Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer (30 page)

Chris paused every now and then to hit his knife with a sharpening steel. I had the sensation of watching a dance performance. A light shone on him as he performed, a white-haired meat maestro, dancing around my fallen pig.

He picked up a section of the loin chops. “This,” he said, “is the most expensive piece of meat.” He ran his blade along a squishy pink part of the meat above the loin. Chris sliced his boning knife in and extracted the tenderloin, a three-foot-long tube-shaped piece of meat. “It’s tender because it isn’t used much. But it’s overrated,” he said.

On that note, I told him that Sheila hadn’t saved most of the offal. There would be no weird lung terrines, no boudin noir.

Chris seemed almost as devastated as I had been. He grasped the butcher table, as if to steady himself.

“It does look like there was a little trauma here,” Chris said, and pointed a knife blade at a reddish spot on the muscle part of the shoulder.

“Oh god,” I said, and told him about what had happened—how I had missed the actual death of the pigs.

He just shook his head in sympathy. Then, as if to make up for it, he put the pig’s back leg on the table, trimmed off a bit of skin, and told me to rub it with salt. We would turn this into prosciutto.

“Is this big enough?” I asked. I remembered Chris’s saying the Parma pigs in Italy grew to be seven hundred pounds.

“It could be a little bit bigger, but it will do,” he said.

Samin laughed when she came in and Chris told her that I had a complex about the size of my pigs. One of the prep cooks poked his head in and, when he saw my pig leg, said, “That’s huge!” I beamed.

“What do Italians do when they’re doing this?” I asked Chris as I sprinkled salt onto the leg.

“They talk about women,” he said dryly.

I cackled. I could see why. I was essentially massaging the pig’s butt. I ran my hands down the skin, pressing, pressing. I finessed the salt into crevices and folds in the skin. The salt rubbed against my skin like sand. After a few minutes of rubbing, the salt drew out water, and my hands were wet. This, Chris told me, was how you knew you were done. I did the same with the other leg.

Then we pressed the pig’s legs into a large plastic box filled with salt and weighted them down with a chunk of wood.

It was the same recipe that Cato the Elder recommended in his treatise on Roman farming,
De re rustica:

Take a half peck of ground Roman salt for each ham. Cover the bottom of the jar or tub with salt and put in a ham, skin down. Cover the whole with salt and put another ham on top, and cover this in the same manner. . . . When the hams have been in salt five days, take them all out with the salt and repack them, putting those which were on top at the bottom. . . . After the twelfth day remove the hams finally, brush off the salt and hang them for two days in the wind.

When I shimmied the big box out to the walk-in, I hit my head on the prosciuttos hanging in the breezeway. These had been curing for eighteen months, as would mine.

“All prosciutto is is salt, meat, and time. T-I-M-E,” Chris said, washing his hands, when I came back in.

I told him that I had read a recipe for prosciutto from a time before Christ. He nodded. “Doing this work, it connects us to the past. The past is just a river we all stand in.”

While rooting around the history of prosciutto making, I had stumbled upon this quote from Pliny the Elder, the ancient Roman naturalist, about Epi curus, the famous Greek hedonist: “That connoisseur in the enjoyment of life of ease was the first to lay out a garden at Athens; up to his time it had never been thought of to dwell in the country in the middle of town.” The garden, as far as scholars can sort out, grew fruits and vegetables. That an urban farmer existed before Christ made me feel like I was—that we all were—merely repeating the same motions that all humans had gone through, that nothing was truly new. This insight gave me a sense of peace.

The breakdown of Big Guy took Chris only two hours. But we still had a lot of work to do: the bellies to roll into pancetta, the salamis to make. Over the next week, I returned to the restaurant to do to my pig everything I had learned during my salumi apprenticeship.

That night I had my first taste of our pork, or pig meat, as Bill liked to call it.

I rolled the tenderloin in a light dusting of salt and pepper, then seared it in a hot cast-iron skillet until it was brown on the outside. I served it with a dab of Tuscan pepper jelly that Samin had made.

When Bill came in from working on the car, his knuckles covered with grease, I took a piece of the meat, swabbed it with pepper jelly, and stuck it into his mouth, then did the same for myself. The flesh tasted extremely sweet, plummy. Tender it certainly was; it didn’t even require a knife. While we chewed, the juices of the meat threatened to overflow our mouths. Not overrated at all. Our months of labor had been well worth it. I was relieved that I couldn’t detect any fishy taste.

Although Bill had been telling people we would never have another pig again, now he said with a titch of paranoia, “Do we have enough meat?”

The next day, Chris and Samin boned the shoulders. Each of them had one of Big Guy’s shoulders, and they seemed to be racing. Both of them had spent time studying with a butcher in Tuscany, so they had been trained by a master.

Normally I would have been trying to find a way to be useful and help, but in their kitchen, I recognized that my role was just the curious, grateful farmer.

“How did you know what to feed them?” Samin wanted to know. She makes most of the calls to their pork suppliers, and after asking what breed they were raising, she always inquired about their diets. The famous Parma hogs are traditionally fed whey from cheese making; in Spain the pigs browse on fallen acorns.

“I had a book,” I said. “But mostly I thought about what I would like to eat.” I didn’t reveal to her the fish-guts story.

The farm had become rather quiet without the pigs. Feeding the turkeys, chickens, and rabbits had never seemed so simple. It was a little like being an empty-nester: with the kids off to college, thoughts turn toward craft projects and Scrabble. Our house suddenly seemed like a relaxing place to be; it didn’t quite feel like a farm anymore, not exactly. But then, I didn’t feel crazy anymore, either. And the neighbors seemed awfully relieved.

Chris finished first, and he presented me a perfectly carved coppa heart. We stuffed it into a beef bottom and made coppas. From those trimmings and Big Guy’s considerable back fat, we made salami. Chris let me weigh out the spices and use his closely guarded secret recipes for finocchino, soria, and a more basic garlic- and wine-spiked salami.

As we worked, when the pastry chef or a dishwasher came in, he or she invariably praised the slabs of meat that had been Big Guy. I positively glowed. It was better than receiving compliments myself. I was proud of this pig.

Chris’s son even came in to admire the pig. Chris pointed out that the meat was pale in color, that it had less myogloblin than most meat. This signaled that it had been raised in a relaxing environment, without being jostled or exercised too much. It’s true that my pigs loved their naps, and the only strenuous exercise they got was when I squirted them down with a hose on hot days and they would dance and scamper.

When I went to fetch the machine to stuff my very own salamis, I felt giddy and crazed. Chris had the mixer on, and his son was watching the meat whirl together.

“I want to learn how to make salami,” his son confessed.

“You do?” Chris seemed taken aback but pleased.

I loaded the stuffer and cranked out my salamis. Meat, I was glad to see, can really bring a family together.

All these acts—the packing of the salamis, the rubbing of the prosciutto—brought me closer to the pigs. I could see how Big Guy was put together. I knew his secrets.

The most memorable part for me was making the soppressata, or head cheese. After the callousness of Sheila’s killing job, the soppressata healed me. To make the dish, Samin put both the pigs’ heads in salty water overnight. In the morning, they were drained of blood and looked pale but still wore an expression that I can only describe as optimistic. I imagined that, as they pattered along Sheila’s concrete path, they thought they were being taken to an even better place, with even better food.

The heads, with two feet and a tail, plus onions, carrots, and celery, cooked for twelve hours at the restaurant. A full four-inch layer of fat formed at the top of the pot. Chris and I gathered around a table and pulled the meat off the just-warm heads. The fat was still hot.

“Today we are going to re-create that great day!” Chris said. He had already told me the story of a few years ago, when his friend Dario Cec chini, the famous Italian butcher, came to Berkeley for a Slow Food event. Chris had made soppressata. It was a gala affair, with every big-name foodie present and accounted for. Dario, famous for reciting Dante aloud while cooking, attended to the pigs’ heads and generally marked the event as epic.

“You know, I’m just disturbed by that woman—what’s her name—Sally? Sylvia?—and how she didn’t include you,” Chris said.

“I know,” I said, working on separating out the small bones from a pig’s foot.

“It’s just wrong,” he muttered.

“Why can’t people do quality work?” I said.

“Or respect the effort you put into the pigs.”

We wiggled open the skulls and scooped out the brains. They were about the size of a large plum. One looked a bit damaged—more like ricotta cheese than brain—so we had to throw it away.

“Taste it,” Chris instructed and showed me a good piece of the remaining one to try. I picked up a little and put it in my mouth. It wasn’t so much a flavor as a texture. Like a thick piece of cream. Delicious. The unmangled brain went into the bowl with everything else. Chris then added orange peel and an Italian liqueur and stirred up the whole mishmash of fat bits, meat chunks, and carrots. We filled a linen bag with the warm mixture. I was glad that Big Guy and Little Girl would be together again in this dish.

Chris brought down the good Italian meat thread—thick twirls of red and white string. That he was pulling out all the stops on this made me nearly cry. His neat, square fingers snugly tied the bag, then lifted the trays to carry them into the walk-in. There the flavors would meld together for a day or so, the fat would congeal, and thick slices would be cut off and served with cornichons and mustard and crusty bread.

We had used all the parts of the pig, the ultimate show of respect. We spanned time with Big Guy, we pulled off all his flesh, so he could feed us—and feed us very well.

Leslie the pastry chef came in as we cleaned up. She saw Big Guy’s picked-over skull on a tray headed for the trash. “Can I have that?” she asked and touched the skull.

“What for?” I asked. I was exhausted from the meat processing.

“I want to mount it on the handlebars of my Schwinn,” she said.

These were my people.

However. While I was celebrating the culinary wonders of Big Guy with Chris Lee, other parts of my former pig lingered in the back of my fridge: nameless, uncelebrated, the oozing plastic grocery bag of intestines that Sheila had handed me before I stormed off her property.

After a grueling day of salami stuffing and pancetta rolling, I peered into the fridge and muttered, OK, OK, what is this? From behind a jar of sauerkraut and a half-empty container of stewed plums I pulled out the intestine-filled bag. It visibly quivered. I remembered my indignation, my disgust, at Sheila’s waste. Suddenly, it seemed quite reasonable. Ugh, just throw that shit away! But no, between Fergus Henderson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, I could find recipes for this bag of offal.

Which smelled awful, by the way. I sloshed the bag onto the counter and untied the handles. Inside, cradled by white plastic, lay a liver the size of a placenta. It was a strange red color, almost blue. Next to it sat, rather perkily, a greenish thing that I had to assume was the stomach. I prodded it with my finger, and it yielded only slightly. It had the texture of a scuba diver’s wet suit.

The stomach-thing was clearly the source of the overwhelming odor. I smelled my finger: a combo of ripe barnyard and salty low tide. Several hand washings failed to erase the stench from my fingertip. And yet I would transform these things into something delicious.

I gingerly separated the liver from its stinky neighbor and promptly washed it. Then I trimmed all the strange veins and arteries that came and went in and out of the organ. Even after major trimming, I still had two gallons of liver. I cubed it up and, following a recipe called
foie de porc rôti
from Jane Grigson, baked it in a low oven shrouded with a layer of caul fat.

While the liver bubbled in the oven, I turned to the stomach. I like strong-smelling things—ripe French cheeses, deeply fermented cabbages. But every recipe I could unearth for pig stomach involved several days of soaking, often requiring bleach. One that I thought I could get behind, an Amish dish in which the stomach was stuffed with cabbage and sausage and cooked, seemed within the realm of possibility—and edibility. But when I upturned the stomach into our sink for a good scrub before attempting the dish, a green slick that resembled algae flowed from the main orifice. It felt like algae, too, slimy. As the stomach juice slithered down the drain I decided that, in this case, Sheila had been right.