We just don’t love bones like we used to. While I’m sure that every reader of this column has a freezer full of homemade stock, is well au fait with the lamb shank and never plumps for breast when there’s thigh on offer, the real joy of bones – “picking [them] up … and chewing the sweet juicy meat still clinging to them”, as Jennifer McLagan frankly puts it in her fabulous book on the subject, Cooking on the Bone – is a sadly rare treat these days. She reckons they “satisfy a deep primal urge to eat with our fingers”; I suspect that gnawing on bones is one of the few purely textural pleasures left to us in western cuisine.

Ribs are, of course, supreme proof of the attraction; given each serving is three-quarters bone, if we didn’t enjoy stripping off those sparse morsels of flesh, then they would have gone the way of other less meaty cuts – for who, apart from a few Fergus Henderson types, fancies chewing on a pig’s ear?

It’s not just about texture though: not only does meat cooked on the bone tend to be more flavourful, but, in marked contrast to much modern pork, that around the ribs is marbled with fat, which means it’s always succulent – even more so with spare ribs, the larger, meatier kind most familiar to us as the obligatory meat element of Mixed Starter number 2. For cooking at home, however, I prefer baby back ribs (also known as loin rack in this country: a shorter, curved cut from up near the backbone. Not only does a whole rack look more impressive but – and, at the risk of infuriating barbecue experts everywhere – I’m convinced they taste better.

We tend to think of ribs as a barbecue classic – but actually, as anyone who’s ever found themselves still desperately chewing on one long after even the wasps have given up on the party, this is a myth. Or, at least, something that’s been lost in transatlantic translation. Racks of ribs are a specialty of southern barbecue – food cooked long and slow in a pit – as opposed to British barbecue, which refers to food cooked very quickly over a hot grill. (To underline the difference, you’d be hard pushed to burn a sausage on the former.) You’re better off cooking your ribs, a cut of meat which, with its sinew and its fat, demands more than a token toasting, in the oven – something which suits the British summer down to the ground.
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