Shredded Pork

This one is DELICIOUS. There are a couple of components, but feel free to omit or recombine as you see fit. I like these best separately, actually. Pictured above, beer, an apple for desert, two versions of the salad/grain, and the meat dish in the middle.

This recipe grew out of my musings about our modern horror of the concept of boiled meat and grain-mush. It is autumn here, I have a LOT of plums and pork at the moment, grain, and still some decent vegis from the garden.

Meat dish.

I put a large cut of pork that had been quite smoked and a LOT of plums into a pot with a little water. I added a tiny bit of water, vinegar, and salt. I cooked that on very low heat for many hours. The plums should totally fall apart, and the meat should be easily shredded with a spoon. I did not cover with a lid, so the plums reduced a lot. When everything was cooked, I seasoned with more mustard, salt, and vinegar. My plums are fairly meaty, but not very sweet, so I ended up adding a small spoonful of honey as well. If you don't have smoked pork, then you could use liquid smoke, that works great. I ended up eating this cold, with the cold salad below.

Grain/vegis.

I boiled a bunch of barley. I cooled it down, and tossed it with finely shredded yellow carrots and either kale or cabbage. I personally love the cabbage version for some reason. I used a little vinegar and salt to season it. If you are serving this one the side, use more vinegar. If you are serving the meat dish on top of it, I'd go less sour. In fact, I think this would also be really good with shredded apple added! I would substitute onion-ferment liquid for any of the vinegar in either of these recipes, which is likely more authentic. Really anything sour is fine, verjuice/sour apple or whatever.

If I were making this in the middle of winter, I'd make the sauce out of dried plums, and use fermented carrots in the salad. I haven't yet tried making this out of preserved meat (ham-ish stuff), but that is the next plan. I'll let you know how it comes out!