FOOD & DRINK / British Classics - Farm-cured ham: No ham like an old ham: Michael Bateman sees the Tamworths graze on a farm where pigs - and meat - are what they used to be

HEAL FARM hams have a rich, subtle, old- fashioned character. They taste the way hams used to taste 50 years ago.

They are made by Anne Petch to old recipes, using old varieties of pig, and both her smoked and unsmoked hams have a rare delicacy of flavour. Chef of the Year Shaun Hill, co-owner of the Michelin-starred Gidleigh Park in Devon, says they are the best English hams he has tasted. 'Anne Petch is the thinking person's pig breeder and her pigs are 'feel- good food', free-range, well-fed and cared for. I groan about the price, but I pay up.'

Anne Petch breeds the kind of pigs which have been almost completely displaced by the modern, cost-effective pig with its high food conversion rate, such as the Landrace. She has 40 breeding sows, jet black Berkshires, Gloucester Old Spots (with their big brown patches), pug-nosed Middle Whites, British Lops (Long White Cornish lop-eared pigs) and Tamworths, the colour of ginger cake.

Petch's pampered pigs graze in small knots on the quilted green hillsides of mid-Devon. They stroll about confidently as if they own the place. Which, in effect, they do. For Heal Farm in King's Nympton, near South Molton, is a Rare Breeds Survival Centre.

The granddaughter of an Exmoor blacksmith, Anne Petch grew up nearby, enjoying a childhood breeding mares. She came to breed pigs by chance. As a joke, she'd been given a piglet as a present. She looked after it as a pet, and eventually pig breeding became a hobby; she signed up as an early member of the Rare Breeds Trust, which today has 10,000 members.

It is the breed of pig that dictates the quality of a ham, together with a good feed of best barley and wheat, and maturity. 'The Tamworths,' Shaun Hill enthuses, 'have real depth of flavour.'

There is a family link here; Anne Petch's great-great-great-grandfather was Sir Robert Peel, who crossed a Red Barbadian boar from the West Indies with an English pig to create the Tamworth. At Heal Farm they are grown to six or seven months old. Modern force-

fed, intensively reared animals are slaughtered at four months.

British hams are made in a way that is special to our damp climate. It doesn't suit the making of air-dried hams, so we don't have dry national hams in the style of Italian Parma ham, Spanish jamon de serrano, French jambon Bayonne, Belgian Ardennes ham or Chinese Yunnan ham. But we do make good dry-salted ham which is lightly smoked (such as York ham) or juicy wet-pickled ham (such as Bradenham ham) brined with molasses and spices; or with brown sugar, honey, peppercorns, juniper, mace, allspice.

Unlike Parma ham, which is ready to eat, wet-pickled hams must be boiled or baked before eating. A baked ham may be further flavoured, studded with cloves, or glazed with honey. A company called The Country Victualler in Newark, Nottinghamshire, has made a name for itself with a spicy cure and marmalade glaze. This is not Anne Petch's way. She believes that if you have a good pig, you should not mask its fine flavour.

'I had to work out how to make ham and bacon for myself,' she says. 'Dorothy Hartley's Food in England was a help, and Jane Grigson's Charcuterie.' She taught herself how to butcher the carcasses, cutting along imaginary dotted lines while holding open a catering manual. She trims the ham beautifully, having had an art school training (it is no accident that the Heal Farm emblem of a farmer with his Gloucestershire Old Spot is by the engraver Thomas Bewick).

She soaks the hams for 12 days in a 60 per cent brine, hangs them to dry, then either simmers them slowly or gives them to her husband, Richard, to smoke. He uses oak and sometimes a little beech to add a slight golden glow. Logs are weathered outdoors for a season to reduce the tannin in the bark. The smokery is no tarry shed, but an ingeniously improvised stainless steel margarine vat, turned on its side, smoke led in by cooling pipes to reduce tar levels which would make the meat bitter.

Although Anne Petch started the business in 1979, it didn't really take off until 1983 when a newspaper article about Heal Farm triggered thousands of letters. Her early experiences of the food industry were distasteful. An old boar that she had sold, she thought, for pet food, she later learned was made into sausages - after first being ground to a pulp, neutralised (to get rid of boar taint), and injected with pork flavouring.

She was disgusted to be rung up by a salesman offering a machine which would increase the weight of hams by 30 per cent. In fact, properly-made hams lose 30 per cent of their weight (which explains the high price of a good ham). 'He wanted to sell me a machine for injecting water,' she says. 'There used to be an advertisement in the trade press for these machines. The headline said: Why sell ham when you can sell water?'

The adverts may have gone, but this shameless practice continues unchecked. Under British food laws, producers do not have to declare the first 10 per cent of added water. So a declaration of 10 per cent water actually means 20 per cent added water. Hypocritical, misleading or what?

Anne Petch traces the food industry's mentality back to Britain's post-war cheap food policy. 'It was a laudable proposition at the time, to pile the nation's plates high with cheap food. But to keep food cheap we got intensive farming and excessive food processing. The supermarkets insist on cheap pork, and the pig breeders have to comply or go bust.'

If the Government applies the full force of European Community regulations, she says, Heal Farm, like so many small food operations - cheesemakers, dairies, smokeries, and abattoirs - will be blasted out of existence. Anne Petch's particular difficulties arise from her success, the diversity of her business. Her mail- order database of 13,000 includes customers for fresh pork (as well as beef and lamb from farmers committed to animal welfare), cured meat, smoked meat and game, and cooked products such as potted beef and pates.

These are all prepared in farm buildings attached to a 12th-century Devon longhouse, elegantly modernised by her husband. It is not enough that the premises are immaculately clean. The British view of the new EC regulations, says Anne Petch, seems to be: if we are going to have a new set of food safety rules, let's go for the highest we can attain. Admirable on paper in a Whitehall office, but something else in mid-Devon.

She commissioned a survey from Campden Food and Drink Research Association, asking what she would have to do, and they concluded she would need to install some 14 separate preparation rooms, and nine cold stores. Her architect's costing: pounds 500,000.

No wonder so many small food businesses are on the verge of collapse, faced with the crippling costs of new investment. Anne Petch has duly forwarded the report to food minister Nicholas Soames, who is generally thought to wave a flag for small businesses. 'We are also told there is an EC scheme to make concessions for Artisanal Producers with a Non-

Industrial Base,' she says.

Having negotiated so many hurdles, Anne Petch doesn't intend to give up now. She has devised a scheme for survival, a centre for small food businesses, which she will call The Food Village. She plans to move her food operation, lock, stock and barrel, to a new and accessible site with a custom-built complex

of Victorian style farmhouses. 'But inside,

I'm afraid, we will have to work in approved, aseptic boxes.'

This centre will offer hope to similar endangered small businesses; such as a dairy, ice- cream and cheesemaking, a bakery for bread, cakes and biscuits, a restaurant, shop, with educational and conference facilities. It will be designed to attract tourists. What it's not is a co-op, she says. 'British farmers are much too rugged individualists to work together.'

Originally the idea was a pipe dream, she says, but the EC regulations are forcing her hand. 'I'm damned if I'm going to give up now.' Backers will put up the money, and the local council has promised to sell them the land. Hopefully, she says, The Food Village will open on 1 January, 1995. 'It's the only way to survive,' she muses. 'If we don't hang together, we'll all hang separately.'

Heal Farm, King's Nympton, Umberleigh, Devon EX37 9TB. Tel 076957 4341. Fax 076957 2839.