Our family ate a lot of processed meat when I was growing up – roast pork, boiled ham, even tongue sometimes, and once in a great while, haslet.
I didn’t know what haslet was at the time, and didn’t think about it much, but now I know it’s a kind of meatloaf made from left over pork bits mixed with bread crumbs.
I gather it’s a Lincolnshire speciality. We lived in Sheffield, not a million miles away from Lincolnshire, and ours came from the local butcher. It sounds like peasant food through and through, although I used to have a rather posh father-in-law from Hampshire who was a big fan of haslet, so obviously it has some social mobility.
Discovering that my local Co-op was selling sliced, packaged haslet, made (or at least packaged) byThe Taste of Suffolk, in Bury St Edmonds, I bought some and made a sandwich and it wasn’t bad, but it was awfully dull-tasting. Fortunately some pickled onions were at hand, and were much needed.
Of course I read the list of ingredients in the haslet:uncured pork trim, cured pork trim and cooked pork rind among them. Also something they call ‘haslet seasoning,’ salt and sage being among them, but also kibbled onions. I had never heard of kibbled onions. I’d heard of Kibble and Bits, as in the pet food, but I didn’t know what they were in that context either. Best as I can find, kibble is just ‘ground meal shaped into pellets’ but in the case of kibbled onions it means coarsely chopped, which looks like this apparently:
Yep, there’s no end to the excitement with haslet.
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