Last of the proper Black Country faggot makers?

When Nigel Brazier's family-run shop shut after 125 years he took the recipe for good old fashioned pork faggots with him.

Now the 64-year-old has found a buyer for The Cook Shop in Old Hill - and it will be nothing whatsoever to do with food.

Mr Brazier, who closed the Halesowen Road business and put it up for sale for £120,000 because he wanted to retire, is writing a book about his shop's history and pledges to include a recipe with every chapter, including for his faggots.

And these were good faggots too, Mr Brazier says. There were people queuing up for them on the final Saturday before his shop closed.

"I think we were the last of the cook shops selling faggots in the Black Country," he says.

To be absolutely clear, Mr Brazier is not suggesting his shop was the last in the Black Country to make faggots.

Plenty of butchers and others make them too. The Cook Shop, however, sold other groceries. People would get their soup and their sugar along with their meat.

Even so, he thinks the art of proper faggot making is dying out.

"You sometimes see chefs come up with new recipes and they're putting all sorts of things in them - garlic, half a dozen herbs, red wine.

"These recipes date back to the 1800s. Black Country housewives didn't have red wine to pour into their faggots. If they had it, they'd drink it.

"The faggot is a way of using other bits of pig you couldn't put anywhere else. You could use everything from a pig bar its squeal."

The recipes in his book have been written for decades. What the public will have to wait for is the story of The Cook Shop and the generations who got it through the First and Second World Wars.

Mr Brazier has been in the shop his whole life. He helped his mother Iris out when he was a boy, during the school holidays, and then took over in 1965.

It was started by his great grandmother, Eve Billingham, in 1889 using the front room of her home in Old Hill High Street. She sold the Black Country food she cooked herself.

The business was passed down to her daughter Mary and husband Joe Priest before it was given to Iris and Bill Brazier and finally to Nigel.

He will now enjoy retirement with wife Anne. Their four sons have all found careers of their own and live in Exeter, Sheffield, Lancaster and the Lake District.

So the recipes will have to be something people use at home instead of buying from The Cook Shop.

"When it comes to the recipes, 'simple' should be tattooed over the heart," says Mr Brazier.

"If you put anything other than simple ingredients in a faggot it might taste good but it ceases to be a Black Country faggot.

"It's the same when it comes to Black Country bread pudding."

Mystery surrounds the identity of the person buying The Cook Shop.

"It will be an entirely different business," says Mr Brazier, from Clent, near Stourbridge. "It's nothing to do with food. The buyer wants it kept under wraps."

And it could be another 12 months before the book is written and released so people can have a go at making the faggots for themselves.

There is what sounds like a challenge to other faggot makers to prove they can keep the proper Black Country faggots going.

"When we closed we served 300 to 400 people on the Saturday morning," Mr Brazier says.

"I don't think there's anyone else out there doing what we did.

"Black Country food is simple. That's its secret and that's its beauty.

"It's in the way the ingredients are all brought together.

"We closed a successful business.

"The reason we survived so long was we created a niche market for ourselves.

"No-one, or at least very few others, did it like we did.

"People wanted to come here."

Who makes the best Black Country faggots? Email newsdesk@expressandstar.co.uk, call 01902 319410 or leave your comments below.