Lessons from the pig: an introduction to Paprika and Pork

The pig. For us Germans and Croats, it's the fabric of our cuisine. What would we put in our sausages, our cabbage rolls, our stews, our charcuterie without this animal? What would we snack on if not prshut? Kosher? Pffft. Sorry, couldn't do it in this family. Many cooks call it "God's meat," a snarky but perfect testament to our own love of such an important animal.

I recounted my first time butchering one of these amazing creatures a little over three years ago. There's no better way to start off this blog than to re-post the experience. It embodies the spirit of this site: letting food, family and the past teach us; learning from recipes, traditions and techniques. At its most effective, this can transform our Weltanschauung; if our outlook on life remains unchanged, we can at least find joy in that learning process.

Slaughtering an animal is probably a little too gory for our stomachs, which nourish themselves largely on industrialized farming far removed from our homes. But if you were my Baba, your family created an economy around doing this -- slaughtering pigs in December, then curing their meat in the cold winter air. Come springtime, the food you had raised, killed and made was ready for sale or consumption. Pigs were a sustaining life force.

My grandmother was much closer to the lives that gave her life. The following post describes my most personal experience with producing pork, though it pales in comparison with agrarian life in Yugoslavia. But I'm grateful for an experience that made me appreciate an animal so central to my family. And in our time, we could stand to apply some of that Old World, old-fashioned appreciation.

Sept. 15, 2012
For the first time yesterday, I helped butcher a whole animal -- actually, a few animals. Two lambs and a pig, thus far the most incredible experience of my internship.

This might sound morbid, and I know my veggie friends will curl in horror at my next statement, but it was generally an enjoyable experience, if not full of teachable moments. Butchering forces you to be incredibly attentive, incredibly thorough; to feel the meat with your fingers in order to recognize the different textures of the different muscles, or to feel the seams along which to separate those muscles so that you don't waste any part of the animal. An err in cutting along the ribs could mean a ruined tenderloin, and wasted -- note this -- not product, but life. 

This is where shit started to get real.

You'll start with a whole pig carcass, and it's an eerie thing. You shave it, you feel it, examine it, you treat it delicately. This animal's about to be cooked; it experienced pain so that we could enjoy it. And here it is, on your stainless-steel table, lifeless.

Half of the whole pig we broke down

I had the honor of segmenting the pig's head. With a hacksaw, I first sawed off the snout, then made my way to the skull, following a vertical line in between the pig's eyes. I took out the tongue next, my fingers feeling the ridges on the top of the pig's mouth and the tendons connecting the tongue to the bottom of the mouth. Yet another strange, indescribable feeling when you're an intern doing it for the first time. It took all of two minutes, but it was gruesome.

I kept reminding myself  I was thankful someone slaughtered this pig, hopefully humanely as possible (it's what we aim for at our restaurant); that it led a good piggy life, and I would be thankful to prepare and enjoy it.

But I wouldn't enjoy it in its entirety. The slaughterhouse made a massive gaffe, and the head didn't match the carcass. The head wasn't fresh, so all of that loveliness we would normally use to make headcheese -- i.e., the entire head, minus the brains and eyes -- were unusable.

Know how I found out it was unusable? Chef tried to simply pop out the brain with his index finger, which should happen easily if the animal was killed recently. No dice.

I had just defiled an animal, one whose lifeless peepers stared me in the face, to no avail. That idea hit me like a wrecking ball at full force.

This journal entry isn't exposing anything new. But I think it provides some insight into why nose-to-tail eating has become popular. We're human, we form bonds with animals. We're also hypocritical, because we eat many of those animals. But if those animals are raised the right way, they can be incredibly healthy for us*; the least we, as humans, could do is show respect for a creature that nourishes us well. Maybe that's why Catholics say grace before a meal, because my grandmother couldn't bear the thought of catching a lamb's blood while her mother killed it. And what better way to show appreciation than to use all of the animal, and not be forced to cringe at the sound of half a pig's head hitting the side of a compost bin?

I'm planning on seeing an animal slaughtered. Not because I want to, be because, if I eat and prepare meat, I have to. It's the only way to actually understand where our food comes from, to truly understand why we should be respectful of the beings we enjoy at dinnertime. And maybe I'll become a committed vegetarian... we'll see.

So perhaps the way I've described this experience doesn't make it sound too enjoyable. But working slowly and carefully with something that was once living is humbling and meditative. And now I am one giant step closer to understanding how that meat gets on my plate.

I wasn't expecting the restaurant industry to do this to me. 

*An animal's diet can alter the fats, compounds and minerals in the meat it eventually provides. Corn provides empty calories, but pigs allowed to forage on nuts tend to produce fat and meat that is higher in those brain-boosting, omega fatty acids. More on this later, I'm sure of it.