A farmer’s guide to meat seasonality

There’s a grotesque way to test the quality of a chicken and it involves sports equipment. 

“You should always steer clear of a chicken you can push through a tennis racket. The meat should be firm, not mushy,” says farmer Tom Jones, who’s been supplying top London restaurants, including St. John, James Lowe's now defunct Lyle's and The Clove Club, with native breed meat from his Herefordshire farm for over 20 years and now has a butchery in Bermondsey.

To spare yourself the awful clean-up there is an alternative, one simple rule of thumb to ensure you’re getting the best quality bird, says Jones.

“If you want to buy a good chicken, it's just on price. Anything north of sort of £10.”

Jones wants you to buy and eat good meat. I first encountered him at a special talk and dinner event called Common Ground at much loved South London neighbourhood restaurant, Llewellyn’s. There he implored us to make meat seasonality part of the wider seasonality conversation, using the example of how poor most spring lamb is compared to hogget (a sheep between the ages of one and two years old) – more on this later.

Today, when most meats are available all year round, many of us don’t have much inkling of the seasonality of animal flesh and the best times to eat it, beyond maybe that we should be thinking about game in autumn and winter, or lining up a lamb for an Easter spread (don’t, hogget’s where it’s at, more to follow). 

Meats like chicken and goat are year-round, but traditionally, meat production would follow the seasonal cycle of farms, with animals given ample time to graze on lush pastures (nutrition is, in the end, flavour) before being slaughtered. This would often mean an autumn cull, with farmers having limited feed to take the animals through the winter. Fat cattle, for instance, would be picked off, meaning the autumn to early winter would be the best time to eat beef. This still holds true today. 

“Summer is the best season for the animals. The grass is growing, bringing all the minerals to the surface, and the cows are getting fat, producing a lot of fat on top of the muscle, and that becomes the best beef then into October,” says Jones. “Traditionally, you wouldn't have been eating beef direct off the fields through December, January, February.”

Things changed a long time ago of course, with the advent of steel frame sheds that enabled farmers to fatten the animals “against the seasons and the elements,” says Jones, but beef from a cow slaughtered in the early part of the year, which has been kept in a shed, drinking mains water and surviving on feed, is not going to be the best meat. 

Instead, during the winter, we should be looking to game and rabbit as great cold-season meats, but you won’t find much of it on the supermarket shelves nor is the likes of venison a ‘wild seller’ for Jones, which is a shame he says, considering the sheer numbers of wild deer in the UK. “Supermarkets, by their nature, are demand led. If suddenly everybody starts turning up and saying, ‘Where are all the wild rabbits and the venison?’, it would be on the shelves. It's not on the shelf because people aren't asking about it,” says Jones.

Like most people who care about the quality and provenance of meat, Jones does not encourage you to buy your meat from the supermarket, where information on how the animal lived is limited. Intensively farmed pork is often slaughtered young and lacks fat (fat is also flavour), though many of the commercial breeds have been bred to be largely fatless he says, as “we are, as a society, pretty fat-scared.”

The key is speaking to those with knowledge. Go to your butcher, ask the questions, so you can make better choices. 

So, about that spring lamb…

“Generally, spring lambs are born on Christmas Day, New Year's Day and onwards, and then they are fed for the Easter market. So they can be sort of three, four months of age, and then they're slaughtered. And it isn't a very good version of lamb, in my opinion. 

They have not had the goodness... the summer is critical really,” says Jones. 

In fact, says Jones, many farmers are turning away from spring lamb, due to the damage wrought on flocks by “unseasonably savage snowfall in March, early April” and the increased price of grain due to the war in Ukraine. October and November is a much better time to eat lamb, again, right off the field, when the bouncy little things have had spring, summer and early autumn to graze. 

To make things easier, here’s a simple calendar so you can know what’s traditionally in season when it comes to the meat on your table and further down, tips from Jones on how to buy the best meat.

Summer

Good beef can be found as early as June, hogget as well. Beef will go all the way through to November time and maybe a bit further if you’re dry ageing. But avoid eating it in January and February, when the cattle has been kept inside. 

Autumn 

Along with beef, this is the time game starts to make an appearance, as well as cured pork (bacon, hams, etc.) from the autumn cull in preparation for winter. Rabbit too (never eat a wild rabbit when there isn’t an ‘r’ in the month is the old saying) . October and November are also great times to eat lamb because they’ve had the spring, summer and early autumn to graze.

Winter 

It might seem like a barren season, but there is plenty to eat meat-wise. Continue through the winter with game, rabbit and cured pork. There will also be good mutton (as there is all year round) and hogget. 

Spring 

Avoid spring lamb, go for hogget instead and start thinking about all the delicious beef just around the corner. Mutton is great in spring, as are wild rabbits. Pork also, if the pigs have gorged on root vegetables and whey and been able to roam and forage during the winter.

Tips for buying better meat

– For chicken, a higher price generally means better quality. Don’t be afraid of big birds either, it means they’ve had a (relatively) long and healthy life.

– Look for ‘hock burn’ on chickens’ legs, tell-tale markings that the birds have been intensively farmed. When the birds are fattened up too quickly, the bones don’t develop at the same rate as the meat, so the skeleton can’t support the bird’s weight. They end up sprawled, unable to walk and sitting in their excrement, which causes the burns.

– Ask questions of your butcher. Find out how the animal lived, what it was fed on and when it was slaughtered. A good butcher should be able to answer all these questions.

– If curing pork at home, avoid sow, as they are not great for curing once they’ve had a few litters. The fat loses the firmness that you find in younger stock who have never had the chance to reproduce. You find the same in a cow that has had offspring.