If you love cooking on the hoof, you’ll love The Talbot. Richard McComb enjoys some retro gastronomy in the Teme Valley.

Dressed in three-quarter length shorts and sandals, the landlady of The Talbot, in Knightwick, scoots over the stone floor smiling like the cat’s who’s got the cream.

“You’ve just missed all the action,” says Annie Clift, one of the self-styled Witches of Knightwick.

Her sister, Wiz, now lives in France but Annie’s 85-year-old mother, Mrs C (“That’s what everyone calls her. She won’t like it if you use her Christian name”), still runs the accounts office at this rural inn in the Teme Valley.

She also makes the game pies and strawberry jam for breakfast because Annie, an intuitive chef, can’t do them any better.

“It’s been all go in the kitchen. We’ve just butchered a fallow deer that came in this morning. It’s been hanging for three weeks,” says Annie.

I ask where the animal came from but, having spent a few hours in the company of Annie, I already know the answer. She just looks at me, smiles and gives a slight wink.

And that’s the magic of The Talbot: it’s a place where things just happen, and those things tend to be linked to the pleasures of food. People turn up at the back door with rabbits; farmers fly-tip unwanted quinces in the yard.

When I first spoke to Annie on the phone, she described her cooking as a bit “off the wall.”

Meaning what? I inquired.

“Road kill,” she said.

Having visited The Talbot, I’m still not sure if she was joking.

For the first time in my life, I try the pleasures of pressed spleen of pig. The organ is rolled in sage leaves, baked in chicken stock and cut into slices.

The spleen is surprisingly creamy, a bit livery, and comes with home pickled beetroot (just about everything is “home” something or other). The dish is followed by a huntsman’s duo of tender muntjac deer and superlative pigeon.

My only regret is that I don’t have space for the rabbit pot au feu or the lamb with throat breads.

I do, however, console myself with a pudding of treacle hollygog, based on a mid 19th century recipe from Oxford University. It contains short crust pastry rolled with golden syrup, baked in milk, and is served with custard. Billy Bunter would pull a cartwheel.

The pub has rooms and breakfast the following morning includes kidneys, black pudding and a sausage made from wild boar and Gloucester Old Spot pig. In 12 hours, I consume a boat crew’s combined monthly intake of protein.

Standing outside the 14th century pub, looking towards the River Teme, Annie praises the pub’s location.

“There’s a butcher’s just over the bridge. There’s a baker’s behind me. The only thing I haven’t got is a candlestick maker,” says Annie. Don’t feel too sorry for her though. There’s a micro-brewery attached to the back of the pub, the Teme Valley Brewery.

The Talbot, which has its own garden to supply the kitchen, is at the heart of a real food community.

A monthly farmers’ market, one of the oldest in the country, is held at the pub and inside the pub all tastes are catered for. In the bar, a customer is knocking back his fifth bottle of Champagne in two days while regulars nurse pint pots in the tap room. It is Annie’s food, and the beer, of course, which brings people together.