Carla Carlisle writes of her friend Oliver Walston, who was often known for 'thinking the unthinkable and saying the unsayable' in the agricultural world of East Anglia. The quail were split along the breast bone, flattened with a cleaver, dipped in beaten eggs, shaken in a paper bag with flour, pepper and salt and fried in butter and olive oil until tender. The little birds were then nestled onto a bed of creamy grits oozing with butter.
This was Sunday-morning breakfast for a million listeners on Radio 4’s On Your Farm , back when Farming Today presenter Oliver Walston interviewed farmers in their kitchens. In our case, breakfast was in the 400-year-old barn we had converted into a vineyard restaurant, inspired by my apocalyptic vision of the future of British farming. Oliver found out about this wild-eyed endeavour after I wrote a one-off column for Big Farm Weekly .
My copies of The New Yorker piled up unread as I defected to the earthier world of the farming press. I was often out of my depth, but I was spurred on by a visit from the agricultural manager of our bank. He hardly spoke during the tour of the vineyard and the renovated barn, but, as he left, he said: ‘Forget the Pinot stuff.
Stick to wheat and barley. Thanks to Poland, East Anglian arable farmers will survive. Grain stores are almost empty.
Demand will increase as the West helps to fuel Glasnost .’ He never mentioned that 74 farms in Suffolk and Norfolk had been on the market all summer. I didn’t thi.