CUT&DRIED
making more of British & Continental charcuterie
Search for a cure The first salami entrepreneurial pig farmer Jonny Cuddy ever tasted was one that he made himself. But within two years of launching Ispíní Charcuterie he had won a Great Taste Golden Fork, and now he is on a mission to revive his native Northern Ireland’s lost cured meat products By Tom Dale
Janice & Jonny Cuddy
JONNY CUDDY HAD been looking for ways to diversify the family’s business for years – cycling through ideas from making bacon to selling the skins to budding tattooists to practise their art – before landing by chance on making charcuterie. Now, after just six years in business with multiple awards to his name, the Northern Irish charcutier is veering off the well-trodden British-twist-on-continental-classics path to revive some long-lost Northern Irish charcuterie recipes. “What I’ve always wanted to do with Ispíní is make really good food, but I didn’t want to be just another person copying what the French, Spanish and Italians do brilliantly,” says Cuddy. “I wanted to reintroduce what we were doing here years ago.” You may think that a man producing awardwinning charcuterie and opining at length about cures and cuts as Cuddy does with ease would have a long love affair with cured meats, but you’d be mistaken. “The first salami I ever tasted was the first one I made,” he says. “I was a typical Northern Irish lad who thought you couldn’t eat meat that’s not cooked.” His fateful journey into the blossoming British charcuterie scene started with a coffee-table book brought home by his wife Sarah one day in 2015: Pork: Preparing, curing & cooking all that’s possible from a pig. While flicking through, his curiosity was piqued by the section on air-dried sausages; “I read the process of making a salami but didn’t think much more of it,” he says. By chance, the next day, while Cuddy was
representing the pig industry at a National Farmer’s Union event, a food technologist asked attendees if anyone had an idea for a food business. “I put up my hand and said I wanted to make salami,” he says. Regional economic development agency Invest NI was in attendance and offered the would-be charcutier a £5,000 slice of funding to develop the concept. Soon after, Cuddy learned that the School of Artisan Food in Nottinghamshire had recently launched a week-long charcuterie course. He signed up and learned the fundamentals. Then, a tiny butchery unit with equipment included became available to rent in Aughnacloy, near Cuddy’s home, giving him the perfect opportunity to develop his brand while keeping costs low. Cuddy coaxed his sister Janice back from Antipodean bar work to help produce charcuterie in the tiny unit, and Ispíní (Irish for sausage) was born. “I suppose it’s a lot of chances that led us down this road,” says Cuddy. “All the cards just
lined up.” By the following year, the brand was already picking up awards, including the Great Taste Golden Fork for Best Charcuterie Product, and had developed an impressive inaugural range. The brand put forward three products in its first foray into Great Taste – with the Pimenton de la Vera Chorizo and Rosemary & Thyme Bresaola picking up a 2-star and 3-star award in the process respectively, with the latter going on to Golden Fork success. The pair remained in their tiny unit until 2019 when Cuddy renovated an old dairy parlour on the family farm, complete with hanging space for about three tonnes of meat. Cuddy built up a solid base of retail and foodservice customers for his popular charcuterie products across the island of Ireland, and then COVID hit. The loss of the restaurant trade – then accounting for 40% of the business – forced Cuddy to bring forward a long-held plan to open a retail operation to showcase Ispíní’s produce. “I had always wanted somewhere physical to sell our stuff with cheese and everything that makes a nice board. Then, fortunately, just after the pandemic started, a unit came up just up the road in Moira,” he says. The charcutier had noticed that in retail environments which also sold cheese, sales of his products were far higher than in those which did not. “I wanted to have a shop focused on our charcuterie, which was also selling local cheeses and other provisions to showcase the area and CONTINUED ON PAGE 26
Vol.23 Issue 3 | April 2022
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