Shopper talk

Geraldine Durrant, from West Sussex, attributes her confidence in cooking meat and poultry to a former independent travelling butcher. Today, Geraldine, 56, visits her local butcher AS Fry Family Butchers in Lingfield Road, East Grinstead when buying meat for special family occasions.

"We tend to buy meat at the supermarket simply because there are only two of us at home now, and it is convenient, but we always go to Fry's if we are buying 'serious' meat - large joints or orders for special occasions, holidays and celebrations.

Their produce is uniformly excellent, they give advice as well as sell, and you can order a particular size and cut of joint, rather than simply hoping the supermarket will have something suitable in stock. I find that if you are in the supermarket after 10am on a Saturday morning, for example, you have very slim pickings.

To be honest price doesn't really come in to it and I would rather pay a bit over the odds for a product which I can depend on. As far as ordering various cuts of meat is concerned I suppose I am confident in knowing what I want. But I think if you are not sure then an independent butcher is the best place to go. I certainly owe all I know about meat to the travelling independent butcher who used to come to our first country home when I was a new wife. He would ask me what I planned to cook, I'd show him the recipe books, and he'd tell me what cut of meat I needed and so on - he was an absolute life saver."

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