Huelva is a place that the rest of Spain jokes is backward. As Wales is to England. Tasmania to mainland Australia. And like Wales and Tasmania, the prejudice towards this region is matched by the beautiful reality, and the open-mindedness of the inhabitants that is misinterpreted by outsiders as naivety or backwardness. Apart from a few mining scars from the Rio Tinto mines and an as-yet-not-overdeveloped coastline, much of the region is sierra covered in forest.
The Sierra de Aracena is some of the most beautiful and bucolic landscape in Spain. Roads carved from the hillside, long before cars, are so narrow that you have to slow down. They rise along ridges to reveal green mountain valleys covered in forests of cork oak, holm oak, chestnut and fragrant scrub. The roads drop into the valley floors where clearings have been made for small farms. The fences are dry stone, and in the shade of ancient oak, lay cattle. Nestled in a saddle between two small mountains is the town of Linares de la Sierra. It is a white stone village separated from the forest by a snaking stream. On its flood plains are the huertas or kitchen gardens. Beyond the huertas is la dehesa, a massive swathe of forest that covers 2.5 million hectares of south-west Spain and eastern Portugal. A lot of it has been declared parkland.
To think of it like a national park would be wrong. While almost no commercial activity is allowed in a national park, the forest around Linares de la Sierra, and much of this part of the world, has been farmed for centuries. In Spain this process is called la ganadería, in which animals are raised in the outdoors. Think shepherds protecting and moving their flocks. In some parts of the country, great flocks of sheep are herded across large distances, including through the heart of towns and villages in la trashumancia. The forest around Linares de la Sierra is the foraging grounds for the village’s pigs. The pigs are fed grain and scraps, and so return to their feeding spot daily. However, they are free to roam the oak and chestnut forest during the rest of the day, eating the autumn fall of nutrient-rich acorns and chestnuts as well as feeding on grasses, insects and the worms and tubers they find as they root about in the earth.
They are large black pigs. They are not the famous Iberico pigs used for making jamón. They are mongrel pigs that over the years have been bred to suit the local conditions. The locals just call them autóctono or autochthonous. All the town’s pigs are slaughtered by just one man. He is the town’s matachín. It is a role that is passed down through the town’s men.
We met with Juan Marquez, who was Linares de la Sierra’s matachín for many decades. His granddaughter Laura welcomed us into his home, settled us into chairs and went to fetch her grandfather. The thick stonewalled cottage had been renovated in recent years, the walls lined with plaster and the old roof covered with a plaster ceiling. There were photographs on the wall of Juan as a handsome young man with sweeping black hair and sporting a broad-shouldered suit. The slim woman next to him in the photos was presumably Laura’s grandmother, for they both had the same slim waist, round hips, long but refined nose, and full lips wearing the same smile. Juan was now old and almost completely deaf. He came in and was helped into his chair by Laura. He was warm and welcoming but seemed perplexed as to why we had come from so far away to learn about his time as the town matachín. Not bewildered. Interested. We paid our dues, showed our respect, and explained our mission to learn about the annual killing of the pig and making the jamóns and sausages. Juan seemed comfortable with our explanation and began to tell his story.
‘I killed my first pig when I was still quite young,’ he began, sitting upright and pleased but not proud to have an attentive audience.
It was always a busy time in the village and something we all looked forward to. There was always so much to be done. So much work and preparation. Washing of tools and gathering of wood. All the boys in the village would crowd around the matachín when he stuck the pig. We would watch the pig as the blood flowed out and someone caught it in a pan. I never knew a pig had so much blood inside him. I would help cut the pig in two. Here in Linares we don’t [until recently] have modern chillers, so we still cool our pigs on the cold stone pavers that line the village streets. The old matachin saw I was taking great interest but was not as gruesome as the other boys. Then one day, when I was fourteen, he took me aside and quietly said, ‘Now it is your turn’.
For Juan this was a grave duty. He was responsible not just for dispatching the town’s pigs but for doing so in a suitable manner. Almost all of the meat from the pigs would be turned into sausages: chorizo, morcon and morcilla. The legs would be made into jamóns. A pig that dies well will leave a body still full of muscle sugar (glycogen) that is turned into lactic acid during fermentation, in the case of producing sausages, or by enzymes when producing jamón. A nice acidic sausage or jamón resists bacterial attack as it dries. When a sausage or jamón is dry it is shelf stable and can safely last for years if stored correctly. The calmer the pig is at its death the better the quality of the sausage. If a pig is terrified at its death it uses all its muscle sugar trying to escape. The meat won’t ferment as well and there is a greater chance the sausages will spoil.
Resting his hand over his heart, Juan said:
I love animals. I really love them. I love my friends and family too. More. It was my responsibility not only to provide families with meat and smallgoods to feed them over the long cold winters, but I was also chosen to be the one person in the village to make sure the pigs did not needlessly suffer. The other young men did not have the steady hand. They were too bloodthirsty. The pig would look into their eyes and know they had death on their mind.
I don’t know if his eyes were just rheumy but there were little tears forming in their corners. Laura held his hand.
The words ‘the pig would look into their eyes’ struck me. There was another pig I remember. It looked me in the eye. His name was Gub-Gub. He was the pig I raised for the family Christmas dinner. I, like Juan had been, was fourteen. I bought Gub-Gub as a piglet from a neighbour and named him after the pig in Doctor Dolittle, one of the first animals with whom the lead character in the 1967 film learned to talk. Gub-Gub was small and black. He liked his back scratched and to chase chickens. He in turn was chased by the cows. He loved mud, grass, warm wheatmeal and plastic pots. On our neighbouring farm lived a Bavarian butcher who spent his weekend mornings killing animals and turning them into leberkäse, landjäger, and bloodwurst. He was a fine butcher, who had his own high-speed mincing machine that looked like a torture device from an early James Bond film. He had a recipe for every part of the animal and would sing when slaughtering and yodel when smoking his sausages. With limited English and a voice like gravel he warned me early on, between puffs from his hand-rolled cigarette, that ‘A pig is not a pet. For both of your sakes, do not let it become your friend.’
Christmas drew near and the pig got fatter. I fed him warm pollard and grains, and scraps from the kitchen. I’d scratch his back and he’d grunt contentedly. He’d follow me around the yard and I would throw him weeds over the fence as I tended the vegetable garden. He’d play with them and throw them back, like a dog with a stick.
One day, Gub-Gub followed me over to my neighbour’s. I had already been there earlier in the morning, filling an old bathtub with water and lighting a gas burner under it. Hot water removes the hair from a pig. Pigs have a funny gait, as if their hips were not finished properly when they were invented. Gub-Gub walked over the paddocks, stopping to root around in a particularly rich patch of weeds, then gingerly approached the gravel driveway. He didn’t like gravel on his trotters.
Gub-Gub followed me into the old dairy where my neighbour did his killing. The butcher looked at neither of us. He went about his preparations like a dentist going through his array of scrapers, sticks and mirrors. He sharpened one particularly worn knife. It had a thin curved blade and dark wooden handle. He took a rope, looped it a few times around itself to create a noose, and in one deft movement had Gub-Gub the pig hogtied. ‘Hold this under the knife,’ he said, passing me a shall
ow enamel dish. He took the knife and pushed it into Gub-Gub’s neck. He didn’t just slice, he gouged it around to open up the wound to let more blood flow. Gub-Gub squealed in terror. The dying pig fought against the rope and squealed again. He looked me in the eye, then his eyes saw nothing. That look of betrayal is something I carry with me always.
The bell rang out across the village. Laura placed her hand on her grandfather’s shoulder. Our time with him was up; they had a priest to listen to. ‘Because every death is different so every carcass must be prepared differently,’ said Juan. ‘I was the matachín and I was followed by the gandinguera.’ She is the guardian of the traditional recipes. Juan told us that she would help the families on the day of the matanza. ‘She would take a little sample of their sausage mixture, la preuba,’ he explained, ‘and fried it. She would taste it and suggest more salt, less pepper, more smoked paprika, less thyme.’ Those ingredients contain different bacteria-retarding compounds and the amount of salt can alter the fermentation of the sausages. Complex food science that was determined by taste, not probes.
‘La matanza was always considered a festive day,’ continued Juan. ‘All the village had so much fun. Except for the pig.’
THE TEMPTATION OF JAMÓN
The following day we travelled to the small town of Corteconcepción. We were there to find the Eiriz family of jamón makers. We had instructions to head to the town laundry and that the factory would be opposite that. We stopped a builder and asked directions, and he pointed towards the village centre. Very quickly the road gave way to old mule track. We parked the car and walked. The mule track narrowed to a 2-abreast walking path. We followed the directions from old women, perplexed to see a group of grown men heading to the town laundry. The laundry was outdoors. A long stone trough with well-worn corrugations either side was fed from the spring under the village. This is where women still brought their washing and scrubbed it in the running water. Several cobbled lanes verged on the washing well, the lanes lined with 2- and 3-storied white stone buildings, built sometime in the 1700s, some leaning more precariously over the lane than the others. None of them looked like a factory. It was the grunting of pigs and the braying of a lone donkey that led us to the last building opposite the laundry. There in the paddock, standing next to an old tractor, were a donkey and a middle-aged man. Judging by the way he was scratching it behind the ears and talking to it in the tone and inflection usually saved for the neonatal, the donkey was more pet than beast of burden. On the hill behind the two was a small herd of pigs lying in the sun by a small dam near the oak forest. ‘Where’s the jamón factory?’we called out. ‘Behind you. Look for the sign of the smiling pig,’ he called across the paddock as he petted his donkey.
Almost everywhere people eat pork they advertise it with a picture of a happy pig. Not just a normal-looking pig but a pig that is enthusiastically happy about being turned into ham or that has been anthropomorphised so much that you could be forgiven for thinking you were eating human flesh. When I was growing up, my father would drive us to the Dandenong Market to sell dairy calves. Dandenong was also home to The Dandenong Ham and Bacon Factory, makers of Dandy Hams. The pig that advertised the ham made from his fellow species was dressed in top hat and tails, waistcoat, striped trousers and two-tone shoes, with a cane under one arm, sported a monocle and stood joyously upright. So happy was he to see us that he doffed his top hat in a 3-motion neon animation. The pig at Jamónes Eiriz was simply smiling like a blissfully ignorant pork loon.
Domingo Eiriz is the sixth generation in his family to make jamón. He is the youngest son, gregarious, social and professional. His older brother, Manuel, the one with the pet donkey, worked on the factory floor. His other brother did other work somewhere else in the plant. Domingo led us through it. It had a modern skin of insulated aluminium, approved by the European Union health department, slipped inside to line the historic building. He explained that the pigs on the hill were ‘representative’ of the way pigs were raised in la dehesa. Kind of like a Truman Show for pigs. All the pigs for his factory are raised around the area, and sent away to be slaughtered and dismembered in another town that has the abattoirs. The bits are trucked to the factory in this little town of 600 or so, and reassembled and given another life as embutidos y jamones. Smallgoods and jamón.
The first part of the process had not changed much since the 1960s. There were still rows of women stuffing spiced and salted pork flesh and fat into sausage skins made from the cleaned entrails of pigs, which were then sewn and strung up and sent off to be fermented. This was the fate of the bits of the pig that cannot be cured into jamón or paleta (jamón is the cured back leg, paleta is the front leg). Great strings of intestines unravelled from buckets to tie off the chorizo and morcon. It was not dissimilar to a photograph in a 1970 Time Life book I have called The Cooking of Spain and Portugal. The modern scene was just better lit and the women weren’t smoking. The whole room was filled with the smell of garlic and smoky paprika.
Domingo led us through the sausage drying rooms with their forest of lomos, strips of loin muscles, hanging from racks. We walked towards the inner sanctum, los secaderos de jamón—the jamón drying rooms. We ducked as we entered a low-domed-ceiling room, open to the outside world through shuttered windows. We gasped and uttered words of amazement but the sound disappeared, absorbed by the irregular shapes of the hundreds of jamóns hanging silently from the ceiling. Their flesh was wine red, their skins gouda yellow, all decked with dark spots and patches of grey-and-white mould. These were two years old. They were some of the best hams made in Europe. Deeper tasting and considered more masculine than the pinker prosciutti of Parma, these would sell for many hundreds of euros across Spain and around the rest of Europe.
‘You must understand that making jamón is a very special process,’said Domingo. ‘It is a battle defending the jamón from the putrefying bacteria by curing it with salt and drying it in the mountain air. At the same time we are also creating a fertile place for the beneficial moulds and enzymes that transform the meat proteins into very delicious salt crystals that embed the flesh,’ he continued in wonderfully considered English. Like many Spaniards, he had done the summertime food trade shows in the United States and twanged his ‘r’s like an American. ‘Basically jamón sits somewhere between mummification and transubstantiation. It is a miracle.’
The jamón secaderos were truly beautiful. The jamóns themselves created an irregular surface that followed the contours of the building, making it look and sound as if a recording studio had been created by a meat-loving acoustic engineer. While the flesh soaked up the sound of our voices and leather boots on hard cold stone, the jamóns themselves exuded an aroma that was a mix of mushroom, camembert cheese, dried meat, sweet flesh, and a word I learned working in Scottish pub cellars when I was in my early twenties—fusty.
Domingo finished the tour by taking us to the old house. There were pot plants and mops and other clues that this was a real house and not just a showroom. You find this often in Spain where you’re taken to try food in what seems like an old-fashioned country village home or farmhouse but is in fact only used as display centre; the family has headed into the comfort of a nearby town or city, or even Madrid or Barcelona, leaving the old family home as a piece of corporate theatre.
Domingo leveraged a jamón into the oak jamoneria, the cradle that holds the jamón as one cuts it. In Spain the jamón cutter is the cortador. Add ‘dor’ or ‘ista’ at the end of a root word and you get a profession. Matador, barista. A cortador ‘corts’ or cuts jamón for a living. In Italy they are called violinieri. The prosciutto cutter holds the ham like a violin, ankle in the hand, butt under the chin, the sharp thin blade cutting back and forward over the fret-like femur as if it were a Stradivarius. Sometimes the violinieri misjudges the resistance of muscle or nicks a bone and the mis-angled blade of his knife flies into his nose. Most violinieri have a nose many NRL players would recognise. The Spanish are less flamboyant and rely
on the slightly safer jamoneria.
Go almost anywhere in Australia and ask the deli manager for prosciutto and they will finely slice it into ultra-thin slices. This is excellent when draped over a piece of sweet ripe melon or loosely wrapped around a grissini or layered across a pizza. This allows maximum surface area of the prosciutto to be exposed to the air in the mouth. Warmed by the heat of the tongue the aromatics in the fat and flesh are liberated, sending pillows of meaty fragrance up over the back of the mouth into the back of the nose—the retro-nasal part of our head, which is where we smell.
The mistake often made with fine smallgoods such as prosciutto and jamón is caterers rolling the paper-thin slices into rosettes. These we chew into a pulp, missing the point, and the experience of the delicate texture and complex aroma.
The Spanish have solved this problem by cutting their jamón into lonchas—roughly the shape of a matchbox and the thickness of a summer power bill. A loncha fits perfectly on the tongue. It is perhaps the best-designed shape on the planet for delivering the flavour of aged dried ham from the tongue into the olfactory centre.
With his long round-ended blade, fine like a fish knife, Domingo delicately cut into a 3-year-old jamón. The old kitchen—made of stone, with dark oak beams supporting the white roof, not decorated but lined with old (no, arcane) cooking implements—was filled with the aroma of some of the best sliced ham on the planet. Nuts, sweet old flesh, mushrooms. Frank Camorra was waiting quietly to one side. Cesc Castro, our researcher and great friend, was hovering nearby. He is Catalan and, by birth, should be immune to the seductive powers of Andalusian jamón. Our photographer and another good friend, Alan Benson, was quietly taking his images. I watched both of them. They were oscillating closer and closer to the plate that Domingo was preparing for us to shoot.
My Year Without Meat Page 18