Big British Food Map Keeping it veal

Date Published:

08/05/2008

In an age of food waste, veal, quite rightly, is back on the menu. Andrew meets a veal producer who is trying to change the public's perception.

It's a fact often overlooked but to keep a cow producing milk you have to keep it breeding. Female offspring become part of the herd, but until Jonathan and Vicky Brown started Bocaddon Welfare Veal, Vicky's brother Rob was shooting each bull calf soon after birth. There just wasn't a market for it.

A family affair

Milk is in the blood for Vicky and Bocaddon farm is a real family run operation. Her parents moved here from Surrey (where they were also dairy farmers) 20 years ago. Vicky's brother does the milk, her aunt and uncle have a very good soft cheese business on site, and so it seemed only natural for Vicky and Jonathan to join them when they left London with a new baby a few years ago.

"I was working for a jewellery wholesaler, but I didn't really have a passion for the product" says Jonathan. He flirted with the idea of becoming a chef, and then running a farm shop, before finally settling on veal.

Initially they took on six calves but with little advice available on humane veal production they had to find things out for themselves. "I started going round local restaurants to gauge interest, but at that time I didn't even have a product" says Jonathan. "We weren't even sure if it was going to taste good." Thankfully it did and since then the business is well underway and they're processing two animals a week. Jonathan is able to sell nearly all the edible bits of the animal ensuring very little waste "The only bits I can't sell or use are the lungs and the balls” says Jonathan.

Escaping the stigma

I ask Jonathan about the public's perception of veal and he's heard it all: "one woman came up to me at a farmer's market and accused me of selling unborn foetuses" such is the public's misconception. White veal, as traditionally made in the past on the continent means crating the animal so it can't move and develop its muscles, and feeding it only milk to produce a pale flesh. Jonathan's product, which is sometimes called rose veal, is nothing like that. It's more like lamb in that it's just bits of a young tender animal. "We're saving an animal from being shot at birth and being wasted," says Jonathan, and he's keen for it to gain a wider audience.

We take a walk to see the animals housed just up the lane. They're free to move around, have plenty of bedding and are fed milk at first as they would be naturally, before moving on to solid feed as they grow up. They seem content enough and are inquisitive about my camera. Then man and beast scatter as the heavens open and give us all a good soaking. Us humans rush back to Jon and Vicky’s cottage for lunch.

Vicky pops a freshly baked loaf out of the bread maker before nipping out to pick some wild garlic from the lane. Meanwhile Jonathan fries off some of his veal escallops. What follows is probably the nicest sandwich I think I've ever eaten; warm fresh bread, a thin smear of mustard, pungent wild garlic and lovely tender veal. Pudding is one of Vicky's homemade flapjacks and a cup of tea.

Jonathan also supplies Nathan Outlaw, one of Cornwall’s top chefs. His restaurant is recommended by everyone in these parts as a good place to eat so I decided to see how he handled the product.

Read more about that here

And it's not just Andrew having a cow, Janet Street Porter is on a crusade to get us eating veal again and is rearing her own calves for the mission. Follow her campaign on the F Word.