A Pig in Provence (7 page)

“Now, now my beauty, yes, my love, you’ll be fine. What a lovely mother you are. Such lovely little babies you have. Yes, you’ve done a good job.” He stroked Lucretia as he gently repositioned her so he could remove the dead babies from beneath her and push the others to safety in the corner. He stood up.

“She’ll become calm in a little bit. There girl, now, now. That’s my girl. Yes,
chérie,
good job, good job. Lovely little babies. Yes, that’s right,” he cooed as he guided her down on her side, teats exposed. The little pigs scurried over, and after much scrambling and confusion, each attached itself to a teat and settled into quiet sucking. M. Gos and I added fresh straw to Lucretia’s bed.

“Don’t feed her quite yet. If she sees food in the trough she’ll want to get up and might step on one of the babies. Wait a few hours.” We talked a bit more, and he gave Ethel a Malabar bubblegum, her favorite because it had a little comic strip inside. When Donald came home that night, he went immediately to Lucretia to feed her and to see the babies. One more was dead. Of the litter of fourteen, eight survived, one more dying a few days later when Lucretia stepped on it.

Lucretia rapidly became a pet, and she responded to us just as I had seen M. Gos’s pigs respond to him. I, too, began talking to her, calling her sweet names, and spoiled her with treats like fallen pears and almonds that I gathered from abandoned trees. She loved the whey we fed her, and the bran, and soon her little
piglets were lapping it up as well. They quickly grew into handsome creatures, and Donald performed the necessary castration on the males.

“Got to do it,” M. Gos told us on one of his friendly inspection tours. “Otherwise, no one wants them. Their meat gets too strong.” Donald had performed the procedure frequently at Davis, so he was perfectly at ease when the time came to castrate our five males. I, on the other hand, was not. I did manage to fulfill my role as assistant with dignity as well as trepidation, and our perfect little pigs were soon ready for sale as feeder pigs.

M. Gos sent several of his regular buyers to us. “Old Gos says these are good pigs,” said our first customer, an elderly farmer dressed in layers of brown clothes. As he leaned over the rails to look at the pen of little pigs, he explained his confidence in us. “Gos told me you bought the sow from him, bred her with his boar, and that you feed them whey from that goat cheese you make. That true? Got any of that cheese?” We sold him some cheese and two piglets. The rest of the piglets were soon sold as well, and shortly thereafter Lucretia visited the boar again.

As winter approached we began to hear more and more about the coming
jour du cochon,
the day when the family pig is killed,
pâtés
are made, hams and bacon are salted, and a big feast, attended by family and friends who helped with the work, is held in honor of the occasion. In Provence, the
jour de cochon
is associated with Saint Antoine, Saint Vincent, and Notre-Dame, because their feast days fall from the middle of January to the beginning of February, the coldest time of the year, when the pig must be killed and the meat given time to cure before the weather warms. If not, the meat will spoil.

Marie and Marcel Palazolli, tenant farmers of Italian descent who lived just up the road from us, were well known for the
quality of their pork provisions, which they made from the succession of pigs they fattened each year.

Everyone liked to harvest grapes for Marie and Marcel because of the lunches Marie, one of the best cooks I have ever known, served to the crew. Marie was short, with golden olive skin, dark hair kept short, and a rumbling laugh that began as a deep chuckle. She always wore an assortment of sweaters, vests, and caps or scarves, the type depending on the weather, and her hands were as creased and worn from hard work as Marcel’s. She looks just the same today, only her hair has a reddish tint, like mine. Marcel’s hair was already gray when I first met him—it’s pure white now—and his delicately boned face has rosy red cheeks and bright blue eyes. Back then he usually dressed in the standard blue worker pants and jacket with a heavy sweater underneath, and a wool cap as needed. Today, he’s more likely to be seen wearing Nike sweats and a logo baseball cap.

The harvest lunches began promptly at noon. Marie picked grapes until eleven, then went home to finish the meal so that everything was ready when the workers, about ten in all, Donald and me included, tromped up the narrow, twisting staircase that led to Marie and Marcel’s apartment in the huge, old stone farmhouse. Once owned by a single family, the house had since been divided between three owners, one of them the proprietor of the land Marcel farmed. Marcel and Marie got the apartment as part of their land tenancy contract.

After the workers sat down around the large Formica kitchen table, Marcel poured
pastis
for everyone who wanted it. As soon as it was drunk, the first course of
charcuterie,
homemade, of course, was served. Thick slices of
jambon cru
and
saucisson
were stacked on platters, and jars of juniper-and-rosemary-scented
pâté
,/i> were set out, along with
baguettes
and bottles of red wine
filled by Marcel from the vat he kept in his cave. We all helped ourselves to the platters and bottles as they passed among us. The second course was invariably pasta, a different shape and size each day, dressed with a meat sauce made from the previous day’s leftovers and tomato sauce, a practice I readily adapted to my own kitchen. The pasta was served with
fromage rouge
sprinkled over the top, a dry orange cheese sealed in red wax that was far less expensive than Parmesan. Marie wouldn’t let anyone off with just one helping.
“Servez-vous! Servez-vous!
Have more, please, that’s not enough. Eat more,” she would say, pushing the bowls and platters toward us. “Go on, go on, serve yourself.”

It was hard to resist Marie’s attention and even harder to resist the food. You would think that
pâté
, cured ham and sausages, bread, olives, and two healthy servings of pasta would be enough, even for strong men and women in their prime. But no. Marie wanted to be sure no one left hungry and that no one thought she was cheap. She didn’t ever want it said that you don’t get enough to eat at her house.
Charcuterie
and pasta were only the prelude.

Other farmers’ kitchens were rumored to be stingy with the lunches they served to their workers, keeping the good food for
le patron
and his friends. Not at Marie’s house. The pasta was followed by platters heavy with braised rabbit, chicken, or guinea fowl, all raised in the cages and pens in the open barns below the kitchen. They were seasoned with mushrooms she and Marcel had collected and dried the previous fall, and with wild thyme and rosemary and a little dried orange peel. Sautéed zucchini, stuffed tomatoes and eggplant, and freshly dug potatoes accompanied the meat dish. And always more wine and bread. I usually tried to pass up seconds of the
charcuterie
and pasta in order to have room for the main dish and the vegetables. A salad made from garden-picked greens or maybe wild dandelions came next,
the vinaigrette heavy with garlic, and then a platter of cheese. The cheese was always followed by melons, because Marcel was, and still is, a notable melon grower, and grape harvest and melon season coincided.

Toward the end of every meal, Marcel would get up from the table, go down to the
cave,
and bring up four or five melons of different kinds, which he put on the table before sitting down again. Next, he would carefully select one melon and cut a slice from it, scraping the seeds directly onto his plate and cutting the flesh away from the crescent of the skin. Everyone waited. If he pronounced it good, and he usually did with a “Mmhupm,” the melon was cut up and passed around on a platter. If not, it went into the bucket to be fed to the pig and chickens. This ritual continued until no one could eat another bite of melon. Finally, Marie made coffee, and then it was time for us to walk back into the vineyards, pick up our buckets, and return to cutting grapes—an astonishing feat after such a meal. But since Marie was well known as one of the best—if not the best—cooks around, people would rather be lethargic in the field than give up ten days at her table.

In the old days on the farms, before World War II, five meals a day were served to the workers, starting at dawn with bread, olive oil or thin slices of lard, maybe jam, and wine or hot coffee, followed by a morning
casse-croûte
of more bread and sausage or
pâté
. Then came a large lunch, and a late-afternoon or earlyevening snack similar to the morning one. The day ended well after nightfall with a final meal of soup, vegetables, more bread and wine, and maybe fruit. I can’t imagine what five meals a day would have been like at Marie and Marcel’s.

Over the more than thirty years that Marie and Marcel have been my friends, I’ve shared many meals with them and learned
many things, among them how to slaughter, dress, and preserve a pig. Donald and I were invited to help when it was their turn for the traveling butcher to come to their house for the jour du cochon.

It was still dark when Donald went up the road to help Marcel and the other men build the fire and get the equipment ready. By the time I arrived at the farmhouse courtyard an hour or so later with Ethel and her baby brother, Oliver, steam was rising from the water in the metal oil drum, and smoke from burning grapevines and oak scented the air. A wide plank rested on top of two trestles next to the drum of boiling water. Everyone was bundled up with thick wool scarves and knit hats pulled down over their ears. They spoke quietly, not wanting to upset the pig. They understood that an agitated animal would not bleed well, and if it didn’t bleed well, the meat would be tainted, the hams wouldn’t cure, and it would be a big loss to the family.

When M. Benedict arrived about half an hour later than scheduled, it was evident he had already had a few shots of eau-de-vie from the bottle he pulled out of the truck. Dressed in a heavy white apron, he was short and stocky, with big, red meaty hands and a round red face—the stereotype of a local country butcher. By this time, Ethel had gone to play dolls in a back bedroom with Marie and Marcel’s daughter, Aileen, and Oliver was in the kitchen upstairs with Marie’s mother watching him. Everyone else was in the courtyard waiting for the ritual slaughter to begin.

M. Benedict shook hands with each of us and then asked, “Glasses?” Marcel had already brought glasses down from the kitchen. The butcher filled them with the homemade, fiery, unaged
eau-de-vie.
We raised our glasses in silence, then drank to the pig in one long swallow. It went down like liquid fire, burning and warming all the way to the bottom of my stomach.

I kept back, out of the way, and watched while M. Benedict directed the men. “You, over there. Throw this rope through the hook,” he said, indicating a triangle with sharp hooks on each end. “That’s it. No, no a little tighter. Good, good. That’s it.”

When all was ready, including Marie with a deep yellow plastic basin holding a little wine vinegar, the men became quiet.
La mise à mort,
the killing of the pig, was still steeped in superstition, and the ritual was to be accomplished according to longtime custom. It was important that the pig be treated with respect at its moment of death, a practice reminiscent of old sacrificial rites, because it would be providing the family with food throughout the year. Cooing noises by Marcel and the butcher gently coaxed the pig to come out of his house. The butcher hit him between the eyes with a hammer, and four men, Donald among them, gripped his limbs while the butcher quickly looped a block and tackle over his rear feet and hoisted him up. Once he was secure—it took only seconds—the butcher carefully sank a knife deep into his throat, cutting the jugular vein. The men held the jerking pig as steady as they could while Marie caught the fountain of pumping blood in her yellow basin, stirring it constantly with a wooden spoon so the blood wouldn’t coagulate, until no more blood came.

It all happened so quickly and with such swift, sure movements that I barely had time to register the emotion I felt at the passage from life to death. At one moment the pig was a living, breathing, heaving animal, one I had known for the last year as I helped Marie feed him, and in the next moment he was an inanimate object, ready to become food. With the release of blood, I saw his life slowly leaving and his eyes beginning to fade. My heart was pounding and I turned my head. When I looked back moments later, it was over and the transition from life to death
completed. It was time to begin the transformation of the pig into
pâté
, sausages, and hams.

Marie left the courtyard and headed upstairs to the kitchen, and I followed. Oliver was sleeping quietly in a nearby bedroom, so I joined Marie and three or four other women, including Marie’s mother, in her sixties then, a beautiful Calabrian with pure white hair and the profile of a Roman emperor. “Here. Start sautéing these,” Marie said, handing me a cotton sack full of minced onions. I chopped them last night, but they need to cook now in the
saindoux.” Saindoux,
I learned, was the very fine, delicate fat surrounding the pork kidneys. Once rendered, it was stored and then used for certain sautés and, most importantly, for making pastry crusts, as is rendered back fat. You can still buy saindoux at some butcher shops, but none of my French neighbors render their own fat anymore, not even Marie.

Someone came over to the stove to help me hoist the five pounds of onions into pans of melted fat, and we stirred them until they were just beginning to color. Then we put them into a big pot on the table and stirred in the blood. Marie was pounding fennel seeds, coarse salt, and peppercorns together in a mortar. “Not everyone uses wild fennel, but we do.” She rubbed some fennel seeds between her fingers and smelled them before passing them to me. “It’s better than garden fennel. More flavor. I cut bunches of the wild fennel stalks in the fall and keep them in the
cave.
” She added a little nutmeg and allspice, and then stirred the mix into the blood and onions.