Off the Bone

Tamworths are actually a bacon breed, raised for a long side with good streaking in the meat, rather than a specifically lard breed. The spectacular amount of fat in these pigs… Jonathan, their owner, had this to say:

“The four inches of subcutaneous fat, I’m afraid, is due to my lack of experience with feeding pigs.

We gave these guys about four gallons of whey per pig per day, along with copious stale bread and tablescraps. The two that Torsten worked on last week were born in mid-May, and weighed in at about 300# each.
What I took away from this experience is that next year, we ought to have twice the number of pigs!

The second pair of pigs, who have their appointment with destiny today, are a month younger and probalby 50-75# lighter. I am hoping that they are a bit leaner under the skin, too.”

And virtually everything you could possibly want to know about the different breeds of pig can be found at this fascinating website, guaranteed to arouse curiosity and alarm when you read it in the middle of a long tech.

This is Torsten. Torsten currently has his fingers buried as far as they will go in a fresh ham, for reasons I’ll get into in a couple of days. We cut the ham in the German style rather than the American – the ham people tend to think of here has been shaved down to the femur, with the butt and round removed. These hams have the hip bone and knee still attached, and weigh about 30 pounds each. At a guess, half that weight is fat, because these are Tamworth pigs, a heritage breed raised for lard rather than meat. Tamworths are descended directly from the wild boars of Europe, via bloodlines which, according to most experts, have been astonishingly pure. Some believe that the breed was developed purely by selection, and never crossbred for desirable traits. No one can confirm that an outside strain was bred in. They are known as a bacon breed, long bodied and fat.

Pigs with this proportion of fat to lean were common as little as 50 years ago, when there were still people whose need for calories was simply so great that there was no other way for them to get enough energy than by cooking everything with an equal weight of lard. So important an energy source was this, in fact, that it was almost as valuable a commodity as the pork itself, if not more so. The demand for lean meat, the turn away from lard as a cooking fat, and the growth characteristics of most such breeds have made such pigs economically unviable. They mature slowly, and backfat sells at a sixth the price of loin. On the other hand, they forage, and eat pasture, and will grow fat on virtually anything you feed them – a turn of the century farming text gives the recommended diet for these pigs as “less than 1% broken glass.”

Lard, to Torsten, is not simply the fat from a pig, but a specific sort of fat, akin to suet in a cow – the fine, soft white fat from inside the abdominal cavity, which serves as a cushion for the kidneys, known in English cookery as leaf lard. This fat, too soft to do much else with, is rendered, then used as a cooking fat, or stewed with apples and onions then spread on bread. Soft is a relative term. In the late autumn chill, it feels firm as cold butter. Still, though, it’s the wrong consistency for sausage making, and this is what Torsten is after. Torsten is a German master butcher, who can trace the line of butchers in his family back to the 30 Years War. He is also Muslim, having converted, he tells me, in a fit of disillusionment with Christianity and “the lies on which it was built.” Oddly enough, he made this discovery after an intense study of church history, inspired by a period living in what he describes as “the intensely religious Midwest”. At that point, he had been making sausages for 12 years (not counting the years he helped his father as a boy) and giving up either the sale of pork or his religion was entirely out of the question. Since the day he converted, he has not eaten a morsel of pork, though he handles it every hour of his working day.

For sausages, we use the fat beneath the skin, and even that is not a homogenous substance. The fat trimmed off the loin is fatback, the stiffest, hardest fat on the pig. Salted, it becomes lardo, smoked, it is a Ukrainian delicacy. English and American books make a distinction between hard bacon fat and soft bacon fat – the traditional test was to set a cold, hard slab of bacon across two glasses. If it sagged, the fat was soft. Torsten, though, reels off an entire litany - back, neck, shoulder, and breast, jowl… Belly combines very soft fat and medium hard fat. Different sausages use different parts. Today, we will make two kinds of liverwurst, one kind of blutwurst, and something from the offal. But first, we will cut up a pig.

A fairly detailed description of pig butchery in the German pattern follows, with photos.

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A few days ago I sat in the library periodical room. I brought my own work, but the more time I spent surrounded by journals, the more I felt that as an aspiring academic I should have some clue about their contents. Last I checked, nobody seemed to have stolen my dissertation topic, but for all I knew someone could have been making my job easier by doing related research. My eyes fell on the Journal of Modern History, for I sat near the Js, and I picked up the latest issue. A quick scan of the table of contents - and there it was, a review essay on food! In half an hour my notebook was filled with the additions to my “extracurricular” reading list, and I started thinking about other connections between food and academia, running not through research but through academics’ stomachs.

Except for the few cranky dieters, we love food, and, by and large, we are not too picky. This goes especially for graduate students. I don’t know what these people eat when they get to their homes, kitchens, and spouses, but almost everything flies in academic settings: cold pizza, hot pizza, leftover sandwiches from the luncheon seminar, chips and pretzels and any crunchy things from a bag, alcoholic beverages in any price range, carrot sticks with or without a dip, and anything with sugar in it. We do not exactly starve, but the stereotype of a starving student is so strong that it never fails to guide our hand to the proverbial cookie jar as long as the cookies are free.

This makes cooking for academics an easy business. Within the walls of the ivory tower were are all children, and food is exciting. We try every item in the buffet without trying to learn their ingredients first, stuff our mouths with chocolate-covered strawberries, and delight in florescent yellow ‘cola’ drinks with weird labels. I started a friendship with red onion marmalade, eased the stress of peer review with donut holes (bought), consoled colleagues with chocolate-cranberry cookies, and expressed gratitude with fresh apple cakes. We break bread to create a community, but also use food the way people before us must have used touch - to reach out to someone when words don’t cut it, and when touch is off limits.

And this, I think, is another reason we love food so much. Academia is lonely, and food means other people. Even if they just ordered it delivered. If they made it - that’s true love, whether or not it’s fully baked.

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Two years ago I took a course on Soviet history with a visiting Italian professor. He was one of the happiest men I’ve known. Between talking about the collapse of the Soviet Union he would tell us stories of his academic apprenticeship, his preferred order of photocopying pages from a book, his youngest daughter’s fascination with dragons, and his exasperation with well-meaning friends who took him for dinners in the Boston North End. A good home cook himself, he hated North End Italian. It was too rich, he thought, and too complex, as if the chefs could not resist throwing together all the ingredients they were unable to afford back in Italy, and created an imaginary “rich Italian” cuisine in their New World restaurants.

At the end of the semester I exchanged chocolate chip cookies for his daughters for his favorite home recipe - which turned out to be pumpkin pasta. It’s a lovely thing, flavors mild and clear, and perfect for fall. Aside from the pumpkin you will only need your pantry staples: garlic, olive oil, parsley, and, of course, pasta. If you cannot stand the simplicity, or have a fennel bulb in the pantry begging to be used, I’d let you add it too - although Andrea might frown.

Andrea started with raw pumpkin, peeled and sliced quite thinly. I prefer to pre-bake mine, because I don’t like peeling raw pumpkin. You can do either, but if you don’t pre-bake you should give your pumpkin time to cook almost completely in the skillet before you add pasta, which means starting the skillet as soon as you put your pasta pot on the stove. If you choose to pre-bake, keep the pumpkin in the oven until it can be pierced with a sharp knife but not yet smooshed with a spoon, and start the skillet when the pasta water is boiling (use robust dried pasta, not something that will cook in seconds).

For two servings you’ll need two cloves of garlic, half an acorn squash or equivalent (I used one small delicata squash, which was lovely), and a generous handful of parsley, chopped fine.

1. Sautee garlic in a generous quantity olive oil; when very fragrant and golden, add slices of pumpkin. Salt and pepper and wait, letting the pumpkin brown a bit (or cook if it’s raw).

2. Add chopped parsley, stir, fish out your still-uncooked pasta from the pot and dump it in the skillet with a little bit of pasta water. Stir and cook everything until the pasta is ready, adding more pasta water if you have to. Adjust salt, add more pepper, and serve piping hot.

3. Don’t sprinkle parmesan on top.

On Saturday morning Tse Wei and I strolled the Union Square farmers’ market in search of mint. It’s getting rather late in season, and rather cold, so fresh mint is becoming rarer. Luck smiled on us, though, and we returned with a generous bunch of spearmint and five tiny (and rather expensive) bunches of mints of other kinds - one with tiny round leaves arranged in neat rosettes, one with delicate fuzzy leaves like tiny spearmint, with a tint of violet, one apparently from a crawly plant. They all smelled unmistakably like mint, but wonderfully complex, with notes of green and bitterness and chocolate.

I have a poor memory for names, and planned to look up mint varieties when I got home. It was a foolhardy plan. There are about two dozen species in the mint family, but countless varieties and hybrids, so who knows which ones I have drying in bunches now. Unless you have access to farmers markets as large and diverse as the one at Union Square or decide to grow your own mint, you are most likely to come in contact with two varieties - spearmint and peppermint. Spearmint is the number one choice for most cooks, used in the mint sauce for roast lamb and most mint preserves, jellies and teas. Peppermint - more precisely, peppermint oil - is what you’ll come across everywhere else, from toothpaste to chewing gum to after dinner mints. It is a Massachusetts native, although it is now grown in Oregon and Washington, and the most minty mint, containing a large amount of menthol.

I have developed a real fondness for mint of all kinds in the last few years - mostly for making tea. It reminds me of summers in the garden, back in my childhood, when grandma would create flavorful infusions with fresh leaves plucked off all the plants in the garden - blackcurrants and strawberries and pears and sage. They smelled of summer, crackling firewood and storytelling. Before bed, I would get a mug of mint tea - hot water pored over a few fresh leaves of spearmint from a shiny tin kettle.

Even a dried mint twig steeped in a mug of hot water has very little in common with what you’d get out of a sachet of ‘Celestial Seasonings’ - it has a calm complexity of flavor instead of hysterical menthol notes. There are, of course, much better dried mint teas, but it’s so easy (and so much cheaper) to prepare your own that you might as well. Wash the mint, spread it out to dry, and when no water remains on leaves, gather in bunches and hang upside down. You can also dry them flat and spread out, but they will take more space. When perfectly dry and brittle, gather in an airtight container and store away from light. You’ll have to experiment with the quantity of dried mint that gives you your preferred strength.

The personal chef to George Sr. and Barb spills all