Mike Crewe-Brown’s Wicked way with pork

Être copains comme cochons. (Photo: Mike Crewe-Brown)

By Marie-Lais Emond

26 Jul 2024

Deep flavours of magnificent pork, slowly infusing beans, snuggling with goose confit. Here’s where the ultimate pork happens, the sustainable rearing, the wickedly good tasting pork meat, just outside Joburg on Mike Crewe-Brown’s farm.

It’s in the discovery of a rich cassoulet, spiced ’Nduja, a crisping whole spit roast, many, many sorts of sausages, bacon, salamis, patés, terrines and rillettes. Part of the discovery at WickedFood Earth is that we can eat or take away all these outstanding examples of pork at source and, if we like, can learn how to make these porky things, too. One could be something of a charcutier once the merry classes are over.

I’m here more for the warming, rich cassoulet discovery this rather cool day but I’ve been for many other of the fabulous pork (and other) items before now. It seems impossible that it’s already been more than two years since I was last on the farm. My life’s changed a lot in the meantime. WickedFood Earth hasn’t really, except for seeming to have improved on what was already good.

It follows that many of Mike’s clients become his friends, and some of them are here today. This is Hekpoort in the greater Cradle of Humankind, but I hear Mike just saying “in the valley”. Here, additionally, there is quite some farming neighbourliness, including a certain degree of product swopping. He mentions that I might find a richesse of pecans in the food today because of one such neighbour. This is going to be one of the farm’s famous pork lunches, which are often quite a party. However, this one has a little différence, pronounced the French way.

He called one of these neighbours not an hour ago because loeries had just eaten all of the little plants that were to be our lunch salad, and which had been growing in front of this long outdoor stoep until midday. She’s already arrived with leafy armfuls from her farm, which will become the salad to accompany our cassoulet.

Just that word “cassoulet” sends delicious thrummings through my body and brain. My mother, after she’d fallen in love with cooking in her later years, used to ask me and my sister, for our birthdays, to give her any wish meal request. She’d make whatever it was. For one birthday I chose cassoulet, warning her that it was quite a task if you don’t live on a humble farm in the south of France.

She read up, phoned Anne, her friend at the French embassy, and William, one of her best foodie friends who’d lived and eaten his way through Belgium and France, and so the three apparently had many meals and fun together, arguing and advising. William was one of the eventual guests and so, I recall, was my friend Suzette Mafuna, who’s since been in Canada for two decades. It was that long ago.

It really is about time I have another cassoulet. Mike and two Joburg food critics kept themselves “sane” during Covid-19 times by competing with each other, making the “classics”. Cassoulet was one.

“It even became a bit too competitive then,” he says. It had seemed not too naughty to do all this in the fresh farm air, with one of the group a doctor. Under his mantle it seemed sort of okay. He still is a doctor and a guest-client today.”

As much as we talk about the wonders that Mike achieves with pork, so do people search out Cilla Crewe-Brown. She’s the classy hostess and organiser of all these events and workshops, enviably serene and wittily wry. Mike does the food. We do the eating of it and the benefiting, but Cill is the beautifully cool key to all of it.

We can espy one of the overnight cottages through an opening in the stoep wall. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

She tells me something I didn’t know – that after a big lunch like this or after a “merry” workshop, people can stay at the two farm cottages that Cilla says “are not luxurious but more than adequate, clean, simple and always ready for guests”. We can espy one of them through an opening in a side wall of the long stoep. If there’s a call for more accommodation, she can also place people at nearby guesthouses and B&Bs in The Cradle.

I adore cooks like Mike who’re never afraid to tackle and perfect anything. Bread is just one of those things. The theme of today’s pork meal is French, mainly with regard to the cassoulet. The bread could be French country bread, though it has a greater healthiness to it. I would say it’s nicer.

Cilla and Mike Crewe-Brown, left, and Mike’s perfect country bread. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

What makes it more French are the pork charcuterie items that will accompany it as hors d’oeuvres, let’s say. Mike and I secretly taste a few of these delicious things off knives in the kitchen for pre-hors d’oeuvres, with a bit of his bread, while we discuss relevant chefs, cooks and their books, like Fergus Henderson, like Elizabeth David and “the daughter of that one that’s even slightly longer ago than David”. Finally we remember she is Sophie Grigson.

He’s made a pork brawn cut into generous squares and a WickedFood farm paté of the “fifth quarter” and his own salami or saucisson. “Nothing goes to waste here – we use the lot.”

Charcuterie of Mike’s own pork brawn, his pork offal paté and salami or saucisson. (Photos: Mike Crewe-Brown and Marie-Laid Emond)

He’s also made French style mustard, and is serving it along with soft cheese and pickles that go with the charcuterie selection and bread.

The table’s been set down an inner section of a broad and long stoep. It’s not fiercely cold but, on the way here, it rained those fat drops that could change into real snow in a moment. What happened instead was that the sun peeked out every now and then and is still playing that game.

Read more: Hong Kong Chicken – PE’s perfect poultry

On the long table are coloured folded cotton napkins, hand-written place names and jugs of water containing fresh basil. At the table the wines everyone has brought, mostly champagnes and their South African equivalents I notice, are poured and the platters hungrily emptied.

“What’s the fifth quarter?” asks a woman down table.

“Well, heart, kidney, tongue, tripe, liver, lung, marrow, tendons, membranes even.”

“Aiiheee – I’m pleased you told me that after I’d eaten it!”

Pete opposite me has seconds. Mike and I had firsts in the kitchen, so, in that way, we are doing that too.

I ask him if I’m looking at a labyrinth over there. I get a withering look, and he says the vegetable beds are planted like that in semi-circles to prevent run-off.

Not a labyrinth. The vegetable beds are just planted like that to prevent run-off. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

I’d gone for a short walk before lunch. There are marked trails that guests can book for but I hadn’t gone that far. I hadn’t gone far at all, really, because I’d been trying to take a picture of one of the non-porcine animals on the farm, following a Pedi African sheep with its fat tail, dun coloured neck and head and an endearing bum splotch, until I was suddenly shocked. I’d walked into a very low electric fence or line, not looking down. When I realised what had happened, I felt fortunate to have been wearing a sturdy pair of Levi 501s.

I know the trails meander past the other animals like these sheep, but not past the pigs. Mike says everyone always wants to pet them and their piglets, and that people carry diseases, such as swine ’flu, to them, not the other way around.

From the table, where the next French course is being served, I can still see my Pedi sheep not getting electrocuted as it walks where I walked, maybe picking its hooves up better than I did.

Vichyssoise made with the classic farm ingredients but served non classically hot. (Photo: Marie-Lais Emond)

“This course,” grins Mike, “is vichyssoise made with the classic ingredients from this farm but served unclassically hot because of the cooler weather.” Yes, I did notice the addition of some ground pecans. Now I’m wondering if the bread we finished off earlier didn’t have some too.

On cue, another light rain falls outside our snug vichyssoise stoep.

In the kitchen Mike is cutting up the cassoulet for a last bout in the oven. Cunningly, he’s made huge square pans of it that he’s divided into sections, so that each section contains a piece of the goose confit he made as well. There are more than enough pieces of the pork meat and the Toulouse sausages that he also made for everyone to get enough of those.

“The Toulouse is a very basic sausage with nowhere to hide. The quality of the meat is the star. The texture is something like boerewors.”

I’ve been watching Mike taking pics of each dish as it’s served and remembered he was once a photographer and teacher. That was before he was a food magazine publisher and that was before he realised what he’d always known that he wanted to be, which was a very responsible farmer, farming all sustainably. Since then, he’s pretty much invented some of the ideal South African pork pigs through careful selection and crossbreeding.

Despite what we often used to hear, luckily not so much anymore, about pigs and their meat, the taste and smell of pork is more often described as sweet and clean. It’s an easy meat to digest and the meat colour and fat is thought to be more appetising.

This kind of lunch and other versions are just ideal and a treat for our pork lovers. So are the charcuterie workshops Mike holds. He often takes the workshops travelling too, once taking in our editor.

Mike takes the cassoulet from the oven. The crust is beautifully exemplary. The crumbs have been stirred back into the beans a few times, for that is the crust thickening secret. My mother’s friend, William, had advised that it be done 10 times.

My mother would rather have agreed with Mike, whose uncle she knew anyway: “We’re all just inconspicuous specks and we can’t take ourselves too seriously.” As he carefully plates the cassoulet, he adds: “And life as we know it, rather than it knows us, goes on.” We start carrying the plates out on to the stoep that is full of pork fans.

I can’t suppress a dramatic sigh while I dislodge some of the cassoulet with my fork and this hearty, steamy aroma is about to transform into the longed-for cassoulet taste on my tongue. It’s just not a looker though. Cassoulet is not at all photogenic, and is uniform in colour if not texture. However, we do have that green salad of donated leaves containing some more of those pecan nuts.

Mike and his friend Tim Truluck, not present but very well known to many in Parkhust in Johannesburg for his council work, have often been on road trips around Europe, and particularly France. I’ve said to Mike that I got to the French countryside searches for cheap and wonderful farm kitchen food or lucky chances of omelettes and glasses of wine too many decades after Elizabeth David.

However, Mike insists: “It’s all still there, except you don’t get a glass of wine and coffee thrown in anymore. But we could eat cassoulet. And steak frites. The cassoulet beans change, the bird changes from goose to duck and back again.”

For today he wanted the hearty experience to be as true to his rural farm as possible, his own pantry products, which I guess was pretty easy for him. He purposely used our common kidney beans, while in France they generally use their most common bean, the flageolet. Like them, he cooks the completed cassoulet very slowly for 10 hours.

It is true that the quality of the pork makes the big difference, the wonderful difference.

Crèmes brûlées: ‘I undercook them a little before burning the top with a flame.’ (Photo: Mike Crewe-Brown)

Mike has made classic crėmes brûlées for pud.

“I’ve had too many that became scrambled egg, so I undercook them a little before burning the top with a flame.”

When I was little, people would get a bit funny about saying “pig” in French and I was told it was worse than swearing, though my younger French-speaking cousin did it a lot.

Être copains comme cochons. (Photo: Mike Crewe-Brown)

But there is one expression I like about friends getting together and sharing something, like today. It is: être copains comme cochons, literally to be friends like pigs. DM

WickedFood Earth holds regular 3-course pork banquets on the farm. Book: Cilla on 076 236 2345 or [email protected]

Charcuterie Workshops: Cilla on 076 236 2345 or [email protected]

Mike Crewe-Brown: 060 761 0885

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