A Cook's Tour (4 page)

     So it was with a mixture of excitement, curiosity, and dread that I woke up on a cold, misty morning in Portugal and looked out the window of my room at orderly rows of leafless grapevines, the fires from distant hearths issuing smoke into a gray sky over the valley. Where I was staying was a bed-and-breakfast, a seventeenth-century
quinta
(a private home turned country inn) about half a mile from the Meirelles farm. It was set back from a twisting country road, past an arbor, surrounded by fields and orange groves and mountains, looking in every way as it must have four hundred years ago. Three young women looked after a few guests. There was a chapel, and a large dark country kitchen with a constantly burning wood fire and a long table. A vast carbon-blackened hooded chimney allowed most of the smoke to escape. The predominant smell in Portugal, I had quickly found, is wood smoke. The only source of heat in the large house – in my room, as well – was a burning fire. When I’d arrived late the previous night, there was one going in my room, creating a nice toasty zone, just large enough to undress and climb into the high four-poster bed. José’s family, in addition to their farm, have a home in nearby Amarante, and another residence in Oporto.

     By the time I’d arrived here, I’d already gotten the picture that Portugal has plenty of good stuff to eat. I’d eaten head of
pescada
(a sort of oversized whiting), roast kid goat cooked in an old wood-burning oven, the doors sealed with plaster (they used to be sealed with cow dung), an incredible octopus risotto, and, of course,
bacalhau, bacalhau, bacalhau
(salted codfish). I’d spent a night in a roundhouse on a mountaintop in the Douro Valley, awakened in a torrential rainstorm to descend quickly (before the roads washed out) to a
quinta
at the bottom, where I had roast loin of pork, potatoes roasted in pork fat, and azeito cheese. I’d visited the open markets in Oporto, where I’d met fishwives whose skills with profanity would put any cook of my experience to shame. With José translating, I’d listened for a while to the back-and-forth between fishwives and customers, amazed that sixty-five-year-old ladies who looked like Martha Washington could make me blush.

     On the day of the slaughter, we drove to the Meirelles farm, a stone and mortar farmhouse with upstairs living quarters, downstairs kitchen and dining area and adjacent larder. Across a dirt drive were animal pens, smokehouse, and a sizable barn. José’s father and cousin grow grapes, from which they make wine, and raise a few chickens, turkeys, geese, and pigs. A few hectares of grapevines and multiuse plots of land stretched over gracefully sloping fields beneath tree-covered hills and mountains, a few church spires and smoking chimneys just visible among leaves and branches.

     It was early morning when I arrived, but there was already a large group assembled: José’s brother Francisco, his other brother, also Francisco (remember the wedding scene in
Goodfellas
, where everybody’s named Petey or Paul or Marie?), his mother, father, assorted other relatives, farmhands, women and children – most of whom were already occupied with the early preparations for two solid days of cooking and eating. Standing by the barn were three hired assassins, itinerant slaughterers/butchers, who apparently knock off from their day jobs from time to time to practice their much-called-upon skills with pig killing and pork butchering. They were a likable bunch: a red-cheeked old man in vest and shirtsleeves, sporting a black brim hat and dapper mustache, two younger men in sweaters and waterproof boots. Looking amiable and unthreatening, they shook my hand over early-morning glasses of
vinho verde
, a barely fermented white wine made from the family grapes.

     Cousin Francisco positioned a sequence of bottle rockets and aerial bombs in the dirt outside the farmhouse and, one after the other, let them fly. The explosions rocked through the valley, announcing to all who could hear news of the imminent slaughter – and meal to follow.

     ‘Is that a warning to vegetarians?’ I asked José.

     ‘There are no vegetarians in Portugal,’ he said.

     The mustachioed man I took to be the chief assassin – he was holding the knife, a nasty-looking blade with a slot in the middle and a wooden handle – began his approach to the barn. Everyone joined in the expedition, a look of neither sadness nor glee on their faces. Only José’s expression was readable. He was watching me, a wry smile on his face, curious, I was guessing, as to how I’d react to what was about to happen.

     At the far end of the barn, a low door was opened into a small straw-filled pen. A monstrously large, aggressive-looking pig waggled and snorted as the crowd peered in. When he was joined in the confined space by the three hired hands, none of them bearing food, he seemed to get the idea that nothing good was going to be happening anytime soon, and he began scrambling and squealing at tremendous volume.

     I was already unhappy with what I was seeing. I’m causing this to happen, I kept thinking. This pig has been hand-fed for six months, fattened up, these murderous goons hired – for me. Perhaps, had I said when José first suggested this blood feast, ‘Uh no . . . I don’t think so. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it this time around,’ maybe the outcome for Porky here would have been different. Or would it have been? Why was I being so squeamish? This pig’s number was up the second he was born. You can’t milk a pig! Nobody’s gonna keep him as a pet! This is Portugal, for Chrissakes! This porker was boots and bacon from birth.

     Still, he was my pig. I was responsible. For a guy who’d spent twenty-eight years serving dead animals and sneering at vegetarians, I was having an unseemly amount of trouble getting with the program. I had to suck it up. I could do this. There was already plenty in my life to feel guilty about. This would be just one more thing.

     It took four strong men, experts at this sort of thing, to restrain the pig, then drag and wrestle him up onto his side and onto a heavy wooden horse cart. It was not easy. With the weight of two men pinning him down and another holding his hind legs, the main man with the knife, gripping him by the head, leaned over and plunged the knife all the way into the beast’s thorax, just above the heart. The pig went wild. The screaming penetrated the fillings in my teeth, echoed through the valley. With an incredible shower of fresh blood flying in every direction, the shrieking, squealing, struggling animal heaved himself off the cart, forcefully kicking one of his tormentors in the groin repeatedly. Spraying great gouts of blood, the pig fought mightily, four men desperately attempting to gain purchase on his kicking legs, bucking abdomen, and blood-smeared rearing head.

     They finally managed to wrestle the poor beast back up onto the cart again, the guy with the mustache working the blade back and forth like a toilet plunger. The pig’s movements slowed, but the rasping and wheezing, the loud breathing and gurgling, continued . . . and continued . . . the animal’s chest rising and falling noisily . . . continued and continued . . . for what seemed like a fucking eternity.

     I’ll always remember, as one does in moments of extremis, the tiny, innocuous details – the blank expressions on the children’s faces, the total lack of affect. They were farm kids who’d seen this before many times. They were used to the ebb and flow of life, its at-times-bloody passing. The look on their little faces could barely be described as interest. A passing bus or an ice-cream truck would probably have evoked more reaction. I’ll always remember the single dot of blood on the chief assassin’s forehead. It remained there for the rest of the day, above a kindly rosy-cheeked face – an eerily incongruous detail on an otherwise-grandfatherly visage. Imagine your Aunt Minnie bringing you a plate of cookies as you sat in front of the TV, a string of human molars strung casually, like pearls, around her neck. I’ll remember the atmosphere of business as usual that hung over the whole process as the pig’s chest rose and fell, his blood draining noisily into a metal pail. A woman cook came running for the blood, hurrying to the kitchen with it after it stopped draining freely, the death and killing just another chore. More women walked briskly to and from the kitchen with other receptacles. Food was being prepared. And I’ll never forget the look of pride on José’s face, as if he were saying, This, this is where it all starts. Now you know. This is where food comes from.

     He was right, of course. I’m sure that had I just seen a thoroughbred being inseminated, a cow being milked, a steer being castrated, or a calf breeched, I would have been equally ill at ease. I was a pathetic city boy, all too comfortable with my ignorance of the facts, seeing for the first time what was usually handled on the Discovery Channel (just after I changed the channel).

     The horse cart, with the now-dead pig aboard, was wheeled around the corner of the barn to a more open area, where his every surface was singed with long bundles of burning straw. All the animal’s hair was burned off, a time-consuming process that left black streaks and patches on his thick skin. He was then scrubbed and washed with cork, scrubbed again, and then – another brief but horrible Kodak moment.

     I was smoking and trying to look cool, as if what I’d just seen hadn’t bothered me at all. The pig was positioned head away, hind legs and butt pointed in my direction. Global Alan, one of the shooters for the TV crew, was standing next to me, shooting from a crouch as the men washed and rinsed the pig’s upper body. Suddenly and without warning, one of the men stepped around and, with the beast’s nether regions regrettably all too apparent, plunged his bare hand up to the elbow in the pig’s rectum, then removed it, holding a fistful of steaming pig shit – which he flung, unceremoniously, to the ground with a loud
splat
before repeating the process.

     Global Alan, professional that he is, veteran of countless emergency-room documentaries, never flinched. He kept shooting. You never know, I guess, what footage you might just be required to have during the editing process, but I had a hard time imagining the ‘Pig-fisting’ scene on the Food Network.

     Alan just kept shooting as the man quickly cut a perianal moat, yanked out about a foot of intestine, and tied it into a dainty knot. Under his breath, Alan’s only comment was, ‘Oh yeah . . . that’s in the show.’ When I looked over at him, he tapped the side of his camera and added, ‘Video gold, baby, video gold . . . I smell Emmy!’

     ‘This is on cable,’ I pointed out.

     ‘An Ace, then,’ said Alan. ‘I want to thank the Academy  . . .’

     The pig was wheeled into the barn, his legs tied in a spread-eagle position, and the carcass was hung from an overhead crossbeam, to much grunting and exertion from the butchers. The animal’s belly was now split open from crotch to throat, his back, on both sides of the spine, cut and allowed to bleed out, and his still-steaming entrails pulled gently out of his abdomen and placed on a wide plywood board to be sorted. God help me, I assisted, stepping right in and putting my hands inside the warm cavity, pulling away heart, lungs, tripe, intestines, liver, and kidneys and letting them slide wetly onto the board.

     Have you ever seen
Night of the Living Dead
, the black-and-white original version? Remember the ghouls playing with freshly removed organs, dragging them eagerly into their mouths in a hideous orgy of slurping and moaning? That scene came very much to mind as we all sifted quickly through the animal’s guts, putting heart, liver, and the tenderloin aside for immediate use, reserving the large and small intestines for washing, separating out the tripe, kidneys, lungs – and bladder. Just as Armando had promised, the bladder was indeed inflated, tied at one end, and hung in the smokehouse to toughen up a bit.

     The intestines were taken to a large trough, where for the next few hours a woman in an apron washed them inside and out. Later, they’d be used for sausages. The now-clean, white body cavity was washed with red wine to inhibit bacterial growth and my victim left to hang there in the cold barn overnight, a pail below.

     It was time to eat.

     A tablecloth was laid over a small table in the barn, only a few feet from the recently departed, and men and women brought a snack for the hardworking butchers and their helpers. The chief assassin whipped out a battered squeeze box and began to play, singing in Portuguese.
Vinho verde
was poured. A frittata-like creation of egg, chorizo, and onions appeared. There was a bowl of cooked beans – like favas, but garbanzo-colored – which you had to slip out of their skins before popping them into your mouth. This was accompanied by a little grilled liver, olives, and sheep’s milk cheese. A select group of pig killers and relatives gathered round to eat, a slight rain falling outside the barn doors. The old man with the squeeze box, that drop of blood still on his forehead, began a melodic address, what could only be described as Portuguese barnyard rap, an homage to the pig. On such occasions, the words change to reflect the individual circumstances of each particular pig, celebrating its transformation from livestock to lunch, and challenging others present to join in with their own verses.

     While I can’t remember the exact lyrics – as translated by José – I can tell you with some assurance that the words of the first verses went something like this:

                                             
This pig was a strong one

                                             
He didn’t want to die