We wait, not entirely patiently, for the jambon and the saucissons, and it’s worth it. The saucissons are dense and peppery and rich and moreish. The first of them has the soft bite of dark meat; by the end of the twelve, when they’ve dried out longer, they’re deliciously leathery. And then, later, when the pigs are so long gone that the enclosure at the Mas de Maury is overgrown again with brambles and nettles, there is the ham. Our very own air-dried, acorn-fed, free-range ham, over 8kg of finished weight – about €500 worth of meat.
Think of the best ham you’ve ever had, and double it.
Wafery thin slices of dark, dry, salty-sweet meat cut from the pleasing rise of the leg, textured, marbled, unctuous. All those hours up and down the slope in the woods at La Graudie; all those mornings spent running after pears and chestnuts, building up dense, tasty muscles – well done, Little Pig.
The charcuterie is a delight that makes meal-planning easy and recalls hot sunny days hosing down the pigs in rainbows of spray. But it isn’t just a case of sitting back, waiting and reminiscing. When Christmas has passed and the visitors have gone home, there is work to be done, too. We have another head, a second head, and this time we have no intention of dumping it in the communal bins. There are chunks of fatty meat, a cluster of trotters, some large joints from the shoulder – plenty of pork still to be processed and stored. We simmer the head in a stockpot; we boil the trotters; we make a wet cure of salty water and dunk slabs of pork in it, submerging them for days. We roast the kidneys and the heart. We render down strips of thick fat into fluffy, pure white lard; we fry skin into crackling; we stew bones for stock. The house is full of the warm, rich smell of pig.
Having accomplished the salting and freezing, we turn our attention to canning, the traditional staple of French preserving. We’ve seen it done by our neighbours: Solange has an old barn lined with shelves of jars packed with beans and peas, potatoes and carrots, rapountchou, walnuts, stews and casseroles, meat of several kinds. The local supermarkets and garden centres put on magnificent displays of Kilner and preserving jars, different shapes and sizes, different seals and lids, regimented and shiny. Several of the hardware shops in town allow you to take along huge quantities of pâtés or terrines and the like so that they can stuff it into tins for you; you come away with trolleys full of plain, orangey-bronze tins, completely sealed. Although most people have freezers, many still prefer to keep food in this way; we’ve often been invited for an impromptu meal with friends and eaten heartily from a selection of home-preserved meat and vegetables and fruit tipped out, there and then, from jars and tins.
From the complicated range of equipment on display we choose a canning machine, a large plain metal pan that looks just like a big saucepan except for the small round pressure dial on the lid. This will allow us to raise the temperature of the meat high enough to kill off any bacteria so that it’s effectively sterilized, then to seal the jars with rubber seals. In this way, the food should last for years, if we want it to. It’s a simple but effective process, but more labour intensive than just bagging up joints for the freezer, and so we begin chopping meat and liver with herbs and spices and experimenting with recipes; we fumble the slippery seals, juggle jars to stack them in the pan, fret over the moment when the steaming whistle stops and the pressure takes hold. It feels like a strange cross between country cooking and a chemistry experiment. But at the end of it we have four or five kinds of pâté, terrines and galantines, some casseroles and ragus, and a supply of lovely soft, gelatinous brawn all neatly packed into jars, safely kept.
We’re proud of ourselves: we’ve made tricky, country-style conserves in the tradition of proper French farmhouses. Some of the products have the hallmarks of the beginner – one or two of the pâtés would have benefited from more fat in the mix – but everything is edible, and most things are delicious. Delighted with my new savoir faire, I take a small jar of terrine to Solange the next time I call by. She’s sitting at the wooden table in her all-purpose front room, the séjour that acts as kitchen and living room and dining room. She takes the jar politely, without enthusiasm, holds it to the light, turns it, and places it back on the table. I presume she will never eat it. But on my following visit, she admits to having tried some. It was, she says, pas mauvais. Not bad. I take that, with pleasure, for the high praise it is.
Finally, there’s the pork pie. A fitting finale. A happy ending.
For a start it’s huge. This is not a little snack pie, or a pie you can slip into your pocket, or even a pie you can fit on a dinner plate. This is a statement of a pie, gluttonous, extravagant, ceremonious. It takes two days to make.
We make it as a challenge, to see whether we can. On the first day, Ed simmers two trotters and a few raggy bones to make a stock, and then simmers the stock to make a thicker, gelatinous goo – the pork-pie jelly. It cooks for hours in a steam of stomach-rumbling meaty smells and in the meantime we chop the pork we’ve set aside. This is mostly shoulder, dark and fatty, but there are strips of belly, too – the meat mustn’t be too lean or the pie will be dry and gritty; you can’t have an eye on the calorie counter. The filling needs to be rich and soft and plump. There’s sage and thyme and savory in the mix, cut from the garden, some grated mace, a little white pepper and a lot of black. We knead it together by hand.
We also take the final wedges of dense back-fat from Big Pig’s fine shapely back and render them down in a frying pan, slowly, slowly, pouring off the liquid fat as it melts until we have a bowl of shiny, downy lard.
That’s it, then. Ready.
The next day we put the thing together. I soften the lard with hot water, boil it briefly and then mix it with flour to make the pie pastry. It’s the first time I’ve tried working with hot-water pastry and I’m taken aback by its slithery trickiness. Warm and slightly animal, it slides through my fingers as I attempt to mould it. It tears and slumps. I’ve got a cake tin as a kind of pork-pie mould, but the pastry simply sags off the sides into a heap. I give up on the tin.
By now the pastry is cooling. I can’t afford to let it get cold or it will become brittle and unworkable, but this not-quite-cool dough is perfect. For a few minutes it becomes supple and pliable; I find I can mould it like clay with my fingers, stroking it with my thumb so that it stretches and shapes. I settle on using it in a single piece, wrapping the meat in a parcel as though wrapping it in cloth. I ease out a base and we place the meat on it in a mound; I work the pastry up the sides with both hands and pinch it closed at the top. I leave a little gap, enough to let out the steam. It’s hefty; there’s too much pastry frilling where I’ve drawn it together. But it looks as though it might hold up, which is all we can hope for. We bake it.
When we take it out of the oven, it’s golden and crunchy and, better still, there’s been no collapse or seepage or cracking. An intact pie. Ed warms the jelly stock and pours it carefully into a fat syringe so that we can squirt it into the hole at the top of the pastry. When the pie seems full we wait for it to ooze down into all the gaps and then squirt again. Drip, drip; every last drop into every last nook.
The pie cools. Handsome and homely.
I don’t really like pork pie. I particularly don’t like the slippery, rubbery jelly stuff that clings to the pastry; I’m not keen on the chewy meat. But this is not that kind of pork pie.
Everything about this pie is delicious, addictively pleasing: the crisp pastry, the tender, yielding meat and the amazing melt-in-the-mouth, utterly-pork jelly. It’s a pie to savour and remember. We tuck in, revelling. We thank the pigs for allowing us this pleasure. On a bright, January day we take our pie into the sunshine on the top of the steps by the front door, and we let it ooze and crumble on to our plates. Somewhere at a distance a buzzard mewls; a robin flicks and fusses around the bowl of chicken food by the woodshed. The day is calm and very quiet.
It’s almost exactly a year since we were preparing for the arrival of the weaners. At that point, I had very little idea about what to expect –
it was just a couple of piglets, wasn’t it, that we would pen into a field? But now I know. I know about Big Pig and Little Pig from snout to tail, from hairy black hide to glistening innards; I know about the effort and the commitment, the expense, the anxiety, the love. And was it worth all of this? Was it really worth raising pigs ourselves?
When I’m asked these questions I think of the pork pie. The stock, the lard, the meat – all ours, all from our own hearty black pigs. There’s something special about this; it’s an achievement I’m proud of. It feels an important thing to have done and I would not hesitate to do it again. The store of dark, firm, rich meat that we feast on for months is fantastic, a magnificent stash that makes every pork meal a treat. Each forkful of fine roast or ham or pâté answers the question unequivocally: yes, this was worth raising pigs for.
But Big Pig and Little Pig, my two life-affirming pigs – would I prefer the meat on the plate, the fat, juicy pork pie, or would I rather have them careering towards me up the slope in the woods?
Now that’s a different question altogether.
Notes
1
1. pp. 12–13 ‘There is no savings bank … without seeming to have cost anything’: Samuel Sidney, quoted in William Youatt, The Pig (London: Routledge, Warne and Routledge, 1860).
2. p. 15 I read about an experiment carried out at Cambridge University: Broom, D. M., Sena, H. and Moynihan, K. L. 2009. ‘Pigs learn what a mirror image represents and use it to obtain information’. Animal Behaviour, 78 (5), 1037–41.
3. p. 19 ‘To kill a hog nicely … tear the carcass about’: William Cobbett, quoted in Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig (London: Hambledon, 2001), p. 95. This book offers a wealth of first-hand historical accounts of raising a cottage pig, the slaughter and butchering.
4. p. 27 ‘I have observed great sagacity’: Erasmus Darwin, quoted in The English Pig, p. 14.
5. p. 29 In the fifteenth century: the story of the Abbot of Baigne is quoted in Bentley, Jr., G. E. 1982. ‘The Freaks of Learning’. Colby Quarterly, 18 (2), 90.
6. p. 29 ‘squalling […] in different keys or notes’: quoted in Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 21.
7. p. 31 ‘but that, if he did not perform his lessons well’: Robert Southey, Letters from England, 3rd edition, 3 volumes (London: Longmans, 1813), vol. iii, p. 19.
8. p. 31 ‘the most tractable … good natured as a spaniel’: Curiosities of Biography; Or, Memoirs of Remarkable Men (Glasgow: Griffin, 1845), p. 190.
9. pp. 32–3 ‘Each pig you come across … pine for sympathy and company’: Robert Morrison, quoted in The English Pig, p. 20.
2
1. p. 54 ‘Don’t fall on your food like a pig’: Desiderius Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerilium, a handbook containing instructions for the moral and practical education of children, first published in Latin in 1530 and subsequently translated into many languages.
2. p. 58 ‘keeping the left arm round the body’: George Borrow’s account of pigs at Llangollen Fair is included in Wild Wales (first published in 1862), quoted in Edward Thomas, George Borrow: The Man and His Books (New York: Button, 1912), p. 278.
3. p. 58 A pig in boots: for an account of droving routes and traditions, including the wearing of boots, see Shirley Toulson, The Drovers (Buckinghamshire: Shire, 2005).
4. p. 59 ‘unwearied patience’: from ‘Bisset, the Animal Teacher’ in The People’s Magazine (Saturday, 1 June 1833).
5. p. 66 ‘neat garden cabinet for growing bacon … contents of the carpet sweeper’: from a collection of cartoons in Heath Robinson and Cecil Hunt, How to Make the Best of Things (London: Hutchinson, 1940).
6. pp. 67–8 ‘I told you we were having a piggy salted … did not get hold of our piggy’: Luc François, ‘A Village and a World at War: Sister Joachim (1867–1956) and World War I in Ooigem’, West Sussex Record Office, Chichester, Ad. Mus. 14478.
7. p. 75 ‘Poor injured Bisset’: ‘S. Bisset, A Singular Character’ in The Sporting Magazine, volume 27 (London: Rogerson & Tuxford, 1806), p. 240. This article recalls the stories of a number of eccentric sportsmen and hunters, some years after Bisset’s unhappy experiences in Dublin.
8. p. 76 ‘in the practice of good manners’: from ‘Some Account of S. Bisset’ in Anthologia Hibernica (January 1793).
9. p. 83 ‘During the Spring and Summer Months’: William Marshall, The Rural Economy of the Southern Counties, 2 volumes (London: Nicol, Robinson and Debrett, 1798), vol. ii, p. 206.
10. p. 83 ‘all the small potatoes … and mash it’: quoted in Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig (London: Hambledon, 2001), p. 50.
11. p. 83 ‘an important member of the family … scratching piggy’s back’: see family pigs in Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), p. 22.
12. p. 83 Similarly, the French belle époque: for pigs and the belle-époque postcard, see Michael D. Garval. 2015. ‘Visions of Pork Production, Past and Future, on French Belle Epoque Pig Postcards’. Nineteenth Century Art Worldwide, 14 (1), complete article and figs. 1–36.
13. p. 84 ‘To have a sty in the garden’: Walter Rose, quoted in The English Pig, p. 47.
14. p. 88 I’m struck again by the brutality and trauma of the slaughter: the accounts of pig slaughter in this paragraph are taken from The English Pig, pp. 94–101.
3
1. pp. 91–2 One of those who see the show, for example, is Anna Seward: her impressions of the Sapient Pig, and Dr Johnson’s response, are quoted in Bentley, Jr., G. E. 1982. ‘The Freaks of Learning’. Colby Quarterly, 18 (2), 91.
2. p. 93 ‘for the Pig to be burnt’: for a discussion of pigs and the black arts, see ‘The Freaks of Learning’, 91–2.
3. p. 93 ‘The Big Black Pig … people who played cards’: Donald Mackenzie, Scottish Folk-Lore and Folk Life: Studies in Race, Culture and Tradition (Edinburgh: Blackie, 1935), p. 51.
4. p. 93 ‘lovers of the monstrous’: from an untitled 1846 article about the Roxburghe Ballads, attributed to John Winter Jones, principal librarian at the British Library from 1866 to 1873, quoted in Patricia Fumerton and Anita Guerrini (eds), Ballads and Broadsides in Britain 1500–1800 (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2010), p. 106.
5. p. 95 ‘My brothers and I had to collect acorns’: quoted in Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig (London: Hambledon, 2001), p. 46.
6. pp. 99–100 ‘no two pigs are the same … in this county as elsewhere’: John Boys and John Farey discussing pig breeds, quoted in Julian Wiseman, The Pig: A British History, 2nd edition (London: Duckworth, 2000), p. 29.
7. p. 100 ‘it is painful to see … in a fit state for breeding’: the Derby show of 1881, reported in The Pig: A British History, p. 63.
8. pp. 100–101 ‘Lean bacon is the most wasteful thing … not well fatted’: William Cobbett, Cottage Economy (London: Clement, 1821), pp. 148–9.
9. p. 102 For pigs raised in intensive conditions: for antibiotics used to treat animals and humans, see ‘Cutting Antibiotics: Denmark Leads the Way in Healthier Pig Farming’ in Der Spiegel (International Edition, 13 November 2013); figures from Thomas P. Van Boeckel et al. 2015. ‘Global Trends in Antimicrobial Use in Food Animals’. PNAS, 112 (18), 5649–54.
10. p. 106 ‘what with the weather, and the concourse of visitors’: an unnamed newspaper report quoted in Jan Bondeson, The Feejee Mermaid and Other Essays in Natural and Unnatural History (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1999), pp. 23–4.
11. p. 107 ‘great torture must have been employed’: Henry White, a clergyman, reported in James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 volumes (London: J. Davis, n.d.), vol. ii, p. 911.
12. p. 107 ‘a plenitude in the belly’: London Unmask’d or The New Town Spy (1785), quoted in Hannah Velten, Beastly London: A History of Animals in the City (London: Reaktion Books, 2
013), p. 127.
13. p. 107 ‘You are not to beat him … appear to read your thoughts’: American conjurer William Pinchbeck in The Expositor or Many Mysteries Unravelled (Boston: printed for the author, 1805), p. 23.
14. p. 107 ‘The creature was shewn’: Sarah Trimmer, Fabulous Histories Designed for the Instruction of Children, Respecting Their Treatment of Animals, 5th edition (London: Longmans, 1793), p. 71.
15. p. 108 ‘some pigs have evinced … to converse with men?’: A Present for a Little Boy, first published 1798 (London: Darton & Harvey, 1800), unpaginated.
16. p. 121 ‘the proprietor is rapidly amassing a fortune’: London Unmask’d; or The New Town Spy (1786), quoted in Paul Keen, Literature, Commerce and the Spectacle of Modernity, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 173.
17. p. 125 ‘When the appointed day came round … a few pork cuttings’: Edwin Grey, Cottage Life in a Hertfordshire Village: How the Agricultural Labourers Lived and Worked in the 1860s and ’70s (Harpenden and District Local History Society, 1935), p. 116.
4
1. p. 130 ‘while someone held the poleaxe on the pig’s forehead’: Beamish Museum Archives, quoted in Robert Malcolmson and Stephanos Mastoris, The English Pig (London: Hambledon, 2001), p. 98. The book has an extensive chapter on pig-killing, with some intriguing first-hand accounts.
2. p. 130 ‘upended, had their throats slit’: Ralph Whitlock, A Family and a Village (London: John Baker, 1970), p. 96.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 26
