The Talbot, Knightwick, Worcestershire (01886 821 235). Meal for two: £30-£80

Inside a whitewashed pub, at the bottom of a hill close to where Worcestershire meets Herefordshire, is a crumbling piece of English heritage. The fact that it’s crumbling is not a cause for concern. It’s meant to crumble. It’s a hand-raised, hot water-pastry pork and game pie and it’s built to crack and splinter like this. The shell, heavy with animal fats and the colour of an old oak table, breaks away to give access to the compacted meats, punchy with white pepper and mace, and an amber jelly which is long-cooking’s own reward.

In our bid to prove our deep sophistication, the British middle classes tend to venerate the charcuterie traditions of Spain, Italy and France. We big up their determination to use everything of the pig but the oink. Sometimes we overlook the brilliance of our own traditions, perhaps because they are so much harder to find, and so much easier to lose. At the end of our meal, I ask Annie Clift, who has run the Talbot this last quarter of a century, whether this marvellous pie has won any competitions. No, she says: “And you’d better enjoy it while you can. My mother makes them, won’t allow anybody else to do it, and she turns 90 soon so time’s running out.”

You have been warned. No worries, though – the Talbot has many other selling points and will carry on knocking out the good stuff, even once Mrs Clift has hung up the wooden dolly she uses for raising her magnificent pies. Let’s be clear, though: the Talbot is not one of your glistening modern gastropubs, licked with seven very similar shades of beige all with different names, like “wheaten stubble” and “oatcake bake”. It does not have banquettes and stylish art. It has a website that looks like it was put together with a John Bull printing set, and functional mixed decor that I’m sure its regulars adore. The fireplace is for fires. It is a working community pub, with signs on the doors up to the bedrooms telling fishermen to take their dirty boots off when they’ve finished a day on the River Teme across the way (but which hasn’t always stayed there; in 2007 it flooded the bar).

The Talbot works all the angles. Its car park hosts a regular farmers’ market. They run residential courses in cooking game, both furred and feathered, and special events such as a 70s retro disco night including a bistro menu of grilled grapefruit, prawn cocktail, coq au vin and Black Forest gateau (natch). There’s a bar menu and a “luncheon” menu and a “Farmer’s Ordinary Menu” at £14 for three courses for people coming in off the fields. It does what it needs to do.

What defines it is obstinacy. They make nearly everything they sell, including all breads, black pudding, pies and preserves. There is a market garden out back and an embarrassment of hillsides nearby if they decide to try the foraging lark. They even have the Teme Valley Brewery, making beers with names like “This”, “That” and “Wotever Next?” All of this could be exhausting in a “you don’t have to be mad to work here but it helps...” sort of way, but it isn’t. It’s just what they do, with a pronounced absence of ponce, verging on the ramshackle.

You would, I think, have to be a hard-hearted, self-regarding, tiresome, po-faced schmuck not to like it. Not because it’s a gastronomic palace. It really isn’t. The food is great, in a solid, trustworthy sort of way that speaks of a kitchen with an instinct to feed and the skill set to do it. You would have to like it because, in an age when gastropubs across the land are mostly fuelled by the dull beep of the Brake Bros truck reversing up to the back door, it’s bloody lovely to find a place that cooks everything from scratch because they can’t see the point of doing otherwise.

The menu is long. Being a pub, a lot of things come with chips and salad, or salad and chips. You can have them in any order you like, really. Those chips are sizeable, without being lazy chunky ones, and properly fried; the salads are almost as well dressed as I am. A pea and rocket soup, finished with a spiral of cream, is a deep, nourishing thing that makes you feel you’re being thoroughly good to yourself without being puritanical. A slab of their pork, orange and cognac pâté is all earth and depth, and comes with their own lightly misshapen oatcakes. On the side is a zingy pot of chutney, which is mostly lightly pickled runner beans; in another week with another glut from out back I suspect it would be something else. Where their kitchen garden is concerned, I imagine you get what you’re given.

Other than that pork and game pie, we have the lamb shoulder, cooked long and slow, until it can be pulled apart into sticky pieces. The accompanying minted quinoa looks almost self-consciously modish, but it does the job. Out of curiosity we also order the main course from the farmer’s ordinary, at £10. It is a heaving plate of curried chicken on the bone, full of hefty roasted spices and decidedly unsweetened. The pot of dhal on the side is about as good a version as I’ve had anywhere: savoury without being a thump of salt.

And then, for pudding, we share a treacle hollygog, which, they say, is an Oxford University recipe from 1850. This is no great act of historical recovery; they were just down a pudding one evening and Annie’s sister found it in a very old cookbook many years ago. It’s been on the menu ever since: a roll of shortcrust pastry, drenched with golden syrup then baked in milk until it forms a caramel, and served in a Lake Windermere of custard. We share it between two, but could have done so between five. It’s a killer dessert and perhaps literally so if you did it too often, the crumbling sweetened pastry mixing with toffee mixing with the impeccable custard.

At the top I’ve given a price range, because it’s not the sort of place where you come for three courses every time. You come for a slab of pork and game pie (if you have any sense) and maybe a hollygog to finish (if you’re feeling ambitious). You come for a sandwich the thickness of a Sidney Sheldon novel. Mostly you come for the embrace of a place that gives a damn.

Jay’s news bites

■ The Tolcarne Inn at Newlyn is another pub where they make everything from scratch, though here the major influence is the waters just over the sea wall. Ben Tunnicliffe makes terrines from ray and potatoes to be served with piccalilli, grills whole plaice, and roasts fillets of hake with saffron, and serves it with asparagus and crab risotto (tolcarneinn.co.uk).

■ Are you both greedy and ridiculously competitive? Of course you are. Get Smorgasboard, a new game for people overly interested in their lunch. Players adopt the identity of a chef – Monsieur Fromage, Senor Gamba – and move around the board solving culinary anagrams and spotting missing ingredients. More info at smorgasboard.ie.

■ More evidence of the emerging food scene in England’s northwest: Mark Birchall, until recently executive chef at Simon Rogan’s L’Enclume, (and alumnus of Northcote Manor) is launching a restaurant with rooms at Moor Hall in Aughton, West Lancashire. It’s due to open next year (moor-hall.co.uk).