Feeding & Nutrition

The butcher had one left, a pale knuckle of pork with the skin still on, and he knocked a quid off because it was closing time, so I took it home not quite sure what I'd do with it, and the cat, Biscuit, spent the walk through the door sniffing the bag like it contained the meaning of life, which for her it rather did.

I'd boiled bones before, for the dog, but never a hock, and never for a cat, who up to that point had treated my cooking as a faintly insulting sideshow to her pouches. This time she would not leave the kitchen. She sat on the counter, which she knows is forbidden, and watched the pot like a sentry who'd been given the one post that mattered.

It simmered for hours. The house filled with that pork-and-ginger smell you get at a proper Sunday lunch, and by evening I lifted the meat off, shredded the little that was worth having, and tipped the rest, bone and all, back in to keep going, because wasting a bone that had given up this much flavour felt close to a sin.

Biscuit got a spoon of the soft meat over her evening food. She ate it, looked up, and for the first time in her life asked, out loud, for more, with a noise I can only describe as a demand, a short insistent chirrup that meant I know what you're hiding.

The stock was the real prize. I strained it into jars, let it set in the fridge into a pale wobble of jelly, and spooned a little onto her meals through the week. She stopped picking at the kibble and started meeting me at the bowl, which is a thing cats decide to do on their own terms, never yours, and the fact that she'd decided it for a jar of pork jelly felt like a small personal victory.

A word of warning I wish someone had given me. Ham hock is salty, and a cat's kidneys do not want your salt, so I rinsed the meat, skipped any seasoning in the pot, and used the stock diluted, a spoon through the food, not a flood. The jelly is mostly gelatin, which is gentle, but the salt is the trap, and a cat is a small animal with a small margin for error.

My gran would have called this frugal, not fancy. Boil the bone, feed the cat, waste nothing. She kept a stock pot going constantly and thought pouches were a racket, and standing at my stove with a cat winding round my ankles I understood her better than I ever did at twelve, when frugality looked like a thing old people did to annoy you.

The dog got the last of the meat, the bits too tough for a cat, chopped fine, and he approved, though he approves of most things that fall from a height or smell of pig. The cat, meanwhile, had staked a claim on the fridge shelf where the jars lived, and would sit there of an evening as if to audit the supply, a furry little quartermaster with no real authority but plenty of attitude.

Did it do her any good. Her coat looked brighter, her water intake seemed steady, and she gained a little weight she needed after a thin summer. I'm not saying it cured anything. I'm saying a week of real food, made slowly, agreed with her, and the proof was in the way she waited by the bowl instead of wandering off mid-meal the way she used to when the pouch was just fuel.

The jars became a sort of calendar. One for Monday, one for Thursday, one for the weekend, and I found myself planning the cat's week around a fridge shelf, which is either the height of devotion or a sign I'd lost the plot, and Biscuit, uninterested in my introspection, simply tapped the glass when she wanted the next one opened.

I won't boil a hock every week. It's a Sunday kind of job, a cold-weather job, the sort of thing you do when you've got the oven on anyway and an hour to spare. But it's in the rotation now, a cheap cut turned into something the cat treats as an event, and that's a small win worth repeating, even if the butcher now saves me the ugly bit on purpose.

The butcher now sets the knuckle aside for me without asking, which is either neighbourly or a sign I've become the person he tells stories about, and I've stopped minding, because a quid off and a cat who meets her bowl with intent is a trade I'll take every cold week of the year, jar after jar, until the weather turns and the bones go back to the dog.