Have I given you a recipe before? The question’s rhetorical, and the answer is: ‘I don’t think so.’
And the reason is that I haven’t had one to give. But now I have. It’s the only recipe I have ever invented and I doubt I’ll manage another. I hit on it by chance, modified it, repeated it, perfected it and named it. It is neither fancy nor difficult to make. But it turns my knees to jelly, and I’d like it to turn yours too. It’s Pork Bennett.
No, I don’t consider the name immodest. The dish is mine and I am proud of it, and why should I pretend otherwise? Did Boris Stroganoff disavow his beef? Did Caesar disavow his salad? So Pork Bennett it is, please, with capital letters. Feel free to use it, fall in love with it and pass it on, knees for the jellying of. There is too little pleasure in this world.
If you’re using your own pig, kill it. How, I’ve no idea. I use a butcher. But whatever you do, don’t feel guilty. We’re an omnivorous species and have been eating pigs since the dawn of time. Pigs, as it happens, are also an omnivorous species and cheerfully eat people. The only difference is that pigs, for all their vaunted intelligence, still haven’t worked out how to farm us.
You can make Pork Bennett with loin chops or belly strips, but whichever way you go, the vital element is fat. You want fatty chops or fatty belly, a good half-inch of bright white fat, because fat is flavour and fat is good. And please don’t fall for the old delusion that fat will clog your arteries and still your darling heart, or indeed that fat will make you fat. Fat’s just energy. The most popular and successful weight-loss diet, the keto diet, abounds in fat. Inuit people eat little but fat, and they’re not fat. Fat’s fine.