Salt, Smoke and Time: The Makers Shaping British Charcuterie

Say the word “charcuterie” and most people’s minds go straight to a market stall in Lyon, a cured leg hanging in a back street in Parma or a Black Forest smokehouse. Its roots may be continental, but its present and future reach well beyond them. Some of the most accomplished charcuterie being made today isn’t coming from the Dordogne or the Dolomites, it’s coming from the Scottish Highlands and the Sussex Weald. 

British Fine Foods’ charcuterie range is built on two producers, but between them they tell a surprisingly complete story of how this most European of crafts took root in British soil, and, in the process developed a distinctly British character. 

The import that went wild

Great Glen Charcuterie starts with an irony worth sitting with: it took a Dutch couple to help put British charcuterie on the map.

Jan Jacob and Anja Baak left the Netherlands for the Scottish Highlands, where Jan Jacob became involved in managing the region's wild deer population. That's not a small detail: it's the story. Great Glen isn't European technique layered onto British ingredients as an afterthought; it grew directly out of a British land-management problem, solved with a continental instinct for what to do with good meat. The couple started small, with a smoker built in their own garden, while raising six children, turned sustainably managed wild venison into a distinctive range of Highland charcuterie. This isn't charcuterie despite being British, it's charcuterie that could really only have been made here, from deer that needed managing on Highland estates.

The adman and the herdsman

Moons Green Charcuterie is a fascinating British happy accident story which grew from an unlikely partnership between two men who came to the craft from opposite directions 

New Zealand-born John Doig is a former advertising man and food writer who became a pig farmer and charcutier. Ian Jones is a lifelong herdsman, farmer, butcher and beekeeper who, in Moons Green’s own words, knows meat as only someone who has spent a lifetime chasing sheep through gorse in the rain could. At Owley Farm in the Kentish Weald, they make charcuterie by hand using free-range British meat sourced from small, high-welfare farms.

They develop every recipe, grind their own spices, stuff every saucisson and rub the cures into whole cuts themselves, relying on excellent meat, salt, carefully judged seasoning and, most importantly, time.

The range moves from British interpretations of continental classics, including chorizo, bresaola, lomo and coppa, to more playful recipes such as wild fennel, rosemary and garlic, plum and port and lamb with preserved lemon. Their air-dried ham is matured for 18 months, while their saucissons change with the seasons and make use of British herbs and ingredients wherever possible. 

Then there is the iconic Beer Stick, their own invention and perhaps the product that best captures the Moons Green character: seriously well-made charcuterie recast as something new, designed to be eaten with a pint. They have since created versions using fennel, venison, lamb, truffle and enough chilli to merit the name Hellfire. 

One man came to the craft sideways, the other was practically born into it. Somewhere between the two, they pioneered a distinctly British style of charcuterie.

Continental Craft transformed into a distinctly British product

What links Great Glen and Moons Green isn’t shared geography or founding story: it’s that both producers arrived at charcuterie with innovation and curiosity rather than imitation. Great Glen took a British land-management challenge and solved it the continental way. Moons Green took continental technique and pushed it somewhere genuinely new through the Beer Stick, exceptional free range British meat and their own innovative original recipes. 

Using continental craft as a starting point, these makers have drawn on British landscapes, exceptional local meat and their considerable curiosity to create exceptional charcuterie with a character entirely their own.

See the British Fine Foods’ charcuterie range.