“Smell it,” Chris said. I leaned in—it smelled like a barnyard.
“I like it.” I grinned.
“You would,” he said, like we were old friends.
“Let’s try one,” he said, and brought out an example of what the finished product would look like after four months of aging. The coppa had gone from football to softball size, a white mold had formed around the whole thing, and when Chris cut into it, the meat was a deep red, as if it had been cooked. He handed me a piece. This is food that honors the pig, I thought as I chewed and the subtle flavors filled my mouth. It wasn’t like the turkey or a rabbit—merely a delicious and sacred thing to eat; this pig, through alchemy, had been transformed into something higher, almost immortal.
Chris stared at a slice, then we both chewed thoughtfully. It was so good, smoky and rich, earthy. “So that’s my deal,” said Chris.
In his book About Looking, John Berger wrote, “A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an ‘and’ and not by a ‘but.’ ” I felt well on my way to peasantdom. But I needed Chris to teach me more—and I secretly hoped he would help me when it came time for my pigs to meet their maker.
Every week throughout August, I returned to the restaurant to learn more: How to make pancetta, which is the pork belly rubbed with spices, rolled, and tied. How to make the Petit Jesus, Chris’s specialty salami, modeled after the Spanish soriano—large chunks of spicy pork and coarse herbs.
Over that time, as I learned about salumi, I also learned about Chris. He grew up in Illinois, where he learned to cook, but he went west in the early 1980s when the whole California-cuisine scene started to happen. Specifically, he went to work for Chez Panisse, the world-famous restaurant in Berkeley. During some of his almost twenty years there, Chris was a forager—a person who goes out to local farms to find the freshest, most delicious ingredients possible.
Chris was ten years younger than my parents, on the tail end of the hippie generation. Like my mom and dad, who built their own house and raised their own food, Chris had the urge to make a connection to something tangible, something real. One day, as we trimmed some meat, he told me that he had considered starting a farm, too, but in the end decided that he had too much to learn from the city. His craft would be cooking. When he discovered the art of curing meat, it became his lifelong obsession.
It was the 1980s, and a law in America had banned the import of bone-in prosciutto, so Chris began working on making his own for his customers at Chez Panisse. “My first prosciuttos were too salty,” he said. “They tasted too meaty, not flavorful like the ones from Italy.” Then he got his hands on a small booklet of guidelines for Italian prosciutto. (“There were no books then, as there are now,” said Chris.) Though it wasn’t a recipe, it did help him figure out that the pig legs he was using were too small. He had to source bigger pigs than his regular supplier provided. He found a farmer in Oregon who raised pigs fed on pasture. The booklet specified that the animals must weigh more than 240 pounds, so Chris asked the farmer to grow them to full size. Also, the booklet said there should be only 3 percent salt—Chris had been using too much.
His experiment was a painfully slow process: it would be eighteen months before he would know whether it had been successful. He remembered at one point looking at tiny flies on the prosciutto hanging in the Chez Panisse curing room that he had built. He fretted about them. But when he went on a tour of prosciutto makers in Italy—where the restaurant had sent him to learn traditional methods from the salumi masters—he realized that the flies were a good omen.
“I remember standing in this world-class prosciutto maker’s drying room—it was just massive, just massive space—when I saw the same little flies,” said Chris. “I didn’t want to be rude, pointing out the flies, so I waited.” When the tour was over, he pulled the guy aside and asked about them. “I said, ‘What are these?’ ” The ham maker explained that the flies were a normal part of the curing process, nothing to worry about. Chris was exhilarated.
Next came salami making. Again, through trial and error, trips to Europe, and an apprenticeship with a master salami maker, Chris finally solidified his process and recipes.
Chris said that when some Italian customers found out the salumi plate was made in house, they were “surprised, then dubious, then surprised again. I had one guy say, ‘This is very good, but this is not prosciutto.’ ” Chris laughed. Hard-core traditionalists say you can’t make prosciutto in a place so close to the sea. They say it must be a hundred kilometers or more from the ocean, which Chris thought was totally arbitrary.
He cut into the soriano—the Petit Jesus—and held it up to the light. The slice was almost four inches in diameter, with clear distinction between the larger chunks of meat and the finer ground meat. Zingy and meaty, with a spicy start from the smoked paprika and a hot finish from the bird’s-eye pepper, this was clearly his favorite. Nobody else in America made this salami.
Chris said if you cut into most salami, you’ll see the silver skin, the air pockets, the too-uniform, hot-dog-like look that marks a mass-produced product. This one made by Chris was like a stained-glass window—fat alternating with meat in an inconsistent, artisanal way. It was truly beautiful. And delicious.
Near the end of August, and the conclusion of my apprenticeship, Chris agreed that I could bring one of the pigs to the restaurant after the kill. We clearly amused each other. During my training, Chris had shown me knife moves and I had told farm stories and made jokes. He said it would take two days to deconstruct Big Guy and make, with my clumsy help, salami, coppas, and prosciutto. All I had to do was find someone to kill the pigs.
“There’s an Anthony Bourdain quote I love,” Chris told me as he trimmed some pork bellies, evening them up so he could show me how to roll them into pancetta, another thing we would be making with my pig: “Every time I pick up the phone, something dies.”
“Yeah, I gotta find someone to execute those fuckers,” I said.
As the time grew closer, my attempts to hire an assassin were getting desperate. No one wanted to come to Oakland to kill my pigs. One traveling butcher laughed. “We do farm kills,” he said, “but you don’t have a farm.” Maybe he sensed, over the phone, my hackles rising, because he started to backpedal. “I mean, you have a farm, but nobody’s going to go all the way down there.”
After I hung up, I went out to the pigsty and poured a fresh bed of sawdust. The pigs loved it and rolled around happily. I had to dash out of the pen quickly, though, because lately they had started to scare me a little bit. Little Girl would pull urgently on my shirttails—not because she wanted to tell me something but because, I think, she wanted to drag me down and eat me.
Every other farm animal had taken a backseat to the pigs. I didn’t know how many rabbits we had or whether the chickens were getting enough food—I could only think of the pigs. Even my family and friends had taken second place behind the pigs. I hadn’t talked to my mom or sister in weeks. Willow went Dumpster diving with Bill and me sometimes, but I could tell her heart wasn’t in it. Bill and I had grown closer, though. After a sweaty night of summer Dumpster diving, we would share the bathtub, wash each other’s backs, and marvel at the treasures we had found that night, and the porcine treasures that were growing larger and larger in our backyard.
The pigs had grown so big, the other animals were scared of them. The chickens avoided them. I kept the young turkeys, suddenly fairly large, in a separate pen so they wouldn’t be eaten.
And though I wanted to kill the pigs myself—perhaps with Bobby’s assistance—I recognized that this might be a job for a professional. To harvest a thirty-pound turkey, to kill a three-pound rabbit—in retrospect, that seemed so easy. Done at home, with simple tools. But to kill two animals that weigh more than I do—for some reason, this fact was significant—made it a big deal. Fi
nishing the pigs was to be the pinnacle of my urban-farming experiences. And the nights were growing longer and colder. It was getting to be hog-killing time.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
After a few more days of phone calls and e-mails, I found a killer, and a woman at that.
A butcher named Jeff, whom I had found up north, had agreed to break down the smaller pig and directed me to a slaughterhouse close to his shop. Sheila’s slaughterhouse. I dialed her immediately. I needed to get a firm date so I could tell Chris when Big Guy would arrive.
“Oh, I hate the Bay Area,” she told me when she heard that I lived in Oakland. But she agreed—all I had to do was get the pigs to her ranch, and she would take care of everything.
“I do kills on Fridays,” she said, “so just bring them by on a Friday.” Any Friday. It seemed rather cavalier. I told her I would be there on a Friday in September, and felt reassured that all was well.
As the date approached I would remember unanswered questions—Where was her slaughterhouse exactly? Should I starve them the day before? Could I get the offal?—but when I called, I would get her answering machine. The outgoing message was in Spanish and English. I left long messages with my questions but received exactly zero calls back, which made me nervous.
Her butcher friend, Jeff, was a bit easier to contact. He had three phone numbers and always answered. He promised that the pig would be butchered to spec, wrapped, and ready to pick up the following week.
“But I want the heads,” I said. Chris had told me about the most amazing book, The Whole Beast. The author, Fergus Henderson, pointed out that all parts of an animal should be eaten, not just the prime cuts. Eating livers and kidneys and brains was a tasty way to not waste an animal’s life. The book begins with “Seven Things I Should Mention.” Henderson’s number one: “This is a celebration of cuts of meat, innards, and extremities that are more often forgotten or discarded in today’s kitchen; it would seem disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast: there is a set of delights, textural and flavorsome, which lie beyond the fillet.”
I was very eager to try all kinds of delights—head cheese, pig’s ears, trotters.
“Oh, you’ll have to talk to Sheila about that,” Jeff said.
“And the blood,” I added, remembering boudin noir, French blood sausage.
Sheila.
But she wasn’t answering. On Labor Day, after leaving three messages in as many days, I again called the Wild Rose, her slaughterhouse.
“Novella, we’re barbecuing,” Sheila said. “We’re open Monday through Friday.”
“But I need to have a few questions answered,” I said, shocked that she had picked up and struggling to remember what my questions were.
“How long does it take?” I asked, finally, lamely.
“Half an hour for each pig,” she said.
“And can I watch?” I said, rummaging through my bag.
“Yes. OK, Novella, we’ll see you on Friday,” Sheila said, and hung up the phone.
Listening to the dial tone, I found my list:
• what time to arrive?
• does she cool them off?
• what about the head?
• should I bring buckets for the blood and offal?
• directions
Oh, well.
The Saturday before I would take the pigs to get killed, my neighbor—the husband of the beautiful Vietnamese woman who had handed Harold to me across the fence—approached me as I took out the trash.
“Excuse me,” he said. We’d mostly just waved at each other, never had a conversation. “Your pigs”—he pointed behind the gates where the pigs were biting each other and squealing over some toothsome bucket of slop—“are smelling very bad.”
I nodded. I had cleaned out the bunny cages and thrown the soiled straw into the pig pen, thinking that the pigs would enjoy it. Surprisingly, they didn’t touch it. Big mistake. The ammonia smell from the rabbit pee festered in the sun and blended with six months’ worth of pig shit to cause a reeking smell. “My little girl,” he said, and gestured at a little munchkin wearing pigtails, “almost vomited the other day, it smelled so bad. Can you move them over to the garden?”
“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I’m going to have them out of here next week. I’ll make sure to put down more sawdust. I’ll get on it right away,” I stammered.
I bent down to the little girl.
“I’m sorry, sweetie,” I said. She lit up with a smile and squeaked. I’ve never felt like such a complete ass. Who would ever want me for a neighbor? All of this looks good on paper and sounds good in theory, but what about the difficulties and challenges?
I had discovered a fascinating how-to book called The Integral Urban House, published in the 1970s, about a house that featured a rabbitry, chicken coops, fish ponds, and composting toilets. The house sprouted up during the eco-movement of the time in an attempt to illustrate a perfect system for growing your own food in the city. I loved the line drawings of a mustachioed man butchering a rabbit.
Chris remembered the house, specifically how the residents of the house used to shock visitors by killing a rabbit or a chicken in order to show them where their meat came from. In the end, the house lasted only a few years—people who lived there couldn’t keep up with the work, some of the systems didn’t function very well (I heard the composting toilet was a disaster), and of course the neighbors, as they have throughout history, complained.
This was one of my biggest problems. In the case of the pigs, I had to admit it: I had become a neighborhood pest. Then I did what every person who has ever felt that they were in the doghouse, that they were incontrovertibly wrong, that if they were to appear in front of Judge Judy, she would take the other guy’s side, would do: I bought a dozen roses—peach ones—from the farmer’s market and left them on my neighbor’s porch with an apologetic note and an offer of pork chops.
The next day, I saw the man again.
“Thank you for the roses.” He smiled and looked at me in a way that told me all was forgiven. But he didn’t want any pork chops, thank you. He wasn’t vegetarian; I think he just didn’t believe that these urban pigs would taste very good.
I was pretty worried about that, too. But I couldn’t dwell on my flavor fears, because over the next few days my primary worry was the logistics of the killing operation. I would have to beg, borrow, and possibly steal in order to get the pigs up north. I had no truck. I had no trailer. I considered renting a U-Haul van, but at $200, it was too expensive. At one point, in the middle of my trailer worries, I again contemplated doing the job myself.
“We could borrow a gun from someone in the neighborhood,” said Bill. He pointed out that we could hang them from the stairs in order to gut them. It would be easier, I thought. But no, the idea of butchering a pig by reading a book seemed more insane than driving sixty miles north to have the animal taken care of by a professional.
“I’ll learn for next time,” I said. Sheila, though she had been hard to reach, would surely guide me through the process. She would maybe even let me pull the trigger. It was terribly important that I knew their death would be comfortable and fast, humane and not scary.
I started a countdown for the pigs and posted photos on my blog. Miraculously, no PETA people showed up to free the pigs. We Dumpster dived for the last time on a Wednesday. The pig-meat gods dripped fat upon us, because it was the best haul we’d ever gotten. Peaches in boxes, so easy to load up. As many melons as we wanted. Crunchy lettuces, plums. In the cheese Dumpster we struck gold: spent ricotta, balls of mozzarella—a whole bucket’s worth. Bill and I actually had to rein ourselves in. We only needed enough pig food for one more day.
The pigs’ noses were coated with white ricotta by midnight, then washed clean by the moisture from the lettuces, and finally sticky with peach nectar. Then they had no more food, except for a bucket of peaches I reserved to lure them into the trailer.
The trailer. I borrowed a
friend’s Ford F-250 with a trailer hitch and rented a Harley-Davidson trailer from some people off the Internet.
“We weren’t going to do it,” the guy told me when we hooked up the trailer. “We had some nasty animal experiences. One lady used a trailer to transport her rabbits, and we could not get the stench out.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to line this with a tarp and sawdust and hay.”
He nodded. He wore a faded, handmade shirt that read RICK JAMES’S BITCH.
But underneath my calm veneer, I was sweating it. Rick James’s Bitch was renting me a trailer that usually transported motorcycles. It was shiny and black. I pulled away, tooted the horn. Back tomorrow afternoon. I thought about how it would all be over by then. What relief I would feel.
Early the next morning, Bill and I plotted the pig capture. We had a series of gates that they would pass through. One held the pigs in; when we had first gotten them, we had even had to add a lock to prevent them from escaping. Another separated the street from the house with a narrow pathway. And behind that was yet another gate. It was the perfect hog run. We parked the trailer butted up to the last gate. I put a bucket of peaches in the rear.
“Load ’em up!” Bill said. He had to go to the auto-parts store to get some glow plugs for a car he had been working on.
“OK.” I walked over to their gate. They were groaning with hunger. They hadn’t had a bite in something like twelve hours. A record. I undid the gate and—nothing. All the sawdust and food scraps had buried the bottom of the door and wedged it shut. The pigs pushed and nuzzled the chain-link fence. Big Guy crashed all of his three hundred pounds against the gate, but it still wouldn’t open.
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