Special Delivery

Lobster through your letterbox? Cheese by courier? Emma Hughes goes behind the scenes with the firms keeping connoisseurs posted

- Emma Hughes

I WILL always remember the day our Waitrose opened. It was 1993 and the small town I grew up in had never seen the like before. On the first day of trading, there were scenes that I was reminded of when watching the locusts decimating Madagascar on David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II. People crowded around the counters with the open-mouthed astonishment of Howard Carter peering into Tutankhamun’s tomb. Yorkshire rhubarb! Potted shrimp from Morecambe! Six different types of Cheddar!

Since then, we’ve come a long way, but the real jewels in the country’s culinary crown —by definition, seasonal and hyper-local— can still be tricky to get hold of and enjoy at their peak. Step forward the savvy suppliers who make it possible to feast on the best of British, whether you’re in Land’s End or central London.

Leading the way is Donald Russell. A Royal Warrant holder, the company will let you order restaurant-quality cuts of meat online, then it packs them into special dry-ice boxes and couriers them across the UK (and further afield; it’s worked with the Raffles Hotel in Singapore). Recently, it’s branched out into life-savers for frazzled hosts, such as stuffed pork shoulder and Jacob’s ladder that’s been slow-cooked for 10 hours.

‘I’m really protective of what we do,’ says head of production Mark Farquhar. ‘It’s so different to anywhere else.’ He’s been with the company since 1990, when, as a young butcher, he became ‘one of the guys on the line’.

‘It was a real step up for me,’ he remembers, ‘seeing meat being matured for 28 or even 35 days and learning the difference between cutting fresh meat and meat that had been aged. It was such an eye-opener.’