Wild Boar
The Food Programme
BBC
4.4 • 977 Ratings
🗓️ 25 December 2016
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this series of four programmes broadcast over Christmas, Sheila Dillon explores the link between tradition and food.
For Christmas Day, Sheila celebrates The Wild Boar Feast - an ancient Viking tradition which still lingers on in Britain (think of 'pigs in blankets') and inspires our love of the Christmas Ham. Historian Eleanor Barraclough introduces Sheila to a stuffed boar's head in the cellars of Queen's College, Oxford, and explains about how the boar was at the centre of mid-winter pagan fertility rituals. In Cumbria, Sheila meets a field of wild boar and talks to farmer Peter Gott about the fearsome intelligence of his huge beasts. Scandinavian chef Trine Hahnemann reveals the huge importance of the Christmas boar in Sweden, and how to make a meatball sandwich for Boxing Day. And chef Giorgio Locatelli explores the passion for wild boar across Italy.
With music from The Boar's Head Carol, the oldest printed carol in English, and recipes from Trine Hahnemann and Giorgio Locatelli.
Producer: Elizabeth Burke.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:04.4 | Hello, you've downloaded a podcast of BBC Radio 4's The Food Program. |
| 0:09.5 | Welcome to our world, from cooking to culture, politics to pleasure. We hope you enjoy it. |
| 0:17.0 | The board's head in hand where I be decked with bays and rosemary |
| 0:29.0 | And I pray no my glance master's be mare he, |
| 0:33.4 | or this is him a mey of the |
| 0:37.4 | The Boers head in hand bring eye, |
| 0:39.2 | bedecked with bays and rosemary. |
| 0:42.2 | And I pray you my master masters be merry. This 15th century |
| 0:45.8 | Christmas Carol celebrates a Christmas ritual which goes back at least as |
| 0:50.4 | far as the Vikings of feasting on wild boar. Today I'll be exploring that |
| 0:56.1 | ancient but still living tradition and how, though we hardly recognize it, it |
| 1:01.2 | still echoes down through the centuries in the special meals we make for Christmas. |
| 1:07.0 | But first the beast themselves and I'm in Endmore in Cumbria with Peter Gott who is one of the few |
| 1:16.5 | farmers in Britain farming wild boar. Now before we begin Peter how can you farm wild boar? |
| 1:25.0 | Sus Grofer, Latin name for wild boar. |
| 1:27.8 | That's a breed. |
| 1:30.0 | Wild, wild boar, one would say, is out in the wild in this country in Forest of Dean, Kent, Dorset, |
| 1:38.0 | Germany, France, etc. |
| 1:40.3 | But as a farmer we've contained them in 16 acres and because they would have required more foraging area than that |
| 1:47.0 | They rely on me for food so they are domesticated but at the same time the species is the same as you would get out in Europe. |
| 1:56.5 | But what drove you into wild boar farming? |
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