There’ll be stone fruit, berries, loads of vegies, free range meats & eggs, honey, olive oil, fresh milk & dairy, fresh & smoked fish, buttery corn, freshly squeezed juices, handmade cheeses, sourdough bread, coffee to go, BBQ brekkie and much more!

Saturday 28th January 2012
8am to 1pm
Collingwood Children’s Farm
St Heliers Street, Abbotsford
BYO bags!

For more info: www.mfm.com.au or 0429 146627

A few items to wet your appetite:
- Our RASV Medal winning dry cured streaky bacon which is perfect wrapped round the turkey
- Pigs in blankets which are our lovely lancashire sausages in chipolatas, wrapped with our own dry cured bacon.
- Pork, Sage and onion stuffing which is a must to produce a perfect turkey
- Family sized pork pies (only produce these once a year so dont miss out!)
- Chipoloata pork sausages which are perfect party size.

We have even teamed up with a local free range turkey farmer to offer you the full experience. however, numbers of turkeys are limited so it will be first come first served.

“The Foire au Boudin which is held every spring in Mortagne au Perche in Normandy is the greatest celebration of black pudding on the planet. It is about celebrating the product in all its different forms every bit as much as it is about deciding who, for that year at least, has made the best. Here is our take on the most important aspect of the festival – the black pudding, or as they would have it in this haven of France, le boudin.

The boudin was, without exception, delicious. After the judges had cast their votes on the winning puds, blackpudding.org had the rare privilege of wandering round the tables and helping ourselves. And we did.

There was black pudding with fruit or with vegetables. Black pudding from every region of France, from Germany and Austria, from Ireland and the French West Indies. Black pudding with herbs or cream, with bread or raisins. Black pudding studded with fat. Black puddings so black that even the white bits were black. It was incredible. Boudin, boudin everywhere and not a drop too pink.

The black pudding was so good that we weren’t put off by the fact that it hadn’t actually been cooked. Of course it was cooked in the making but that was it, no grilling and no frying. It came as you would get it in a shop but it was no worse for that. With 600 entries to get through, the Chevaliers du Goute Boudin simply didn’t have time to cook them before they tasted them.

There was boudin from Lyon containing raw onions marinated in brandy and herbs. Boudin from Auvergne which contained milk, Poitou boudin prepared without fat but with cooked spinach, cream, semolina and eggs.
There was Normandy boudin with apples, Brittany boudin with prunes, boudin from Flanders with raisins, Auvergne boudin with chestnuts, smoked Strasbourg boudin with pork rind and bread soaked in milk.

There was table upon table with boudin nature, the basic and beautiful staple that has nothing but equal parts of blood, fat and onions and is sometimes called boudin de Paris. All shapes, all sizes, and lots and lots of it. It is said that if all the black pudding consumed over the weekend of the fair was laid end to end – and isn’t that a great thought – then it would stretch for over five kilometres. That’s a lot of boudin noir.

But perhaps the best of it – certainly the most fantastic selection of it – was on the table nearest the door where lay the most incredible black pudding creations you have ever set eyes on. It was the “creatif” section.
There was a whole suckling pig, lying there in its glazed glory with a boudin resting in its mouth. The poor creature had been neatly split in two, skilfully hollowed out and was now full to the gunnels with black pudding. Vegetarians or animal lovers, in the unlikely event there were many of these in Mortagne just then, would most probably not approve but this was a work of art.

Next to the pig that had given up not just its blood but its entire body to the cause of black pudding appreciation was a creation of such gastronomic overload that it harked back to the most hedonistic days of ancient Rome. Except that they might have thought it was a tad over the top.
Imagine if you will, a saddle of the finest black pudding studded with quails’
eggs under a thick blanket of succulent Scottish salmon. As if that wasn’t enough, there was a whole glazed lobster straddling the entire epicurean ensemble. This was not just black pudding, this was Mortagne-au-Perche black pudding.
Perhaps our favourite however was the cake. It really did look mouth-wateringly good, a choc lover’s dream made true. Dark and white squares, like a chocolate chessboard, topped a six-inch high, layered delight. The gateau was cut open to reveal perfectly equal Battenberg-style squares – and its dark, bloody secret. This was a cake from the little shop of horrors – chocolate and black pudding and fat.

Wow. How could something so wrong taste so right? The dark, strong, slightly bitter chocolate worked perfectly with the tangy boudin. Their two consistencies were close enough that you couldn’t immediately tell where one stopped and the other began. Look up guilty pleasures in a good dictionary and there will be a picture of this cake. Okay there won’t but there ought to be.

The delights were everywhere.

Tiered silver trays of fancies perched gracefully on glass salvers – anywhere else in the world, of course, they would be dainty cakes but this was Mortagne and they were dainty boudin.
Look left and you saw generous slices of gelatinous boudin topped with chocolate and cranberries. Look right and there were pastry parcels filled with fruit and pudding sitting next to a plate filled with pretty black and white towers of thinly sliced boudin and fat.

Mortagne au Perche is heaven on earth for the black pudding lover. It celebrates everything that is best about this magnificent food.”

In the beginning, the pudding was the boudin. The boudin was anything stuffed inside an animal gut, the medieval cooking medium equivalent to the vacuum pouch so beloved by contemporary chefs. The haggis and the sausage are descendants of the boudin as are Christmas, Yorkshire and Sussex Pond puddings. In most cuisines, the distinction between savoury and sweet is a fairly modern one. Blancmange was made with chicken, sugar and almond milk; mincemeat pies, which came to be stuffed with spice and fruit, were made with meat. Slowly, the strands were unravelled and puddings became entirely sweet while sugar, without disappearing entirely, came to have a much lower profile in savoury dishes.

Part of that evolution meant animal innards – stomachs, bladders, intestines – falling into disuse and puddings being wrapped in a cloth instead. We are not sure if the switch was provoked by squeamishness, or simply the increasing unavailability of animal parts to a growing urban population; it was probably a bit of each. For whatever reason, the cloth – muslin, cheesecloth or cotton – became the normal format, the pudding being moulded either like a cannonball (plum pudding, pease pudding) or like a giant sausage (Spotted Dick or Roly Poly pudding). Things started to change after the first world war, as did many other domestic habits; the Sussex Pond pudding was made in a cloth until the 1930s, when the rather easier pudding bowl took over.

It must have been rather a good trick to produce a spherical version of the Pond pudding. In its modern form it is still impressive and something of an act of faith on which to embark. At the end of three-and-a-half hours, the pudding is turned out (a greased basin is essential) and sits proudly on its plate, a glistening golden brown with just the merest hint of a well beginning to form on the top. When cut open, a rather luscious, rich brown syrup begins to ooze out and forms a puddle around the pudding while the lemon is revealed in the centre. It is a party piece but one whose rich origins in medieval cookery are revealed in the flavour.

A hundred years ago, the Sussex Pond pudding was considered a favourite with children. I am not so sure it would be today, although I urge you to give it a go and find out. There is something quite grown-up about the marmalade-like flavour of the pudding: there is the anticipated sourness from the juice with an additional bitter quality imparted by the lemon’s skin (choosing a thin-skinned lemon will help to reduce this if desired). These traits are in no small measure offset by the sugar, not to mention the considerable density of the suet crust, but those enjoying the pudding will benefit from a long walk while it steams happily on the back of the stove. The reward will not be just in an extremely indulgent pudding but in a taste of history, too.

We didn’t want to run with the herd when it comes to bacon, we wanted to make something quintessentially British, something perfect for the ‘bacon butty’ and ‘Full English’ breakfast (Irish, Scottish or Welsh, of course), but also a chefs bacon – unbrittle with delicate flavours, perfect for dishes like Balmoral Chicken or to wrap around our chipolatas in pigs in blankets.

Prepare yourselves for Pacdon Parks Streaky Bacon, Unsmoked and Dry cured with English Herbs.

The free range, female pork belly is dry cured by hand with sage and mace to our own recipe and not bulked up with water or injected so the resulting bacon does not leave pools of water in the pan on cooking as does some mass produced bacon and is less brittle, deeper in raw colour much like pancetta with subtle herb flavours.

Come along to the Farmers Markets and try this weekend. We are sure you will love it as much as we do.