After much experimentation and determination, Daphne Clarke and her daughter Sarah Long are now producing fantastic gluten-free pastry which means her husband Mayhew and Sarah – who both need to avoid gluten – can safely enjoy a mouth-watering range of pies for the first time in their lives.

While the pastry recipe remains a closely guarded secret, others can share in this culinary breakthrough thanks to the family’s food outlet business.

Clarke’s Quality Meats Limited of Hevingham – just south of Aylsham - is rapidly becoming recognised as the place to buy good local food. TV chef Chris Coubrough visited recently as a judge for the Local Food Heroes event. As a result Clarke’s has earned the Best Local Food Producer 2008 Award.

The family’s interest in meat production began with Mayhew who has been a livestock buyer ever since he left school. Then, in 1982 at just 18, son Andrew became the youngest person ever to obtain the Royal Society of Health meat inspection certificate and, as Daphne explains, this is when the butchery business began.

“Andrew started making excellent sausages and butchering meat for us and for friends and soon he was taking over my kitchen. A forequarter of beef on the kitchen table was the last straw! So we converted an outbuilding into a cutting and processing room. He taught us how to butcher meat and the shop developed from there.”

Today the shop sells a full range of locally sourced fresh meats as well as the more recent bakery products and ready meals. The extensive range includes quiches, Scotch eggs, pork pies, Cornish pasties, sausage rolls, beef & Guinness pies, moussaka, lasagne, cottage pies, curries and fagots.

Daughter Sarah has been instrumental in developing the bakery side:

“Everything is home-made and we do not use artificial flavourings,” says Sarah. “We have developed our own recipes for our products. My mother and I have a feel for what is right. We welcome new ideas from customers too and even make Boerworst (a specialist South African sausage) for a customer in London!”

In addition to retail customers, Clarke’s has also developed a wholesale business supplying restaurants and pubs in Norwich and surrounding villages.

Outgoings for the food business are considerably reduced through associate membership of Anglia Farmers and Mayhew says they source every possible item through the group including telecommunications, healthcare insurance, heating oil and diesel for delivery vehicles.

While still very much involved in the family business, son Andrew Clarke is managing director of Felthorpe abattoir H G Blake where Mayhew is still the livestock buyer. Added to which, Sarah’s son Alex, 19, works at Blake’s too as a fully trained boner.

In addition to his work at H G Blake, Andrew and his wife Hayley have a prize winning herd of Simmental cattle and 200 breeding ewes. They are also members of Anglia Farmers.

“We intend to produce all our own beef and lamb for the shop,” says Andrew. “We source all our livestock needs through Anglia Farmers – feed, medication, equipment, machinery and electricity. Added to which, H G Blake are members too so wherever I turn we are calling on Anglia Farmers to buy what we need to run our businesses.”

In fact, everything within the Clarke family is interlinked and as Daphne says: “We all work together to produce top quality food!”

Clarke’s Quality Meats is located in Low Lane just to the west of the A140 at Hevingham and is open Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays from 7am to 4pm and Wednesdays and Saturdays from 7am to 1pm.