Enraged by the prevailing culture of waste, we decided to consecrate every part of our pig Singer to some human use. The resolution was taken and, after a day or two of trembling, we "screwed our courage to the sticking place", and stuck he was.
And so was I, stuck with a bucket of blood and an armful of reeking guts, slipping in body parts and lard, madly resolved to manufacture the first genuine boudins noirs to be made in north Wiltshire. I regard English black pudding as an insult to the creature who bled for it, and was determined to do honour to Singer in a dish of boudin aux pommes.
Detaching and cleaning his small intestine was the easy part. Harder by far is turning sickly blood into savoury stuffing. The English way, of sopping it up in rusk or barley, loses both texture and flavour. The right way is to pour in masses of cream, which lightens the texture and prevents the blood from clotting, and then to add warm fat from the flank, onions melted in lard, salt, pepper and quatre epices. Sections of stuffed gut, tied at both ends and gently simmered, emerged from this ordeal looking exactly as Zola might have described them - le ventre de la famille, in which need and greed lay coiled together.
At our going rate, this black pudding cost approximately £100 a kilo and, although we ate it with expressions of triumph, uttering constant cries of amazement to find it indistinguishable in taste, colour, texture and general indigestibility from the stuff that can be bought in any French charcuterie for a euro or two, it was by no means as clear at the end of the meal as it was at the beginning that we will do this every year.
Moreover, a problem had arisen: what do you drink with boudin aux pommes? We tried a bottle of our sour home-made cider, but it burped back at us in indignation. Eventually, we realised that you don't drink with this dish at all, but to it, by way of toasting the memory of the creature whose better part it is.
Finishing our meal, therefore, we looked for a bottle of sweet white wine. Expensive Sauternes seemed to be going a bit far, even for Singer. But, as luck would have it, a bottle of that most underrated of sweet white wines, Sainte-Croix-du-Mont, was to hand. This - a Chateau La Rame '99 from Majestic Wines - proved to be the perfect afterthought to our crazy venture: gentle, rich, with an apple aroma and deep golden confectionery beneath, yet half the price of an equivalent Sauternes. And the associations of its lovely name drove away the memory of what had been, after all, a most awful day, from which only Singer had come through with flying colours.
