My visit to the Weekend Tourism exhibition in Ruse did not suggest that I would come across such a find. At one of the stands in front of the Profitable Building, I stopped to try some sausages. I was immediately impressed by the taste of the dried pork leg, as well as the advertising brochure with a smiling butcher. We chatted with the people at the stand and that is how I met Vihren Dimitrov. He is the executive director of Golyamo Vranovo Pig Complex. He told me briefly about the history of the company - established in 1973 and privatized in 1998. While I was talking to Vihren about the meat, he called Terry. This is the technologist of their new product line, the smiling gentleman from the advertising brochure. Terry and I agreed to meet in a few days in the Pavlikeni area. He lives in the village of Duskot, near the city. My excitement is rising as I await our meeting.
Sunday afternoon in the center of Pavlikeni. I have a meeting with an elderly English butcher. I am greeted by a smiling young man of 66 years old. I have not seen so much energy in the eyes of a pensioner living in a Bulgarian village for a long time. We start talking about our country. Terry is delighted with the people, the nature, the food. He first came to our country on vacation in 2005. He finally moved here with his wife two years ago. She is Dutch and surprisingly for me a vegetarian. He is present during our conversation, when we start talking about meat she loses interest.
Terry Gilligan has been a butcher for twelve years, more than half a century. Born and raised in the Manchester area. I ask him why he decided to continue doing this after coming to Bulgaria. He tells me that the conditions here are different and that our dried and smoked meats are better because of the climate. He wanted to make sausages, but he didn't know where to buy the meat. He discovered the pig farm in Golyamo Vranovo and that's how he met Vihren. So from word to word they felt on the same wavelength and shared their pains. It turned out that they had common ground and decided to try.
Vihren's idea was to offer typical English sausages to tourists on the Black Sea coast. Terry was an ideal option for such an experiment. First, the butchers in the factory had to be trained to cut up the animals according to the English tradition. This implies using all of the raw material, which is used to prepare some typical sausages such as black pudding. However, Terry also thought about the traditional taste of the English living in Bulgaria, who obviously feel the lack of English sausages in Bulgarian stores. According to him, these are several tens of thousands of potential customers, mostly pensioners, with high incomes for our standards. Gradually, the partnership between the two developed and at the end of 2016, Vihren's company launched its new English series of products on the market - sausages, bacon, steaks with bone and skin, bacon rolls with skin. They also make a raw dried pork leg called "Gammon". Thus, a boutique production was formed in a large meat processing plant, through external experience and foreign tradition in meat processing, but with Bulgarian raw materials. Vihren is thinking big and is already aiming for the English market, but the first test will be how the products will be received in the summer by tourists at the seaside. Meanwhile, Terry is experimenting with new types of sausages and is already preparing a Bulgarian team to participate in the world championship in animal cutting, which will be the debut for our country.
I ask Terry about the attitude of the English towards local food. He tells me how, as a young butcher, he was trained for five years to work properly with meat – slicing, hygiene, attitude towards customers. In those distant times, half a century ago, there were no large supermarkets, frozen foods and semi-finished products. Housewives prepared homemade food three times every Sunday, and fresh meat was part of the traditional diet. Whatever was not sold as fresh meat was put into sausages, butcher shops were small, and butchers were numerous. Now this profession has almost disappeared from English cities and very few young people would like to develop in this direction. We are following the same path here, but there are still classic butchers who cut up whole animals freshly chilled, as it were, in the halls in Gorna Oryahovitsa, where Terry registered his company Master Butchers Bulgaria. At the beginning of his stay in Bulgaria, he created a Facebook page called Terry the meat, but now he has a lot of work and doesn't have time to maintain it. The interest of the English in our country in his sausage series is growing and the orders are increasing.
At the end of our conversation, we also talk about the meaning of preserving local traditions. He is impressed by the activities of the Localfood.bg foundation and encourages me to continue doing my work in support of small producers of traditional foods. A few days after our conversation, I buy some of the things that Terry and I talked about from the company store of the Golyamo Vranovo Meat Plant. The things that are written in the advertising brochure correspond to reality, the meat is really fresh and is consumed with pleasure. The English tradition has its own dimensions, regardless of the Bulgarian raw materials.
Terrence Gilligan (technologist-butcher) village of Duskot, Pavlikeni municipality e-mail: terrythemeat@hotmail.com tel: 0899 93 20 44 www.goliamo-vranovo.com