by Mark Essig
A Roman farmer who raised suckling pigs for banquets might have looked with horror upon such methods, but the forest pig was perfectly adapted to the conditions of the Middle Ages. The European forest was no place for coddled sty pigs. Husbandry here was defined in roughly equal measures by human intervention and natural selection. Pigs competed with each other for the nuts that dropped to the ground, and wild boars still roamed the woods, muddling the gene pool by interbreeding with their domestic cousins.
In their embrace of swine, medieval Europeans had much in common with ancient Romans. Nobles saw Rome as the pinnacle of civilization and sought to establish a similar heavenly empire on earth. They hunted boar as the ancient Romans did and feasted on pork just as ravenously.
Above all else, the era’s warrior culture valued courage and bravery, which noblemen could demonstrate on the battlefield and in the hunt. The most prized quarries were boar and deer, and only nobles were allowed to kill them. An English law of 1184 decreed that commoners who poached these animals would be punished with blinding and castration. European hunters viewed boar and deer as polar opposites. The deer was elegant and swift, a test of the hunter’s speed and cleverness. The boar, powerful and ugly, was impervious to pain and fought fiercely at bay, demanding strength and bravery from the hunter. Gaston Phoebus, in his fourteenth-century treatise on hunting, called the boar the fiercest of all animals. Lions and leopards kill with claws and teeth, while “a boar kills with a single stroke, as one might with a knife.”
Swineherds depicted in a fourteenth-century English manuscript knock down acorns for their pigs, bristle-backed animals that roamed the forests and sometimes interbred with their wild-boar cousins. Medieval Europeans rivaled the Romans in their love of swine. (Courtesy British Library)
Classical Greece and Rome had shaped those views through legend and myth, such as the tale of the Calydonian Boar. The king of Calydon, the story goes, made offerings to the gods but neglected Diana, who expresses her fury by sending a wild boar to ravage his kingdom. When the greatest warriors of Greece gather to hunt him, “the boar rushes violently into the midst of the enemy, like lightning darted from the bursting clouds,” Ovid writes in Metamorphoses. The boar slashes at an approaching hero, and the man’s “bowels, twisted, rush forth, falling with plenteous blood.”
King Arthur too hunted a mythical boar. In a Welsh tale from early Anglo-Saxon times, Arthur and his fellow warriors tracked the boar across the Irish Sea and then engaged him in a nine-day battle that “laid waste to the fifth part of Ireland.” After the fight the boar swam back across the sea, shook the saltwater from his bristles in Wales, and again began killing men by the dozen. Finally, in Cornwall, Arthur cornered the boar and drove him into the sea, never to be seen again. Arthur became known as the Boar of Cornwall for his bravery.
As Arthur’s epithet suggests, killing a wild boar came to be considered a mystical act that transferred the strength of the animal to the hunter. Domestic pigs—which, in their tusked, shaggy, semiferal state, looked much like the wild boars with whom they shared the woods—basked in the reflected glory of their wild cousins. In present-day Belgium, bones dug up at castles and monasteries show that nobles and monks consumed a lot of pigs, while peasants, when they could afford meat, ate mostly cattle and sheep. Archaeology in England shows the same pattern: commoners ate beef and mutton from older animals culled after the end of their productive lives. The trash heaps of the elite—in castles, palaces, monasteries, and convents—were piled high with pig bones.
Medieval cooks also mimicked Roman styles of preparation. Many recipes were derived from Apicius, whose manuscripts were copied in medieval monasteries and courts. Meat was boiled or spit-roasted and served with heavily spiced sauces. Because the spice trade with the East had expanded enormously by the high Middle Ages, European noblemen had far more potent spices at their disposal—such as cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg—than did the Roman elite. (Medieval Europeans ate spices because they liked them, not to mask the taste of bad meat: an entire pig could be bought for the price of a pound of pepper, and anyone who could afford spices could also afford fresh meat.) Medieval cooks also borrowed from Rome the habit of cobbling together strange creations: they would cut both a suckling pig and a capon—a castrated cock—in half, then sew the forequarters of one onto the hindquarters of the other. The Count of Savoy’s chef presented a boar’s head set between its disarticulated feet, with one side of the head covered in gold foil and the other glazed with green sauce, like a heraldic symbol. A camphor-soaked wick was placed in the boar’s mouth and lighted, so the boar was served breathing fire. One cookbook offered a recipe for a roasted rooster, wearing a tiny helmet and carrying a lance to match, sitting astride an orange-glazed suckling pig.
The pig also played humbler roles in medieval kitchens. In noble houses, the pantry of preserved foods became known as the “larder” because lard, which at the time referred to rendered fat or any fatty cured pork, was the most important item it held. This was another miracle of pigs: they were not only suitable for feasting but also, when preserved, provided a store of food for lean times.
Curing, at its most basic, involves nothing more than drying meat. Bacteria requires moisture to grow, so the drier the meat, the less likely it is to rot. In arid climates meat can be cut into strips and left to cure in the air; Norwegians preserved cod this way, and Native Americans did the same with venison. Usually, though, curing involved salt. Coating a piece of meat with salt creates osmotic pressure: water rushes out of the animal cells toward the salt, drying out the meat. Salt is also directly toxic to bacteria, killing them through osmosis by sucking the moisture out of them. Sometimes the salt gets an assist from wood smoke, which deposits a variety of bactericidal compounds on the meat’s surface, along with delicious flavors. Any meat can be cured with salt, but lean meats like beef tend to become tough when so preserved. Cured pork, with its generous veins of fat, remains tender.
The ancients understood the practice of curing, if not the science behind it. Greeks used the same word to describe both the curing of pork and the Egyptian practice of mummification, because drying out a dead pharaoh was not so different from preserving a leg of pork. Roman farming manuals record the earliest detailed instructions for treating the latter: pour a layer of salt into the bottom of a large pottery jar, place hams, skin side down, on top of the salt, and cover the meat with more salt. Then add alternating layers of hams and salt until the jar is full. After five days, remove the hams and repack them, with the top layer of hams now on the bottom. After twelve more days, remove the hams, brush off the salt, dry “in the breeze” for two days, rub down with oil and vinegar, cold-smoke for two days, and then hang in a meat house. According to Cato, “No moths nor worms will touch” hams prepared in this way.
During the height of the Roman Empire, some of the most highly prized cured pork on Roman tables was imported from the European provinces. Varro insisted that the Gauls of southern France made the best bacon. Cato reported that a Gallic group from northern Italy cured 3,000 or 4,000 hams annually for export to Rome. These Gauls lived around Parma, now famous for its prosciutto, which suggests that the region has enjoyed a continuous tradition of ham making for two millennia. The same is true for Iberia and Germany. Varro recommended pork from what is now Portugal, and Strabo reports excellent hams from the Spanish side of the Pyrenees. Martial gave a nod to hams made along the Rhine, in the same region where Westphalia hams are now made.
For the millions of farmers who cured pork for their own use, lard was as important as meat. Living things need to eat fats, which help create the membranes of all cell walls and provide an efficient food source, packing twice as many calories as an equivalent weight of sugars or starches. Ancient cooks often boiled their meat because this method, unlike spit-roasting, preserved the fat for later use. Fat was so rare and precious that an old Hittite law code specifies that if a dog eats lard from a ma
n’s kitchen, he can legally kill the dog and rescue the lard from its stomach—and then, presumably, eat the lard.
The Mediterranean world harvested most of its dietary fat from olive trees. Since northern Europe was too chilly for olives, the pig functioned as a sort of olive tree on the hoof. A lard belt stretched across Europe, just north of the olive oil belt and overlapping with the butter belt along the cow-heavy coast of the North Sea. Pigs feasted on nuts in the fall, putting on a few inches of subcutaneous fat to live on through the winter. Humans intervened in this process, killing the animals and using the fat and meat as their own winter provisions. Medieval calendars, decorated with illustrations depicting the usual occupations for each month, devoted the fall to pigs. The October illustration typically showed a swineherd in the woods with his pigs, the oak branches heavy with acorns. November, known as “blood month” in Anglo-Saxon, depicted a pig slaughter. The feast day of Saint Martin, November 11, became an important holiday because it marked the start of the slaughter season, when the weather turned cold enough for meat to cure before it spoiled.
For medieval Europeans, the seasons of the year were a bumpy cycle of warmth and cold, abundance and scarcity, but pigs smoothed the ride: they were fattened on the fruits of summer and fall and then slaughtered for winter sustenance—while a pregnant sow, bedded down in a warm shed, promised a fresh crop of piglets in the spring. Many proverbs indicated that a supply of salt pork represented safety: “He who has barley bread, and fatback for his gullet, can say that he is happy.”
Not everyone, however, felt quite so positively about the pig. As Europe’s human population grew and trade expanded, the region’s forests gradually disappeared, and the acorn-loving woods hog was forced to find other ways to sustain itself. Its new food source mirrored that of the very first domestic pigs: human waste, scavenged from the streets. In the cities of Europe, as in those of the ancient Near East, people found such habits troubling—and the pig’s reputation suffered accordingly.
SEVEN
“Swine Eat Things Clean and Unclean”
Sometime around 1210 ad, Francis of Assisi and his companion Friar Juniper paid a call on a sick friar and asked if he needed anything. The man told his visitors he was hungry for a pig’s foot. Friar Juniper immediately snatched up a knife—“I believe ’twas a kitchen knife,” his hagiographer tells us—ran toward a herd of pigs, and “falling on one of them, cuts off a foot and runs away with it.” Friar Juniper then cooked the foot and fed it to the sick friar while telling the patient “with great glee” about “the assaults he had made on the pig.”
The swine’s owner, understandably, complained to Saint Francis, who upbraided Friar Juniper for theft. The friar then explained to the pig’s owner that he had acted only out of concern for the sick man. The owner, moved by the friar’s humility, forgave him and donated “what was left of the pig” to the monastery. Saint Francis thus managed to resolve the dispute, but he did so by treating it as a property crime, no different from stealing a loaf of bread. The patron saint of animals expressed no sympathy for the pig hobbling about the woods on a bloody stump.
As Europe’s forests were felled to grow crops, pigs took up residence in towns, as depicted in this detail from Breugel the Elder’s 1559 drawing Fair at Hoboken. The scavenger pig’s diet, which included the occasional human corpse, contributed to a decline in the reputation of pork in the late Middle Ages.
According to another account of Saint Francis’s life, he once was staying at a monastery when a sow came across a newly born lamb and “slew him with her greedy jaws.” The sow had done what pigs do—eating any tasty morsel that presents itself—but Francis judged beasts by the moral standards of the church. “Cursed be that evil beast,” the saint said, and the sow died three days later.
These stories of Saint Francis reflect a broader shift in attitudes toward swine. Medieval nobles, hunting boar in the woods and feasting on domestic pigs, carried on the Roman tradition of swine love. But the Jewish distaste for pigs persisted as well, transformed but preserved within European Christianity.
Although Christians ate pork, many of them retained the Jewish prohibition against eating carnivores and scavengers. A pig could be eaten, but only if that pig had not dined on nasty things. As the centuries passed, clean-living pigs became harder to find. Europe’s population grew rapidly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and trees were cleared to plant crops. The pig, having lost its forest home, found a new one in the growing towns and cities, where its eating habits again came under scrutiny. To the old indictment—that pigs ate rotting animals and other filth—were added new charges that pigs devoured human corpses and killed children. Pigs were not only unclean: on occasion, they seemed downright evil.
The lamb stood meekly in the top spot of the Christian Bible’s hierarchy of animals, and the swine wallowed at the bottom. According to the New Testament, Christ was “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world,” as well as the Good Shepherd who cares for his flock. The Christian Bible picked up this theme from the Jewish scriptures. “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,” reads Psalm 23.
Pigs have less positive associations in the New Testament. According to the Second Epistle of Peter, those who turn their back on Jesus call to mind a proverb: “The dog turns back to its own vomit, and the sow is washed only to wallow in the mud.” The prodigal son, after squandering his inheritance, must accept the most abject work imaginable: he feeds another man’s pigs and grows so hungry that he wishes he could have “filled his belly with the husks that the swine did eat.” (Those husks, incidentally, were likely pods of the carob tree and certainly not ears of corn, a New World crop unknown in Eurasia at the time.)
Jesus himself had little love for pigs. While traveling among the Gaderenes near the Sea of Galilee, he came across a man possessed. He said to the demons, “Go,” and the demons went out of the man and entered a herd of pigs: “Behold, the whole herd of swine ran violently down a steep place into the sea, and perished in the waters.” The swine numbered 2,000, and yet no one mourned their loss. Jesus would rescue one lost sheep, but he sent thousands of swine to their deaths.
We should not be surprised. The psalm does not say, “The Lord is my swineherd, I shall not want.” The prodigal son’s father, upon welcoming him home, does not kill the fatted hog. Jesus was born a Jew and died a Jew, and he passed along to his followers the Jewish view of swine.
These prejudices, common in early Christianity, were transmitted down through the centuries. European works known as bestiaries, which circulated widely in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, drew Christian lessons from the behavior of animals. The lamb was entirely blameless. In the words of one bestiary, the lamb represents “our mystic Saviour, whose innocent death saved mankind,” as well as any Christian “who obeys his mother the Church.” All other animals have a mix of good and bad attributes, except for the pig, which is represented in entirely negative terms. “The pig is a filthy beast; it sucks up filth, wallows in mud, and smears itself with slime,” one bestiary claimed. “Sows signify sinners, the unclean and heretics.” In addition to filth, the pig stood for gluttony and lust, the last two of the seven deadly sins.
There is a glimmer of biological truth to some of these charges. Pigs have few sweat glands, so they wallow in mud and let evaporative cooling do the work of thermoregulation. They are often in a hurry to eat, but that is a by-product of their diet: whereas sheep eat foods that are abundant in nature—grass and leaves—pigs need energy-intensive foods that tend to be scarce, demanding quick action that might resemble gluttony.
Nature also made pigs lustful. During sex the boar’s penis—two feet long, thin as a pencil, and corkscrew shaped at the tip—locks into a corresponding twist in the sow’s cervix, and there the two remain, for fifteen minutes or longer, during which time the boar ejaculates up to a pint of sperm. An early agricultural writer described pigs as “v
ery lecherous, and in that act tedious.” Europe’s pagan cultures—the Celts, Greeks, and pre-Christian Romans—had celebrated swine for their exuberant fertility; Christians had a more troubled relationship with sex.
To modern eyes it’s difficult to blame the pig for doing what nature demands. But to medieval Christians, brought up to find moral lessons in the natural world, the pig’s habits made it a problematic choice for the dinner table.
The New Testament freed Christians from most Jewish dietary laws, with Acts of the Apostles the key text. Peter, while “very hungry,” experiences a vision of “animals and reptiles and birds of the air,” and a voice tells him to “kill and eat.” Peter protests that he has “never eaten anything that is common or unclean,” but the voice tells him, “What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common.”
Just as Jews defined themselves as not-Greek by refusing to eat pork, Christians defined themselves as not-Jewish by eating it. At one of the councils of Antioch, the church fathers recommended that Christians eat pork precisely because the “synagogue execrates” it. Eating pork became a symbol of the New Law. Rather than a small tribe content to remain pure in its own homeland, Christians sought to convert the entire world to the Gospel of Jesus, and they were happy to welcome lovers of swine. It is hard to imagine the Roman Empire embracing Christianity if Christianity had not first embraced pork.