A breakfast worth barking for

There’s a joke in there somewhere ... but, on second thoughts, perhaps not.

Sunday morning dawned and no review written. The obvious thing was lunch but we’ve just done one of those and it’s important to keep up the column’s variety.

Sunday evening is never a good time for eating out (and then there’s the Downton Abbey factor, if not the Strictly X Factor or other such nonsense).

So breakfast it was and because there are limited options on a Sunday, we settled on a farm shop cafe that’s been on the “to-do”

list for a while.

Dropswell Farmshop is near Trimdon, which is, of course, the Bermuda Triangle of County Durham. Better men than I have lost their bearings hereabouts never to be seen again.

There is Trimdon, Trimdon Colliery, Trimdon Grange and Trimdon Station, which is also known as Deaf Hill (no-one knows why) and where the last train stopped many, many moons ago.

Dropswell Farm’s postal address is Trimdon Station (or Deaf Hill) but is actually nearer Trimdon. To find it you need to ignore the road signs, find the centre of Trimdon village (as opposed to any other Trimdon) and head due east for about a mile and a half. It is well signed from there – and well worth seeking out as we discovered.

The shop and cafe are run independently of the farm by Paul and Christine Craddock although much of the produce is sourced from there. The cafe is like many others in that it is in a converted farm building and the look is rustic practicality – sturdy pine furniture, tiled floors, whitewashed and exposed brick walls.

Paul’s a butcher by trade and that is obvious in the shop and the cafe where locally sourced meat holds centre stage.

We both had the all-day Full English (£6.25) which turned out to be a bargain plateful of two rashers of bacon, two links of sausage, fried egg, black pudding, mushrooms, baked beans, grilled tomato and toast and butter.

It was perfectly cooked and presented. The stars of the show were the bacon and the black pudding. The bacon, cured on the farm, was thickly sliced and had a mild, slightly honeyed sweetness. The black pudding, made from a local farmhouse recipe which Paul has adapted, had a singular character which turned to be primarily down to the addition of mint. For those who find the musky meatiness of black pudding too much, this lighter less highly spiced version might be more acceptable.

The pork sausages, made on the farm from pork sourced from Tim Chapman at Morton- on-Swale, near Northallerton, were fat, handsome bangers, not too highly spiced or flavoured, but of a lovely firm texture.

Everything else on the plate was just fine and dandy. The excellent pot of tea for two brought the bill to just £15.10. Best meal of the day? Certainly.

All good museums make the visitors “exit through the gift shop”. Well, at Dropswell the exit is through the farm shop/butchery where Paul is lurking with a host of goodies, particularly his excellent charcuterie. As well as the cuts of local beef, lamb and pork one might expect in a high street butcher’s shop, Dropswell offers its own pork pies (award-winning in Melton Mowbray of all places), panchetta (served with a fried egg in a bap on the cafe menu), salamis and chorizo sausages. Paul has also developed his own take on the Spanish blood sausage sobrasada which has a kick like a mule, he says. We’ll let you know about that.

All of this ended up in our basket, along with a corned beef pie, some pork chops, venison burgers, some of the sausages we had eaten with our breakfast, butter from the Acorn Dairy at Darlington, Durham camembert from Parlour Made at Morden and other good stuff.

Which meant we spent almost twice as much as we had on breakfast but frankly it could have been more such is Paul’s enthusiasm for the local products he sells.

We loved our breakfast and the shopping. We were happily replete and, now, so is the freezer.

Ratings:

Food Quality: 10/10

Service: 7/10

Surroundings: 7/10

Value: 10/10