We’ve had a busy month at Spitting Pig , with all kinds of office parties taking place in and around the area of Impington, birthdays, wedding and anniversaries given the full hog roast Impington roast treatment and literally thousands of residents going off sated and happy with a hot roast pork bap smothered with gravy and apple sauce in their hands. We’ve been to two of the colleges over the past two weeks, and there cannot be a finer setting for a party than the quad of a college – our roast pork baps go to all the most prestigious places! I haven’t checked the scientific literature, but it seems that a hot roast pork bap is definitely brain food – it must be, the way all the students were wolfing them down! We’re obviously pretty popular with the dons too, because they invite us back year after year – we must have done pretty much all of the colleges in the town at some point. I’ve been there so much over the years I feel like I deserve an honorary degree – ‘awarded for services to hot roast pork’ sounds pretty good, you must agree. One of the parties was an alumni gathering, and two of the recent graduates who’d helped organise similar events in years past confided to me that they weren’t going to make the trip until they noticed who was doing the catering – they remembered the Spitting Pig name from their time in the college. A hot roast pork bap with all the trimmings is a very memorable thing. For Marcel Proust it may have been the madeleines, but when I’m making a remembrance of things past in my life I have to say hot roast pork and crispy crackling features rather a lot, and there’s nothing like the scent of slowly cooking hog to get me reminiscing. I just can’t help myself, it’s involuntary – a real trip down memory lane.
Another trip down memory lane this month took us back to Impington, where I took charge of catering as the proud owner of a new roasting machine many many moons ago at one of my first bookings as a hog roast Impington chef. The basics are, of course, still the same, but I feel like I’ve come a long way over the years – I know roast meat like the back of my hand now, and can pretty accurately guess the weight and the cooking time of a hog just by looking at it. It was nice to be back in the same garden I’d started out it years back, and a testament to the quality of our cooking – the hosts still remembered us and said they wouldn’t have dreamt of getting anyone else in after the success of our first visit, and our popularity with their guests, many of whom were back for the party last week. We did them proud with a great spread – roast pork, roast lamb, buttery new potatoes, and a couple of freshly prepared salads – we’ve already been invited back to do their next party!