Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 19

The difference between English- and Italian-style butchering is one of finesse versus sheer strength. Once we had wrestled Big Guy onto the cutting table, Chris ran his hand over the pig's back. With a small knife, he pressed into the haunches and made a few graceful incisions. The back leg came off easily. I watched in awe-filled happiness. Meanwhile, my American butcher was firing up the band saw.

Suddenly, Chris held what looked like a regular store-bought hacksaw. He crouched into position and began lightly sawing the shoulder and front leg. This came off, and with the side that was left, Chris expertly disa.s.sembled them down to recognizable cuts-a hunk of ribs, a rack of loin chops, a chunk of back fat, which I knew we'd need to make salami, a slab of pork belly about two inches thick.

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 G.o.d," 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 ma.s.saging the pig's b.u.t.t. 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: 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 t.i.tch 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs 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 s.h.i.t 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 a.s.sume 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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.g, I still had two gallons of liver. I cubed it up and, following a recipe called foie de porc roti foie de porc roti from Jane Grigson, baked it in a low oven shrouded with a layer of caul fat. 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.

With the stomach back in its bag, I went out to the garden, dug a hole near the base of a struggling fig, and dropped the pig stomach into its final resting place. The bag went into the garbage, where it would undoubtedly become one of the millions of pieces of plastic flying around a landfill somewhere close by. I would not be reusing it.

The liver dish emerged from the oven. I let it cool. It looked beautiful, with the lacing of caul fat dressing up the top of the dish. When I spread some of the dish onto a cracker, it tasted like chalk and blood. It was edible but disappointing: a failure. I somewhat salvaged things by feeding the chickens the foie de porc roti. foie de porc roti. They went straight to work on it. And though they ate it, I noted that it wasn't with particular gusto. They went straight to work on it. And though they ate it, I noted that it wasn't with particular gusto.

On the last day of our pig processing, Chris and I went for a walk to scrounge some herbs-wild fennel and rosemary-to stuff into a rolled pork loin. We just walked down to the train tracks, where they were growing like weeds, and clipped fronds here and there.

We pa.s.sed Chris's Volkswagen van, an unlikely vehicle for the owner of a very fancy restaurant. But then again, Chris was very unlikely. One day when we were talking about lettuces, I told him that I brought salad to the former Black Panthers. Chris got very excited. He grew up in Chicago and was outraged when Fred Hampton-a charismatic young Black Panther leader-was shot in his bed by the police. Although Chris looked as white as the pork back fat, I later discovered that he was part black. His mother was a light-skinned African American who had decided to pa.s.s as white. Chris, wanting to get closer to his roots, had looked up the Panthers and what they had been doing and had become politically active himself.

We began picking fennel fronds, and talk turned to urban farming. "I'm not really making a difference," I told Chris. "But Willow and City Slicker Farms, they're doing something that's actually providing people healthy food." Then Chris told me about urban farms that had come before mine. At Chez Panisse, they had relied on urban gardens to grow most of their special lettuces and greens.

"One of the gardens used to be around the corner from a m.u.f.fler shop," Chris said. "And the lady would arrive-always late-at the restaurant, driving this postal jeep with the greens." Chris paused and smiled at the memory. "We were so cute," he said. "Then we'd wash them very well to get off the m.u.f.fler smell." There were people raising chickens and bees for honey for the restaurant.

"I think there are townhouses there now," he said when he told me where the urban farm had been.

Back in the kitchen, we washed the fennel well and soaked it in a sink before cutting it finely. Chris found a strange yellow spider on one of the fronds. It was the same color as fennel pollen. While I continued chopping, Chris wandered outside to let the spider go free.

With a giant restaurant skewer, he poked a hole along the bones of the rack of pork loin, and I stuffed it with the freshly cut herbs, packing them in with the handle of a wooden spoon.

How can a restaurant owner be so nice? I wondered as I drove home, the rack of pork loin for twenty in the back of the car. Sure, we had bartered and I had promised to give him one of the prosciuttos made from Big Guy, but this still seemed to be a deal that weighed heavily in my favor. I drove by the intersection where the urban farm had been. Yup, townhouses. They were gray and tall and had lots of parking.

I thought about Chris and his restaurant. From the outside, it was high-end dining, but in the kitchen was a gang of freaks: Leslie the Chinese American pastry chef, who wanted a pig skull on her bike; the pickle-mad Samin; and Chris, onetime radical now teacher. That I was accepted into their tribe made me realize that my ident.i.ty as urban farmer bridged two worlds, made me an aberration. I might have been a little like the yellow spider Chris saved from the fennel frond.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR.

Little Girl's fate had been different from Big Guy's.

I went back up north to pick her up from Jeff's butcher shop, where she had been dismantled in the American style, by a man who had, I couldn't help but notice, a signed letter from President George W. Bush posted on the wall of his meat locker, praising him for this and that. The butcher wasn't there, but his neighbor had come over to let me into the cold room.

"You're from Oakland?" she said. "You've come a long way to get this pig butchered." Like a traitor, I said, "That's because no one in the city knows how to do anything."

She laughed and nodded. After watching Chris trim a pork shoulder of its bone and make soppressata, I knew that city folks know how to do something. I don't know why I said it. In fact, only in the city could I have pulled off feeding my pigs gourmet food. And only in the city were there Italian-trained butchers who were willing to share their knowledge with a novice pig farmer.

The woman wheeled out a dolly stacked high with milk crates filled with pig pieces all wrapped in plastic, then covered with white paper with handwritten labels like BONELESS PORK SHOULDER, GROUND PORK, PORK RIBS. I was thankful for all that meat-it ended up filling an entire upright freezer we borrowed from friends. The butcher had also, per my instructions, saved and wrapped up the bones, the fat pieces, the feet, and the tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs.

All that wrapping, though, didn't have much soul. The butcher had used a band saw to take the pig apart, so the meat left few hints about pigness-the lines were straight, not organic; square-shaped. Little Girl ceased to exist. But Big Guy, in the form of his giant hanging b.u.t.t, had become immortal, in a way.

This soullessness is not how it has always been in America. On Samin and Chris's advice I had read Edna Lewis's essay "Morning-After-Hog-Butchering Breakfast," an elegy about traditional Southern hog butchering. After the slaughter, cleaning, and hanging of the pigs in the December cold, Lewis remembered, "we waited with impatient excitement through the three days of hanging; we were all looking forward to the many delicious dishes that would be made after the hogs were cut up-fresh sausage, liver pudding, and the sweet delicate taste of fresh pork and bacon."

I had also recently run across a copy of Little House in the Big Woods, Little House in the Big Woods, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which fueled this nostalgia. I decided I would try some typically American moves with Little Girl. So I took one of the hams, unwrapped it from its swaddling of paper and plastic, and submerged it in a brining solution for ten days. I released a slab of belly and began the process of making bacon: I cut the big slab into three smaller sections and rubbed them with a little pink salt, kosher salt, pepper, and maple syrup, then placed them in the fridge to marinate for a few weeks, flipping them every other day to spread the brine evenly. by Laura Ingalls Wilder, which fueled this nostalgia. I decided I would try some typically American moves with Little Girl. So I took one of the hams, unwrapped it from its swaddling of paper and plastic, and submerged it in a brining solution for ten days. I released a slab of belly and began the process of making bacon: I cut the big slab into three smaller sections and rubbed them with a little pink salt, kosher salt, pepper, and maple syrup, then placed them in the fridge to marinate for a few weeks, flipping them every other day to spread the brine evenly.

And so Big Guy and Little Girl were still alive, in my heart and in my daily to-do list, just like at a Southern hog butchering, where Edna Lewis remembered that "as soon as the hogs were butchered, a series of necessary activities ensued that kept the whole community busy for at least a week or more." I made almost daily trips to the restaurant to flip prosciuttos, roll and hang pancettas, and monitor the salamis made from Big Guy. I also checked on the Little Girl ham and checked on the belly bacon every day.

I did often wonder: Why did Chris Lee help me?

We talked about it while making lardo, our last task.

"You know, you're really lucky," said Samin.

We were watching Chris remove some skin from a piece of back fat that we were going to rub with salt and fennel and hang in the walk-in.

"I know," I said. "Look at me, I'm an a.s.shole, just watching Chris do all the work."

"You said the magic words," Chris said.

"What did I say?" I asked.

"You said you had two pigs."

"Chris hates it when people come to the front of the restaurant and want to sell him stuff," Samin explained.

"But you said you had two pigs," Chris said, "so I had to talk to you."