days a week if I could afford it.

GreyQueen

milasavesmoney wrote: »

Is mutton popular there? It's not really eaten here, only lamb...and in our part of the US, only available at Easter. Well, we are cow country (western states) after all.

Mutton's a traditional British food which has fallen out of favour in recent generations, and most people have probably not eaten it. I did read somewhere years ago that most mutton in the UK was going to ethnic butchers whose clientele were originally from countries who preferred the flavour. Think some mutton is exported, too.

Lamb is eaten, but it is more expensive prepped for the table than almost any other meat, which is crazy when you consider that sheep-farmers can barely bring their animals to market because the price is so pitifully low. Lamb is often imported (from New Zealand).

I've lived in Scotland (not hugely far from Mardatha) and was there in the 1980s when the radioactive fallout came over from Chernobyl. Official advice was not to drink the milk or go out in the rain and the sales of lamb pastured on the uplands of Scotland and Wales was prohibited for some years after.

Beef and pork are probably the favoured meats of the British population tradtionally, with pork the more proletarian option. The British writer John Seymour, who wrote about and practised self-sufficiency, described the pig as the cornerstone of northern European peasant economy.

Interestingly, you can learn something about social history by comparing the names of the animals for the names of their meats once brought to table. In brackets are the French versions; sheep eaten as mutton (mouton), cows eaten as beef (boeuf), pigs eaten as pork (porc).

Y'see, after the Norman conquest, most of the aristos didn't bother to even learn to speak English for a couple of centuries. The anglo-saxon peasants were raising the animals and calling them by anglo-saxon names whilst the nobs were eating the creatures and calling the flesh by French names.

Full disclosure; I am a descendant of the anglo-saxon peasantry of olde Englande, second generation off the land.:rotfl:

Cappella

Milasavesmoney - You can buy mutton easily here on the markets in Manchester, goat too is easily obtainable.Main stream supermarkets don't tend to sell either though, and not all butchers offer it either. As GreyQueen says the markets stock it because, in our urban area we have a diverse ethnic population who, on the whole, prefer the stronger flavours to those of lamb. Very handy for us, as we like both meats too, and butchers with market stalks are cheaper than the supermarkets.

nuatha

milasavesmoney wrote: »

Is mutton popular there? It's not really eaten here, only lamb...and in our part of the US, only available at Easter. Well, we are cow country (western states) after all.

Lamb has always been seen as preferable to mutton.
Mutton is very difficult to source, very few actual butchers will carry it, though its available through some online sources and farmgate suppliers its expensive.

mardatha wrote: »

In Scotland at least, lamb (mutton is called lamb nowadays apparently!) is always popular although expensive. Traditionally Scots didn't eat much pork, so beef and mutton still sell. I absolutely love lab and would eat it 5 days a week if I could afford it.

They've stretched the age that they describe as lamb - what my father would have known as hogget is certainly sold as lamb (between 1-2 years old) but I've never seen mutton sold as lamb - especially since there is now a demand among the people who can afford it and the price has gone through the roof.

GreyQueen wrote: »

Mutton's a traditional British food which has fallen out of favour in recent generations, and most people have probably not eaten it. I did read somewhere years ago that most mutton in the UK was going to ethnic butchers whose clientele were originally from countries who preferred the flavour. Think some mutton is exported, too.

Lamb is eaten, but it is more expensive prepped for the table than almost any other meat, which is crazy when you consider that sheep-farmers can barely bring their animals to market because the price is so pitifully low. Lamb is often imported (from New Zealand).

The popularity and pricing of meats has completely turned on its head in the last 50 years.

In the 50s keeping a pig was relatively common, so pork wasn't a meat you bought from butchers except in towns and cities. (And it tended to be regarded as a secondary roast, preserved in the idea of turkey and port for Christmas dinner.
Lamb was available all year round as New Zealand or Icelandic frozen meat - usually just leg joints. With a native fresh lamb season starting around the end of June beginning of July as Spring Lamb (Easter lamb used to be hoggett, now its barn raised, summer bred stock where the lambs are born around October - this is more expensive than traditional production and is what has driven the price of lamb through the roof - for supermarkets not farmers)
Beef used to be the regular meat bought from the butchers (braising and stewing cuts) and roast chicken was almost unheard of - chickens were egg producers and at the end of egg production would be too tough to roast - they were sold for stewing.

Intensive farming has changed all that, chicken is now the cheapest meat, beef has slid back down the pricing scale, but pork has gone back to being cheap. And what used to be the best of sheep meat prices, Spring Lamb (sold in the summer) has become cheap supermarket specials most years, with hoggett becoming almost invisible (and premium priced for those who can find it) and mutton, from cheap meat for the proles and pie filling for the Scots to a fine dining experience.

If we have a collapse in intensive meat rearing, then the current availability of very cheap meat will disappear - if that's because of an apocalyptic SHTF scenario then we might be best off looking at chickens only for egg production (and a coq au vin at 3-4 years old) and keeping a pig at home.