Killing It

by Camas Davis

  For the second course, she brought out a terrine of silky, peppery garlic soup for each table. Jehanne’s broth was sturdy and soothing, made rich by way of slow-cooked, roasted duck bones and a lot of minced garlic from her garden. Water. Bones. Garlic. Salt. Pepper. Plus, an egg or two whisked in to achieve that silkiness. That was it, and yet it very quickly fortified us, inspiring us to sit up a little straighter.

  Next, slices of toasted bread, which Jehanne instructed us to rub with a clove of garlic before slathering her award-winning rillettes onto it. Jehanne made her rillettes by picking and shredding the meat from the bones she used to make her soup broth and whipping that meat with rendered duck fat. She seasoned her spreadable, rough pâté with just salt and pepper, rendering its flavor earthy transformative. Like confit, rillettes was a recipe born out of resourcefulness, out of a desire to waste nothing, to use every single part of the animal whose life we took for food. Jehanne’s rillettes possessed the flavor and texture of débrouillardise.

  A platter of duck confit with lentils and bitter garden greens arrived. I’d eaten confit many times at restaurants back in the States, but this duck looked and tasted different. The meat was dark red, almost purple, as opposed to a light pink. It possessed structure and bite, its texture sturdy, even if at the same time it was tender and falling off the bone.

  “It’s the fat that makes this duck taste Gascon,” Kate said. “You’ll never find this back home unless you raise the duck like Jehanne does.”

  I nearly protested. Of course I could find a Jehanne back home. I lived in Portland, after all. If anyone was doing what Jehanne was doing in the United States, I would find her there. But I didn’t really know who or what I would find back home. I hadn’t known what I should look for until I came to Gascony.

  NINETEEN

  Learning a new skill, especially as an adult, requires you to forget what you know, or what you think you know, on a regular basis.

  By my fourth week working with the Chapolards, I felt I’d watched them break down enough sides that I could do it myself without too much trouble. I even sat down with Christiane before lunch at her house one day to show her what I knew, drawing for her a rough sketch of a side of pig and then, without much help from Christiane, labeling, in French and English, each of the primals and subprimals. I was also able to draw where, more or less, each primal should be cut and indicate which bones I would subsequently have to remove. I had this. I’d put on my reporter’s cap and gleaned all the information I could. I’d done all my homework.

  A few days later, Bruno and Dominique let both Jonathan and me cut up our own sides of pork in the salle de découpe. Kate, our proud mother, came to take pictures.

  In one of the pictures, I’m holding a meat saw in my right hand. Dominique had offered it to me to assist in removing the back leg, since I was running into some trouble getting my knife through a particularly tricky bone. To make the saw go, I’ve stepped one of my back legs behind me for leverage, as if at the starting line of a race, grinding my foot into the ground. The front of my body leans at a forty-five-degree angle toward the metal table. My left hand rests on the pig’s rear end and I’m mustering all the power I can to send energy into the saw, which I’m pushing away from my body with all my might.

  Dominique watched me until I finally got through the sacrum. “Camees, when you work on the pig, stand up straight, breathe, and smile.”

  He said something to Kate.

  “If you angle the saw correctly and the teeth are facing the right direction,” Kate translated, “you shouldn’t have to work that hard.”

  In theory, I understood which bones to cut through, which muscles to separate from which muscles. But when I employed my body to do the job, none of that really mattered. My body knew nothing. And my body was the most important part of completing this task in front of me. I needed my body to learn, too. I needed to remember where my arm should be, how my elbow needed to move, how to keep my wrist and back straight. And so my body felt like a new and awkward tool, as if I’d moved my hands in front of my eyes and realized for the first time that they were my hands to move and not someone else’s.

  Dominique moved my ham out of the way and asked me what came next.

  “I’m going to remove the trotter and hock from the shoulder,” I said. He nodded in approval.

  I set the saw down, picked up a short, flexible boning knife, sliced through the small amount of skin, fat, and muscle that surrounded the ankle joint, and began bending my knife in between the joint’s awkward curves, searching for the ligament that held the two knuckle-shaped bones together. Then a quick snap, which I could feel down the length of the knife and into my hand. I’d severed the ligament cleanly and could now separate the trotter from the hock.

  “Formidable,” Dominique said, his face brightening.

  The act of butchery is, if nothing else, an immediate one requiring you to locate your own body, but also the pig’s body, in the present tense. As I located each ligament, each line of fascia, each muscle and tendon, I began to see this pig’s individual, particular road map. Sure, every pig has a front leg and a back leg, a belly and a loin, but I was beginning to see tiny differences in bone and muscle development between each pig—the tributaries, the barely discernible dirt roads. Being able to see the subtleties of each pig’s individual road map seemed essential, because each pig was different. Were I working in an industrialized meat-processing facility, butchering hundreds of pig carcasses every day, I imagine there simply wouldn’t be enough time to be able to read each animal in this way.

  Yet it was precisely through these readings that the Chapolards could tell whether the quality of the wheat and barley they grew for their pigs was sufficient. Were their pigs getting enough exercise? Were they sick or healthy? Fat or lean? Were they slaughtering them at the right age? Had the breeding lines remained pure? In order to ascertain this information, they needed their own bodies to be in close proximity to those of the animals.

  What might it be like if we all lived in such close proximity to the animals we ate? If we had to perform, or at least be witness to, the work of these saws and knives and cleavers in order to put meat on our own tables? How much meat might we eat then? How much might we be willing to pay for someone else to do the close reading for us if we understood the difficult paradox it required?

  * * *

  —

  WITH THE BACK and front legs removed, I turned my attention to the loin and belly. Dominique gave me the option of turning the loin into pork chops or roasts.

  I have, since childhood, been extremely biased against pork chops. It was the only “fancy” cut I remember eating as a kid—or at least the only one more expensive than ground meat or stew cubes—so whenever my mom cooked pork chops, it often felt like a special occasion. But she’d cook them for so long that I’d sit at the table for what felt like hours, chewing. I found them to be dry and unpleasant, no matter how delicious a sauce my mother made, and so, early on in life, I concluded that all pork chops were bad.

  If you ask my mom why she overcooks pork chops, she’ll tell you that she simply doesn’t like “bloody meat.” If I explain to her that there’s no blood in meat, because the animal is bled after slaughter and well before we eat it, she’ll say she simply finds any hint of rawness “disgusting.”

  Her answers have always struck me as irrational, but she is most definitely not alone in her reaction. In fact, her tough pork chops can probably be credited to a tiny roundworm called trichina. Discovered in the mid-1800s, trichinae can infect carnivorous and omnivorous animals, from domestic pigs to wild cougars. If humans eat undercooked meat from infected animals, they, too, can contract trichinosis, which can result in a whole host of unpleasant symptoms and even death. The major reason that pigs used to get trichinosis? They were fed uncooked table scraps and animal carcasses that were already infected, or they came into contact with the carcasses of
other infected wild animals. Industrial farming, which brought pigs indoors, mostly eliminated the latter. But it wasn’t until the 1980s that feeding uncooked food scraps and waste to domestic pigs became illegal, so the only way to ensure that we didn’t get trichinosis was to cook our pork really well. To be safe, the USDA suggests cooking ground pork and organ and variety meats until the internal temperature reaches 160 degrees Fahrenheit, and raw steaks, chops, and roasts to a minimum of 145 degrees, though trichinae can’t live for more than a minute in 140-degree temperatures.

  In other words, maybe my mom’s disgust at the thought of “bloody meat” is really about a passed-down, mostly subconscious avoidance of sickness.

  However, if indoor and outdoor pigs are managed properly, and their exposure to potential carriers is eliminated, trichinosis is not a problem. And the thing is, pork chops—especially chops from the young, lean pigs we raise in the States—really do become dry, chewy, and hard if you cook them to that temperature. This, I would eventually learn, is because the loin muscle that pork chops come from is a structural support muscle, its job being primarily to hold up the pig’s body. It’s not used for locomotion in the same way that shoulder or leg muscles—which must move in a slow, sustained manner almost constantly—are. Thus, the fibers of the loin muscle are bundled quite differently than locomotive muscles, such that the loin contains much less connective tissue—what we often refer to as gristle—within the muscle. As a result, structural support muscles like the loin and the tenderloin are typically more tender to begin with, requiring a faster, hotter cooking method, whereas any locomotive muscle or cut containing that gristle will require a longer and slower cooking time in order to render that tough gristle more tender. Cooked right, both kinds of muscles can be tender, but cooked wrong, they will be tough. Too much high heat for too long, for instance, will cause a loin muscle’s proteins to bind tightly together and never let go, hence all my chewing at the dinner table.

  Despite knowing that pork chops, when cooked right, could be delicious, I chose to cut the loin into roasts. Plus, I wanted to try my hand at what I had seen Dominique do that first week: opening the pig like a book.

  With the tip of my knife, I gently traced around the tip of each rib until I could get underneath the rib cage and begin carving long lines with my knife, to release the fence of ribs. I didn’t yet understand how to create a smooth line between rib and belly, so I covered the belly with hack marks that I’d have to go back and smooth out with my knife later.

  I knew in my brain that the loin muscle curved up into the spine and that I had to be careful to curve my knife along with it, but my hand and body didn’t know this yet, so I shaved about a quarter of the loin off along with the column of vertebrae I removed. I completed the cuts I was supposed to, but in rough and imprecise ways. My bones had meat on them and they were not supposed to. The loin muscle was missing its top side.

  Kate and Dominique were forgiving. We can always make saucisse, they said.

  After Jonathan and I finished cutting our sides of pork, it was quitting time. My hands and legs and arms felt sore. I’d mostly white-knuckled my way through and worked way too hard, but I’d completed my task. I’d not gotten lost too many times, and next time, I thought, maybe my body would remember all the tricky curves.

  * * *

  —

  SINCE JULY 4 was right around the corner, Kate and Jonathan and I planned to throw a party and roast a suckling pig for it. We’d make barbecue sauce, baked beans, and potato salad. We’d invite all our American and French friends to play boules and drink cold rosé with us.

  There’s another picture Kate took that day in the cutting room, of Dominique and me posing with a freshly harvested suckling pig that we’d bought from the Chapolards. I’m not fond of that picture now. In it, we’re clearly calling attention to how small the pig is, looking upon the pig as we would a human baby, in a joking sort of way. While Kate took the picture, Dominique told me he didn’t like suckling pigs because they had no meat on them and tasted like nothing.

  “Tourists like it, though.”

  On the way to Kate’s, I asked her to explain.

  “You slaughter your pigs really young in America, at about six months. The Chapolards slaughter their pigs at twelve months, sometimes more. The beef I buy in Gascony comes from cows that are usually four to seven years old. Your beef comes from animals that are closer to two years, or even less. You guys like your meat to taste mild. We like meat with character, with well-developed fat and connective tissue, which are what give meat flavor.”

  I asked her if the age of the animal also explained the rich color of the Chapolards’ pork, which was so much redder than the pale pink pork I normally ate back home.

  “Exactly,” she said. “The redder the pork, the older it is, typically; the more the pig has moved around, the more concentrated flavor it’s going to have.” Pork in America largely came from young factory-farmed pigs that barely moved around during their lifetimes.

  Americans eat a whopping 265 pounds of meat per capita per year, second only to Australia. Perhaps this lack of flavor and texture in American meat—not to mention its low price—explained why a sixteen-ounce rib eye had become a central point of pride on our dinner plates. Did we have to eat that entire sixteen-ounce rib eye just to feel sated? How would our meat eating differ if we ate older animals, animals allowed to move around, fed a diverse diet—animals with complex flavor and texture, which necessarily cost more because they had to be fed for a longer period of time? We’d probably eat a lot less meat, like my friends in Gascony did.

  * * *

  —

  FOR OUR INDEPENDENCE DAY PARTY, I made pimento cheese with French Mimolette instead of American cheddar, which I could not find—and smoked a pork shoulder for pulled pork, to make up for the fact that the suckling pig had such a small amount of meat on it.

  I’d lost all my enthusiasm for roasting the suckling pig, which, now that Dominique and Kate had schooled me, felt like a pointless waste. In fact, I decided this would be the last suckling pig I’d ever eat or roast.

  That evening, while we Americans proudly, if a touch ironically, drank cheap beer from cans and piled our plates high with food, our French friends picked at their food.

  “What is this orange stuff?” Dominique asked me, sniffing the pimento cheese suspiciously.

  Our French guests didn’t eat much of the suckling pig, and they asked why our baked beans were so sweet.

  “We add brown sugar and molasses,” I told them.

  “Why would you do that?” Kate’s friend Vètou, a surly woman with a strong patois who had taught Kate much of what she knew about Gascon cooking, asked us. “You can’t taste the beans.”

  TWENTY

  A week after our Independence Day party, my friend Eugenie arrived from Portland to take photos for Kate’s new Web site in exchange for a week or two of room and board. Bill, a twentysomething ex–professional skateboarder and recent culinary school graduate, also showed up. After Bill and Eugenie settled in and we all found our new rhythm together, Kate challenged all of us to preserve one whole pig in one hundred pressure-cooked mason jars, give or take. We were allowed to preserve the pig in ways other than the mason jars, but she needed to be able to store just about all of it in her piggery without refrigeration. The entire pig would feed Kate and her students and dinner guests for the next year, and she didn’t have a lot of freezer space, so we would need to use what we learned over the past five weeks to figure it out. Jonathan and I would each get a side of pork from the Chapolards to break down on Kate’s kitchen counter, and then the five of us would attempt to turn everything into food.

  This would be my third time breaking down a side of pig by myself—this time without the help of the Chapolards, although Kate would be there to guide us.

  As I separated each of the primals, I contemplated the role each muscle played i
n the pig’s everyday movements—movements that made the meat look as red as it did, or as pale, or as filled with fat, or as tightly or loosely grained—so that once I’d taken it all apart, I could still remember where each muscle had come from and apply my knowledge of each muscle’s story in the kitchen.

  My internal dialogue with the muscles in front of me went something like this: “Hello, coppa, it’s nice to meet you. You live at the front end of the loin, just around the corner from the jowl. Back home in the States, you make up part of the Boston butt and you live upstairs from the ‘picnic.’ You work hard every day while the pig roots around and shakes its head yes and no and maybe and eats and drinks water. And because you work so hard, in the same way, over and over, every day, you have well-developed muscles with a lot of connective fat and tissue in between them and even more flavor. You will be tough to get to know until we render you soft and tender. You can stand a little heat over a long period of time. ‘Slow and low’ is your motto. But you also don’t mind sitting in a whole lot of salt before being hung out to dry.”

  To get better at this, to become an expert reader of the pig’s road map, I would need to repeat this process again and again when I got home, but I couldn’t very well afford to buy myself that many sides of pig to work on with my meager unemployment checks. And even if I could, I was no longer sure I wanted that much meat in my life.

  As Jonathan and I parceled out our sides, we began to make piles just as the Chapolards had shown us. One for sausage meat. One for all the hams we would salt and smoke. One for the ham meat we’d use to make jambon de Tonneins, a highly herbaceous Gascon version of pulled pork, but made from the back leg instead of the shoulder. On the stove we had a pot going for some of the extra fat, which we would render and use to make rillettes or gratton. We started another pile for pâté, which we planned to seal in jars. We would make gelatinous stock out of the bones and skin, and Kate could use that for canning beans or tomatoes from her garden. We kept the bellies whole to make ventrèche, which we would smoke and then hang, along with the hams, in Kate’s piggery, the coolest room of her house. Any other belly scraps would be added to the rillettes or pâté piles.