Ed lights the blowtorch. It hisses and spits. We’ve been warned against such a brutal attack on the bristles in case we scorch the skin or, worse still, the flesh beneath. We don’t want to raise the temperature of the carcass, obviously, and we don’t want to damage the meat. But it’s only a small blowtorch, not unlike the kind chefs use, and we’re hopeful it might speed things up. We let the blue flame steady and then swipe it back and forth over a section of the rear leg: a bony, hairy bit close to the knee; a trial run.
But pig bristles, it turns out, are not crème brûlée. Our poor specimen of a blowtorch is not up to the job. There’s a bitter stink of burning hair as the ends of the bristles brown and melt, but we’re left with long obstinate stubs spiking from the skin which discolours and singes. We work on the patch of carcass for a while, just in case there’s a technique to it and everything comes right in the end, but it’s just smelly, messy, unsatisfying. At this point in the day we still have a vision of clean, smooth pigskin and a neatly stripped carcass, and this isn’t it.
And so we’re left with scalding. The traditional option; Beatrix Potter’s delight. But for this to work in loosening the hairs, the water has to be as close to boiling as possible, and in such freezing temperatures and with the house a hundred metres or more away, this poses a logistical problem. We set big pans of water to simmer on the cooker in the kitchen, and organize a rudimentary shuttle system: one of us brings the water across while the other scrapes, keeping the supply coming as quickly as we can, keeping scraping.
We do this for hours. Back and forth. Up and down the stone steps. The kitchen fills with steam; we wear a muddy path from the house to the scaffolding tower. We scrape.
It’s not quick or efficient or pleasant. It’s difficult to get the water to the carcass hot enough: when we pour it over we have a minute or so during which the bristles tend to scrape off, but as soon as the water cools, the hairs stick fast. So we end up bringing across smaller and smaller pans – which, in turn, means more journeys. The bristles are most dense along the ridge of the back, around the neck, in the nooks behind the legs; we keep at these thickets, over and over, but the folds of skin and the contours of the body make it difficult to get a clean scrape and in the end we begin to ignore these areas and concentrate instead on the flanks and the shoulders, which are broader and firmer and so easier. In time, patches come cleanish. Each of us develops a technique which works: mine involves gripping the hairs between the fingers of one hand so that they’re pulled tight against the skin, and running the scraper over the muscly curves with the other. This effects a reasonable shave; the hairs come off, with effort. But each bristle is coarse and wiry, and before long they lacerate my hands. I put on a pair of thick blue fleece gloves: my movements become clumsier and my hands still smart and bleed beneath.
It’s slow, painful, exhausting. We have to manoeuvre the carcass so that we can clean each side of it, but even turning it is a struggle – and we still have to work out a way of hanging it. The sun, low in the sky, is already on our backs and will set in a couple of hours. We can’t leave a half-ready carcass lying around on the ground through the night. Animals will come for it, for one thing. More importantly, we need to eviscerate it today so that there’s no risk of the innards turning bad and so that we can hang the emptied pig for the flesh to cool and harden, ready for butchering tomorrow. That’s a lot to do; we still haven’t finished with the bristles. We never thought it would take this long.
It’s not going to be clean and smooth, we see that now. Just clean enough and smooth enough, or nearly. We decide to leave the trotters and the head as they are: the hairs there are too matted and the bony contours too difficult. We’ll work on one or two areas on the main part of the body – Ed has future crackling in mind – and we’ll just have to make do with the rest as it is, still black in places, patchy, riddled with stubble.
Do I think about what I’m doing; about any of this? Not really. Not yet. I just work.
Live pig, Little Pig, needs looking after. He needs feeding, until his time comes. I take a break and wander down to the vegetable-patch pen. He’s standing in the mud, halfway between the shelter and the fence, still. He squelches a heavy step or two as I arrive, but nothing more. He has his face to me, his big ears drooping, his eyes bright; his tail twirls. But as far as a pig can be, he seems expressionless.
He could not see the slaughter or any of the work on the carcass from where he is; there was no particular noise when Big Pig died, no squealing, nothing more than a quiet thud. But I have no idea how much Little Pig may have sensed or understood. What would the smell of blood have meant to him, so much blood? The stench of chemicals, or of burning hair? Can he smell death; the death of a pig?
He’s bewildered at being alone, that much is clear at least. When I step over the wire with the bucket of grain, he makes more of an effort in the mud, stumbling over to me, nudging, trying a nibble at my overalls. I stand with him while he eats. In the field beyond the garden wall there are half a dozen pale cattle. I hear them breathing heavily, snuffling. A robin flits and bobs on the brambles. Little Pig snatches at the grain, fluffing it on to the ground where it lies, sticky and browning, until he noses at that, too, digging it more, making more mud. He eats diligently, with determination. His appetite is unaffected by the day’s events. But I can’t stand here with him much longer, and as I leave he looks up, stops eating and tries to rush towards me. Until he’s held by the mud, marooned, and in the end sinks to a halt in the middle of the pen, in no-man’s-land. He lets out a quiet grumble. I don’t turn as I walk away. I know what I’ll see: a surprisingly small pig, half-coated in clay, alone.
We have to get on. Winching; gutting; butchering; Little Pig still to come; Christmas. There are no more than a couple of hours of daylight. The sky already has a whitish sheen as the cold gathers for night. We stand and look at the scaffold one more time. We examine the bent crossbar again. Will it take the weight? We swing on it; pull down hard, and decide it will have to. There are no alternative places to hang the carcass. Briefly, we consider sawing it in half on the ground and taking the pieces inside overnight, but even though the house is cool in this weather, impossible to properly heat, it’s nothing like cold enough for storing freshly killed meat for fifteen hours or more. So what had seemed an unacceptable risk earlier in the day is redefined as a minor hazard. By now it seems wimpy to make a fuss about a flimsy crossbar.
Gently we winch the pig. The chains ratchet slowly, loop by loop, the carcass begins to lift, hairy trotters first. The legs wave in the air, its back peels from the ground, twists slightly; the whole thing continues to rise until just the head is resting on the trampled grass. The ears are skewed; I don’t look at the eyes.
The crossbar has bent some more but is holding. We keep an eye on it and winch again. The head slides, lifts; it’s only the snout now, finally, snuffling in the grass, and then it, too, is pulled up and the pig is suspended. The scaffolding creaks; the crossbar has a wide, low curve. A few more turns bring the carcass well clear of the ground, and we lock the pulleys. The pig swings ever so slightly, side to side; it’s upside down, half stripped of hair, legs splayed, a wretched thing.
We take off the head. A decent all-purpose DIY saw is fine for this. It’s a simple, brutal task, and once it’s done and the head hauled aside out of the way, the pig is much less a pig. It’s not yet quite meat and nothing more, but it’s losing its pigness all the time, losing its familiar shape and colour, forcing attention from where we’re used to looking – the head and face, the shoulders – towards the stomach and the legs, which are unremarkable, unprepossessing, just undefined animal. Without the head, the body is lighter, too, of course, which mitigates some of our concern about the state of the scaffold.
Eviscerating the carcass, however, is more tricky than you might imagine. It’s not just a case of emptying the insides. For one thing, the intestines can be tasty and useful, cooked up as chitterlings or made into sausage ca
sings; we have plans for the liver and kidneys, the heart, perhaps the lungs. Everyone knows one thing about pigs: you can eat everything but the squeal. Traditionally, nothing was wasted. The bladder was dried and used to store tobacco; the stomach was sometimes blown up for children to play with, a pig-balloon. We may not be quite that thorough but we do know not to be careless with the middles. More importantly, a slip of the knife and we would puncture the gall bladder, spilling bitter yellowish bile which will seep into the not-yet-cold flesh and taint it. This would be a disaster. All these months of work raising a good pig, lost with a moment’s clumsiness.
I’m the dexterous one, so the gutting job is mine. The way the pig is hung, the rump is just above my head height, so I stand on tiptoe to begin. I have to cut around the skin at the anus and then carefully through the muscle to release the rectum. I’ve been told to pull this and tie it off, so that none of the faecal matter can slip back into the innards and contaminate them. This sounds straightforward enough, but I’ve never pulled a rectum before, and it’s more stubborn than I’d anticipated. I’d imagined something like those pop-up plastic tubes that come on top of cans of oil and tins of varnish, but of course it’s nothing like that: it’s slippery and fleshy and isn’t designed to be hauled into the open. It fights back; resists. I have to use more brute force than I’d have liked; I have to tug and lever. A black oaty slop of pig poo slides on to my hands. When the rubbery tube of the rectum finally eases clear of the body and Ed leans across to make the tie with string, I’m breathing hard, sore from standing on my toes and pulling at such an uncomfortable angle, slightly taken aback by what it actually feels like to be doing this. It’s the difference between watching someone dive into deep, cold water and actually diving in yourself: the physical sensation is unimagin-able unless you’re there, immersed. I suddenly feel winded. And we’ve only just begun.
Next I slit the body through the stomach from top to bottom; or more accurately, since it’s inverted, from bottom to top. The knife moves easily and lightly: swish; unzip. It’s nothing more than a basic kitchen task. I’ve got a clean straight cut and I begin to open up the carcass. I work very slowly but gradually the slit widens, deepens. I cut deeper still, but there’s not as much flesh here as you might think, and before long I’ve revealed the abdominal cavity as far as the ribs. I’m inside now. Pig middles are here en masse in front of me: a neat, complex new world folded inside the skin and muscle. There’s a slight membrane to cut, here and there, a few places where the flesh sticks tight, but mostly the innards reveal themselves without fuss and I’m faced with a dissected body, like a Vesalius anatomy drawing.
I somehow expected mess of some kind, sloshy liquid, blood even. But it’s clean and dry. The organs have a patina to them: some of them gleam like pearls in a shell; some have the fine, worked shine of good leather shoes or brushed racehorses. There are pleasing shapes, a concoction of textures. The cavity is tightly and cleverly packed, like a stuffed but orderly suitcase, layered and tucked and tidy. The inside of a pig is a beautiful thing.
But it’s difficult now, up close, to be absolutely sure of what’s what. It’s bitterly cold, the dusk is beginning to settle in the trees, we’ve been working outdoors all day and we’ve never before had to identify the nuance of pig innards. We’re a bit bamboozled. Are those the lungs? Where’s the heart? I think that must be the liver – isn’t it? What I thought I knew about pig anatomy is disconcerted. Organs don’t look the same as they did in diagrams, or even as they do on a butcher’s slab; some are concealed, at least in part, by twists of intestine or folded behind other things. I’m not sure where to put the knife.
We’re slow again, picking our way through the physiology. Concentrate; think! A few things become clear. At the top there are the greenish spirals of the large intestine; the richly coloured, meaty organ below, partly obscured, is the liver. We want that out, for sure.
The lungs are easiest to identify because of their spongy texture, and because there are two of them, but they’re huge, far bigger and broader than I’d imagined, and I doubt what I’m seeing. We can’t find the heart at all, for the moment, and the kidneys are hidden; the stomach bulges to one side, the only thing that’s smaller than I’d expected. This is nothing like the frog we dissected in school.
The innards will just fall out into a pan. That’s what you read. The intestines will fall away, and then the rest of the insides will release in two parts. It sounds simple and unequivocal. But these innards stay where they are, intact, gleaming. I reach round and behind, cutting through the diaphragm where it’s attached to the bony wall of the chest, but it’s difficult to see exactly what’s attached to what and I’m still not quite sure where the bile sack is hiding, so I work warily with the tip of the knife: snip, snip, snip. This seems to go on a long time. I’m patient; slightly mesmerized by the deft nip of the blade. So when the abdominal cavity suddenly and completely slides its contents towards me I’m taken by surprise.
The whole lot empties forward in a solid mass of heavy organs. I should let it all just tumble into the tub below, but there’s a strand or two of tissue still attached, and remarkably this is strong enough to prevent the innards coming completely free. So they dangle, making the carcass lurch on the scaffold, and before I’m quick enough to move away, they’ve piled against me and I’m cradling them against my body, trying to support them, taken aback by the enormous weight of this intestinal mess in my arms.
It’s no more than a few moments. Soon Ed comes and steadies the carcass, hoisting the innards to allow me to cut through the remaining slivers of tissue; the organs fall free into the tub, their dense tangle loosening, everything sliding apart so that it’s easy to see each element clearly, separately, offal on a butcher’s slab. But for those moments I’m overwhelmed by the physical surprise of the pig guts against me: the clean, fresh, slightly salty smell of them; the not-quite-utterly cold; the huge, slippery bulk, unforgettably heavy, like cradling an armful of wet beach stones.
Step away. Take a moment; we’re nearly done. We’ll be finished before dark, just about; there’s only the clearing-up to see to. Put down the burden of innards, shake out the soreness, step away.
We rummage through the intestines in the tub and bag up the offal for the fridge and the freezer. We’re picky. We’ll buy skins for sausages; we decide against keeping the lungs; we don’t bother with small, springy bits we can’t identify. But there’s plenty, nonetheless; more than enough. With another pig to come.
The carcass, slimmed down now, has emptied the last vestige of pig.
We hose it down. Cold water on a cold evening. The ground beneath the scaffold becomes sloppy but the meat shines, dark and new and lustrous. With so much weight removed, there’s no danger now of the crossbar giving way and we hoist the empty body a little higher, checking the grip of the hooks in the legs, settling the thing for the night. We’ve got some sheets of clear plastic which we wrap around the scaffold and tuck over the top of the legs, letting it flap down below. The structure takes on the odd ghostly appearance of something from a TV police drama, but it feels like the proper thing to do, a covering of some kind, a shroud.
We’re too tired to do anything more, and it’s too late. A moon is rising; stars breaking out low on the eastern horizon. The chickens have roosted, fluttering up into the cover of the conifer trees. Little Pig is in the shelter, a black shadow against the pale hay, alone. We check on him, quietly, and then scurry into the house to warm up as best we can. We do ordinary things: cook, drink wine, watch television, play with Mo. Not much is said about what’s happened that day, not much at all. Perhaps we’re just too tired to talk.
A kestrel hunts in the early light, a copper cut-out against the mauve sky. It hovers, flicks down over the garden, cuts away. A bevy of small birds tumbles in its wake, twittering; from the bare damson tree behind the pig pen, a flock of long-tailed tits scatters. Little Pig dozes, eyes open, deep in the straw. Now and again, his ear twitches, but oth
erwise he’s still. The ice has set hard on the puddles in the mud around his shelter; it’s a morning for lie-ins.
The original plan had been to slaughter Little Pig today. Finish butchering one pig; start all over again with another. Two pigs, three days’ work; that’s what we’d said. And then Christmas. But we know now, this second morning, how naive and foolish – how plain laughable – such an idea was. We can’t go through all that again today, we can’t; I can’t imagine scraping hairs again, over and over, or hoisting innards or watching, again, a thrashing, dying pig. Not now; not yet. And besides, we can’t rely on the scaffolding.
So where does that leave Little Pig?
Alone in the straw, dozing.
We close our eyes to the problem and rub our hands in the cold. Let’s just get on. For now, at least, let’s get finished. A few hours and we’ll be done; then we can think more clearly.
We lift the plastic cover: the no-longer-pig hangs there exactly as we left it, except there are teeth marks now and some torn flesh, at the bottom of the carcass where the cavity opens up just above the dangling right leg. Something has been gnawing at the bare meat in the night. It’s not done a great deal of damage: it’s chewed away a dent, cleaned up against one of the bones, that’s all. I can cut out the spoiled bits with a knife. And probably we shouldn’t be surprised that we’ve left a chunk of prime pork swinging in the open and something’s helped itself to a tasty takeaway. But it must have been an animal of some size to reach high enough and to leave such marks. This isn’t mice, or rats, or even polecats. Most likely a dog or a fox, perhaps even a hungry winter deer. It’s natural, of course; it was probably inevitable. But in the chill of the new morning, with the blood from the slaughter still staining the ground around the scaffold, there’s something unsettling about the thought of a good-sized predator feasting on this suspended flesh; there’s a kind of horror-film element to it, a whiff of The Silence of the Lambs. I take off a layer of meat around the chewed wound, tidying it up carefully with the point of the knife. I try not to think too much about what went on here but concentrate on removing the evidence. There: good as new. Pristine.
Big Pig, Little Pig: A Tale of Two Pigs in France Page 21