by Mark Essig
Romans had a taste for blended milk, blood, and flesh that could make even a Gentile shudder. The Roman poet Martial had this to say about a roasted udder of lactating sow: “You would hardly imagine you were eating cooked sows’ teats, so abundantly do they flow and swell with living milk.” (Elsewhere, after a meal, Martial suffers the glutton’s regret and remarks upon “the unsightly skin of an excavated sow’s udder.”) This preference veered into the bizarrely cruel. Some cooks, Plutarch claimed, stomped and kicked the udders of live pregnant sows and thereby “blended together blood and milk and gore,” which was said to make the dish all the more delicious. The womb of this poor sow was eaten as well, with the dish called vulva eiectitia, or “miscarried womb.”
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and statesman, decried such dishes as “monstrosities of luxury,” and he was far from the only critic. Roman rulers passed sumptuary laws limiting the amount that could be spent on meals and forbidding the consumption of items including testicles and cheeks. But the wealthy flouted such rules because the social hierarchy couldn’t function without feasts: feasting provided the only way to learn who had grown richer and who had lost money, who was in the emperor’s favor and who had been cast out. To curtail extravagance was to deny the very reason to feast.
Eating well had become central to the Roman self-image, and not just among the elite. Meat was so important that the empire got into the business of supplying it to a broad swath of the population free of charge. The emperor Augustus had started the practice of distributing free grain and bread as a way to ensure that the citizens remained well fed and peaceful. In 270 ad the emperor Aurelian started handing out free pork to those citizens already receiving free bread. By 450 ad about 140,000 citizens—a quarter or so of the city’s population—were receiving the pork dole, five pounds a month for five months a year.
Free meat kept citizens happy but put heavy pressure on the empire’s food supply: Rome’s butchers had to process and distribute 20,000 pounds of pork every day. The emperor ensured an adequate supply by imposing a tax, payable in pigs, upon certain forested areas of Italy south of Rome. In some years these regions sent more than 30,000 pigs to Rome. Producing and distributing that much pork was no simple matter, but the empire’s farmers managed it with relative ease.
To feed the empire’s expanding population, Rome created the most sophisticated agricultural system the world had ever known. Previously, farming had been a local affair. Even in the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, production and consumption occurred within a fairly circumscribed area defined by irrigated river valleys and surrounding rangeland. By contrast, imports from outside the Italian Peninsula constituted three-quarters of Rome’s food supply.
Rome brought all of the Mediterranean world and much of Europe within its orbit, pulling in grain from Egypt, cured meats from Spain, olive oil from Syria, and spices from further east. The wheat that satisfied Caesar’s bread dole was mostly imported from North Africa, where it was collected as tax. Grain sufficient to feed hundreds of thousands of people moved around the region by ship and filled large granaries that provided insurance against famine.
Although Romans imported grain by ship, they raised nearly all of their livestock within Italy. They kept sheep primarily for wool and secondarily for milk and cheese. Goats were rare, though sometimes raised for milk. Cows offered dairy products, and oxen pulled plows in the fields and carts on the road. Meat from these animals was eaten, but it was usually a by-product rather than the principal reason for raising them. Archaeologists tell us that most butchered cattle show stress injuries to their leg bones, meaning that they worked hard before ending up in the pot. Beef and mutton came from older animals—ewes and cows whose udders had dried up, rams and bulls who had become infertile, and oxen that could no longer pull a plow.
Only pigs were raised exclusively for food. They were eaten when young and therefore were far more tender than worn-out oxen. A popular saying held, “Life was given them just like salt, to preserve the flesh”—meaning that pigs had no reason for living other than to feed people. Given how much Romans loved to feast, this was no small consideration. According to Varro, Rome’s most important agricultural writer, “the race of pigs is expressly given by nature to set forth a banquet.”
Romans created the first detailed farming manuals, which devoted special attention to pigs. The authors likely adapted farming techniques from Greece, but Greek writers were too refined to dirty their hands with practical advice. The best glimpses into Greek farms therefore appear in literature: The Odyssey describes Ulysses’s swine farm, a large operation that involved fifty sows tended by the beloved swineherd Eumaeus. Romans, by contrast, were generous with explicit husbandry advice. Varro devoted more attention to pigs than to cows, sheep, or goats and suggested that to do without pigs was unthinkable: “Who of our people cultivate a farm without keeping swine?” Pigs were the perfect meat-producing animal. Because they were raised only for food, they could be bred for flavor and weight-gaining ability rather than strength or milk production. Columella, writing in the first century ad, extolled their versatility: “Pigs can make shift in any sort of country,” finding suitable pasture “in the mountains and in the plains.” The writers offered feeding advice for each stage of a pig’s life, from piglet to lactating sow.
Roman writers paid special attention to breeding. Boars, Columella tells us, should possess “huge haunches” and be “as lustful as possible when they have sexual intercourse.” He specified similar qualities for sows and described how to build their sties and provide clean bedding for comfort. They were bred twice a year, gestating for just under four months, nursing for two, then starting over again. Some farmers kept herds of three hundred or more sows, which meant they produced thousands of pigs for market every year. With that sort of production, farmers had the incentive—and the means—to breed the perfect pig.
Or, as it turned out, two perfect pigs. Bones from Roman dumps indicate that most pigs stood sixty to seventy centimeters at the withers. Another group, smaller in number but larger in stature, stood about eighty centimeters. The shorter pigs were scattered all across the Italian Peninsula, while the taller type clustered around Rome. Roman writers confirm the existence of the two types. The smaller looked like a downsized wild boar: rangy, long-legged animals with what Columella called “very hard, dense black bristles.” This type lived in the regions south of Rome that produced pork for the public dole, wandering the forests to eat acorns, nuts, and other wild foods. They liked to “root about in the marsh and turn up worms,” Columella wrote, and “tear up the sweet-flavored rootlets of underwater growths.” The best feeding grounds for such pigs, he advised, were forests with “cork oaks, beeches, Turkey oaks, holm oaks, wild olive trees,” as well as plum and other fruit trees, for such trees “ripen at different times and provide plenty of food for the herd almost all the year round.”
Columella also described the larger variety, “smooth pigs and even white ones.” This latter type lived in sties, so it didn’t need agile legs for running through the woods or thick bristles to keep warm. Farmers fattened these pigs on wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas. Varro reports that nursing sows were fed “two pounds of barley soaked in water” daily. These fat white pigs were kept closer to Rome to feed the city’s gourmands: a feast in Satyricon features “three white hogs.” The white sows also birthed the suckling pigs that Roman diners prized. Columella advises that on all farms “near towns, the suckling pig must be turned into money” by selling it to elite households. Adult white pigs were sacrificed to the gods; sty-fed and slow of foot, they were more docile than forest pigs when facing the priestly axe. And they made impressive offerings, not only because they were expensive but also because they were white, the preferred color of the gods.
The gods demanded white because white suggested purity, and the way Roman pigs lived helps explain how they could be considered pure. In the Near East many pi
gs lived as scavengers on city streets, devouring garbage and human waste, and earned a reputation for filthiness. Rome was a cleaner place: aqueducts brought clean water, and sewers carried away filth. The Italian Peninsula, moreover, enjoyed enough rainfall to create marshes and oak forests, and trade networks brought an abundance of wheat and barley. Rather than eating carrion and garbage, Roman pigs spent their days devouring nuts in the woods or grains in the sty.
Diet had a profound effect on the pig’s flavor. In the guts of cows, sheep, and other ruminants, microorganisms digest and transform fatty acids, so what the animal eats has less influence on its flesh. Pigs, not being ruminants, lack those microorganisms, so they deposit fat in the same form they ingest it. A pig that sups on fish guts will taste very different from one that eats hazelnuts. Compared to their scavenging cousins in the Near East, Roman pigs ate well, stayed clean, and tasted delicious.
It took time, energy, and wealth to create such flavorful pork—and the sophisticated Roman system of production was able to expend all three. Rome became the first large city where tens of thousands of people had regular access to meat, and this did not come cheap. Roman pigs competed with humans for food: every pound of barley fed to a pig was a pound that didn’t feed a person. Fattening livestock on grain is an inefficient way to produce calories, and the practice was quite rare globally before about 1800. Rome was the exception. Because it controlled the region’s food supplies, the empire could afford to feed both its pigs and its people. A sophisticated economy created vast wealth, and that wealth allowed Roman pigs to grow fat.
Lean times lay ahead. When the Roman Empire fell, its white sty pigs fell with it. Rome’s small, bristly woods pigs, by contrast, landed on all four feet. They were perfectly adapted to the rough conditions of the dark medieval forest, where they would earn the respect of new generations of farmers, cooks, and diners.
SIX
The Forest Pig
In 401 ad an army of Goths swept from the Balkans into northern Italy. Soon other Germanic tribes forded the Rhine River and invaded Gaul, a region first conquered by Julius Caesar 450 years earlier. The invaders—Romans called them “barbarians”—roamed freely through the empire, capturing more territory until they finally deposed Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 ad. The Gothic tribes then divvied up western Europe: Anglo-Saxons in England, Visigoths on the Iberian Peninsula, Vandals in North Africa, Ostrogoths in Italy, Franks and Burgundians in France, Alamans in Germany. The Eastern Roman Empire—ruled out of Constantinople and often called the Byzantine Empire—survived for another millennium, but the Western Roman Empire was dead.
The fall of Rome, in the traditional view, plunged Europe into the Dark Ages—a period devoid of art, literature, fine dining, clean water, and other luxuries—from which it emerged only with the first glimmers of the Renaissance 1,000 years later. Historians more recently have proposed that there was no sudden fall from civilization to barbarity but rather a gradual transition in which the Roman and Germanic worlds blended to create new, not necessarily inferior, cultures. The jury is still out on that larger argument, but this much is true: the fall of the Roman Empire brought rapid change to the world of pigs.
Only one type of Roman pig survived the collapse. Rome’s complex networks of Mediterranean commerce disintegrated alongside the empire itself. With the disappearance of that trade and of the concentrations of wealth it had produced, there was little market for suckling pigs or large white swine. It’s hard not to see such pigs as symbolic of Rome as a whole, grown fat and lazy on the spoils of empire. Archaeologists digging in post-Roman sites don’t find any bones of large swine. Only the rangy black pigs survived. In the chaos of the empire’s fall, they snuck off into the woods to shift for themselves and soon reemerged at the heart of European culture—as the staple source of meat and fat for both rich and poor.
Pigs had long been at home in northern Europe. The region enjoys the benefits of the North Atlantic Drift, a powerful ocean current that brings ashore warm winds and year-round rains that encourages the growth of hardwood trees. Before agriculture and metal axes reached Europe, Paleolithic tribes huddled along riverbanks and seacoasts because the rest of the landscape was thick with forbidding forests, home to wolves, bears, and the Eurasian wild boar, Sus scrofa.
By about 7500 bc, those wild creatures had come to share the northern European woods with domestic animals imported from the Near East. The populations of that area’s first farming communities had grown quickly, and only migration could relieve the pressure. One group of Near Eastern farmers, traveling by boat, hopscotched along the northern coast of the Mediterranean, rounding the Iberian Peninsula in the eighth millennium bc. Another group moved overland out of Turkey and Greece, following the valleys of the Danube and Elbe Rivers and settling in central Europe at about the same time. These farmers, who soon wiped out or absorbed the local hunter-gatherer tribes, brought with them the full range of Near Eastern livestock: the bones of sheep, goats, cows, and pigs have been found at the earliest sites where they settled in Europe. Not all of these animals, however, survived in their new habitat.
Genetic studies tell us that the first wave of imported Near Eastern pigs died out and was replaced by a new strain domesticated from the wild boars native to European forests. This domestication event likely mirrored those that had happened earlier in China, the Near East, and elsewhere, when wild boars crept out of the woods to scavenge in human settlements. With guidance from Europe’s farmers, who had prior experience tending livestock, some of these wild creatures evolved into an entirely new—and yet not new at all—variety of animal: Sus scrofa domesticus, almost precisely like their cousins in the Near East but descended from a different stock of wild boars.
Livestock, pigs included, sifted themselves by climate and terrain in this changing European landscape. Goats and sheep predominated in highland regions and in dry Mediterranean lands. Cows grazed on the thick grasses of Europe’s northern fringe. Pigs reigned wherever forests remained intact. The pig-based fertility religions of the ancient Mediterranean—the same ones that gave rise to the cult of Demeter—traveled north with the first farmers. Among the Celts who occupied much of Europe, swine became symbols of war, fertility, and feasting. Celtic warriors adorned their helmets with boar bristles, and in Beowulf the hero wears a golden helmet ornamented with images of boars. In Norse mythology the fertility god Frey sports a mighty phallus and rides a golden-bristled boar, and at the festival known as Yule—later merged with Christmas—worshippers sacrificed a boar to Frey to ensure a good harvest. An Irish myth tells of pigs that were slaughtered and devoured and then, a day later, sprang back to life to be killed and eaten again—a fantastical exaggeration of the genuine fecundity of pigs.
The historical record contains a few traces of the pig-keeping practices of early Europe. In northeastern Gaul—parts of the Netherlands and Belgium today—a people known as the Salian Franks came to power and established a legal code just after the fall of Rome. They had two laws for goats, five for sheep, fourteen for cattle—and twenty for pigs. The code specified the fine for stealing more than fifty pigs, indicating that swine rustling was no minor problem. It imposed a higher fine for stealing a pig from a sty than from a field and a higher fine still if the swineherd was present when the theft took place. Other laws addressed “he who steals a leader sow” (presumably one that led other pigs into the forest to forage), “he who steals a bell from another man’s troop of pigs,” and “he who steals a sacrificial gelded boar [that] had been consecrated.” From these laws we can infer that the Salian Franks sacrificed boars to their gods, kept pigs in sties to protect them from thieves and predators, and herded them through fields and forests.
The Anglo-Saxons, the Germanic tribe that had swept into England in the fifth century, wrote laws to protect both pigs and their forest grazing lands. Anglo-Saxons valued a pig at twice the price of a sheep and fixed severe penalties for destroying acorn-producing trees
. Mast—the fruit of oak, beech, chestnut, and other trees—was the most valuable forest product. In a practice known as denbera in Saxon and pannage in Norman, the nobles who controlled the forests charged for the right to fatten swine in the woods each fall. Throughout Europe the size of a forest sometimes was judged not by its acreage but by the number of pigs it could support. In England’s Domesday Book (1086 ad), a sort of census of the kingdom, designations such as “wood for 100 swine” served as measurements for some forests. In ninth-century Italy a monastery’s forest was judged to be 2,000 pigs big. Whether the forest was five or fifty square acres mattered less than the number of swine it could feed, because that determined its worth.
Some pigs spent their entire life cycle in the woods. The tips of stone arrowheads have been found embedded in the bones of domestic swine from Neolithic England, suggesting the animals were kept in a semiferal state and hunted down when needed. In Europe “hogs run wild,” wrote the Greek historian Strabo, whose Geography describes his travels in the time of Augustus. These free-ranging domestic animals could be every bit as fearsome as their wild brethren, which in their various habitats were known to fight off large predators like tigers, crocodiles, and bears. “It is dangerous for one unfamiliar with their ways to approach them,” noted Strabo, “and likewise, also, for a wolf.”
Some forest pigs were closely managed. In the forests of Kent in the ninth century, pigs lived for most of the year on the manors, then were driven in the autumn to seasonal settlements known as denns—the tradition survives in place-names such as Tenterden—where they grazed on mast. The swineherd contracted with farmers and gathered up five or six hundred pigs, for which he was paid by the head. Assisted by a herding dog, he drove them to the forest, where he built a rough pen under a large tree and filled it with straw and ferns for bedding. Then he would feed the pigs, blowing a horn while they ate so they would associate the sound of the horn with food. He would turn them out to forage during the day, then call them back to the pen for the night with a blast of the horn. Swineherds carried either a long, slender pole for smacking branches to bring down acorns or a short, stout stick, flung up into trees for the same purpose.