Read Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Online
Authors: Mark Essig
69
According to the Edict of Diocletian
:
Michael MacKinnon,
Production and Consumption of Animals in Roman Italy
(Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology, 2004), 208–209.
69
After the Punic Wars, the percentage of pig bones
:
Michael MacKinnon, “‘Romanizing’ Ancient Carthage,” in
Anthropological Approaches to Zooarchaeology
, ed. Douglas Campana et al. (Oxford: David Brown, 2010), 172.
69
Other sections of the book offer recipes
:
Christopher Grocock and Sally Grainger,
Apicius
(Devon, UK: Prospect Books, 2006), 55–56, 70.
69
Archeology confirms that Romans carved up pigs
:
MacKinnon,
Production and Consumption
, 168.
69
Apicius is credited with inventing the technique
:
Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
, trans. John Bostock and H. T. Riley (London: George Bell & Sons, 1890), 2:344.
70
Finally, the stomach is tied
:
Grocock and Grainger,
Apicius
, 247–249.
70
The Roman poet Martial had this to say
:
Martial,
Epigrams
(London: Bell & Daldy, 1865), 593.
70
Elsewhere, after a meal, Martial suffers the glutton’s regret
:
Martial,
Epigrams
, 313.
71
The womb of this poor sow
:
Plutarch,
Moralia
, trans. Harold F. Cherniss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 12:565.
71
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and statesman, decried
:
Corbier, “Ambiguous Status,” 241.
71
By 450 ad about 140,000 citizens
:
S. J. B. Barnish, “Pigs, Plebeians and Potentes,”
Papers of the British School at Rome
55 (1987): 160–165; A. H. M. Jones,
The Later Roman Empire,
284–602 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1964), ii, 696.
72
By contrast, imports from outside the Italian Peninsula
:
J. Hughes,
Pan’s Travail
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 146.
72
Grain sufficient to feed hundreds of thousands of people
:
Peter Temin,
The Roman Market Economy
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), 29–31.
72
Beef and mutton came from older animals
:
Michael Ross MacKinnon, “Animal Production and Consumption in Roman Italy” (PhD diss., University of Alberta, 1999), 78–80, 97–98, 112–113, 209–210, 237.
72
A popular saying held
:
Pliny the Elder,
Natural History
, 2:343.
73
According to Varro, Rome’s most important agricultural writer
:
Varro,
On Agriculture
, 357.
73
Varro devoted more attention to pigs than to cows
:
Varro,
On Agriculture
, 353.
73
Columella, writing in the first century ad, extolled
:
Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella,
On Agriculture
, trans. Harrison Boyd Ash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:293.
73
Boars, Columella tells us, should possess
:
Columella,
On Agriculture
, 291.
74
With that sort of production, farmers had the incentive
:
Varro,
On Agriculture
, 365.
74
The smaller looked like a downsized wild boar
:
Columella,
On Agriculture
, 291.
74
The best feeding grounds for such pigs
:
Columella,
On Agriculture
, 293.
74
Columella also described the larger variety
:
Columella,
On Agriculture
, 291.
74
Varro reports that nursing sows were fed
:
Varro,
On Agriculture
, 361.
74
These fat white pigs were kept closer to Rome
:
Petronius,
Satyricon
, 131.
74
Columella advises that on all farms
:
Columella,
On Agriculture
, 291.
75
And they made impressive offerings
:
Michael MacKinnon, “High on the Hog: Linking Zooarchaeological, Literary, and Artistic Data for Pig Breeds in Roman Italy,”
American Journal of Archaeology
105 (2001): 667.
75
A pig that sups on fish guts
:
Richard Bradley,
Gentleman and Farmers Guide
(London: W. Mears, 1732), 71.
Chapter 6
78
Rome’s complex networks of Mediterranean commerce
:
Bryan Ward-Perkins,
The Fall of Rome
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
78
Archaeologists digging in post-Roman sites
:
S. White, “From Globalized Pig Breeds to Capitalist Pigs,”
Environmental History
16 (2011): 100.
79
Another group moved overland out of Turkey and Greece
:
Peter Rowley-Conwy, “Westward Ho! The Spread of Agriculture from Central Europe to the Atlantic,”
Current Anthropology
52, suppl. 4 (2011): S431–S451.
79
Genetic studies tell us that the first wave
:
Greger Larson et al., “Phylogeny and Ancient DNA of
Sus
,”
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
104 (2007): 4834–4839.
80
An Irish myth tells of pigs
:
Miranda Green,
Dictionary of Celtic Myth and Legend
(New York: Thames and Hudson, 1992), 44–45; Jeffrey Greene,
The Golden-Bristled Boar
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011).
80
From these laws we can infer
:
Katherine Fischer Drew,
The Laws of the Salian Franks
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 7, 3–5, 66–73, 88.
80
Anglo-Saxons valued a pig
:
Joyce Salisbury,
The Beast Within
(New York: Routledge, 1994), 34.
81
In a practice known as
denbera: John Thrupp, “On the Domestication of Certain Animals in England Between the Seventh and Eleventh Centuries,”
Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London
4 (1866): 164–172.
81
In England’s Domesday Book
:
Robert Trow-Smith,
A History of British Livestock Husbandry to 1700
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 51.
81
In ninth-century Italy a monastery’s forest
:
Vito Fumagalli,
Landscapes of Fear
, trans. Shayne Mitchell (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 146.
81
The tips of stone arrowheads have been found
:
U. Albarella and D. Serjeantson, “A Passion for Pork,” in
Consuming Passions and Patterns of Consumption
, ed. P. Miracle and N. Milner (Cambridge, UK: Monographs of the McDonald Institute), 44.
81
“It is dangerous for one unfamiliar with their ways to approach them”
:
Strabo,
Geography
, trans. Horace Leonard Jones (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 2:243.
81
In the forests of Kent in the ninth century
:
Caroline Grigson, “Porridge and Pannage,” in
Archaeological Aspects of Woodland Ecology
, ed. Martin Bell and Susan Limbrey (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports, 1982), 300–301.
82
Swineherds carried either a long, slender pole
:
Earl Shaw, “Geography of Mast Feeding,”
Economic Geography
16 (1940): 233–249.
82
An English law of 1184 decreed
:
Robert Bartlett,
England Under the Norman and Angevin Kings
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 239, 674.
83
Lions and leopards kill with claws and teeth
:
John Cummins,
Hound and Hawk
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 96.
83
The boar slashes at an approaching hero
:
Ovid,
Metamorphoses
, trans. Henry T. Riley (London: George Bell, 1893), 279, 281.
84
Arthur became known as the Boar of Cornwall
:
The
Mabinogion
(London: Quaritch, 1877), 239–257.
84
In present-day Belgium, bones dug up at castles
:
Anton Ervynck, “Orant, Pugnant, Laborant,” in
Behaviour Behind Bones
, ed. W. Van Neer and A. Ervynck (Oxford: Oxbow, 2004), 215–223.
84
The trash heaps of the elite
:
Annie Grant, “Food, Status and Social Hierarchy,” in Miracle and Milner,
Consuming Passions
, 18; R. M. Thomas, “Food and the Maintenance of Social Boundaries in Medieval England,” in
Archaeology of Food and Identity
, ed. K. C. Twiss (Carbondale, IL: Center for Archaeological Investigations, 2007), 138–144.
84
Medieval Europeans ate spices because they liked them
:
Paul Freedman,
Out of the East
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 3–6, 19–25.
84
Medieval cooks also borrowed from Rome
:
Bridget Ann Henisch,
Fast and Feast
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), 131.
85
A camphor-soaked wick was placed in the boar’s mouth
:
Freedman,
Out of the East
, 37.
85
One cookbook offered a recipe for a roasted rooster
:
Freedman,
Out of the East
, 38.
85
In noble houses, the pantry of preserved foods
:
Terence Scully,
The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 1995), 244.
85
Sometimes the salt gets an assist
:
R. Lawrie,
Lawrie’s Meat Science
(Boca Raton, FL: Woodhead Publishing, 2006), 130–132.
86
Greeks used the same word to describe
:
Frank Frost, “Sausage and Meat Preservation in Antiquity,”
Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies
40 (1999): 244.
86
According to Cato, “No moths nor worms will touch”
:
Marcus Cato,
On Agriculture
, trans. William Davis Hooper and Harrison Boyd Ash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 154–157.
86
Varro insisted that the Gauls
:
Marcus Terentius Varro,
On Agriculture
, trans. William Davis Hooper and Harrison Boyd Ash (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 357.
86
These Gauls lived around Parma
:
David Thurmond,
Handbook of Food Processing in Classical Rome
(Boston: Brill, 2006), 217.
86
Varro recommended pork from what is now Portugal
:
Strabo,
Geography
, 101.
86
Martial gave a nod to hams
:
Martial,
Epigrams
(London: Bell & Daldy, 1865), 595.
86
Living things need to eat fats
:
Harold McGee,
On Food and Cooking
, rev. ed. (New York: Scribner, 2004), 797; Adam Drewnowski, “Why Do We Like Fat?,”
Journal of the American Dietetic Association
97, suppl. (1997): S58–S62.
87
Ancient cooks often boiled their meat
:
Mireille Corbier, “The Ambiguous Status of Meat in Ancient Rome,”
Food and Foodways
3 (1989): 233.
87
Fat was so rare and precious
:
Harry Hoffner, “Oil in Hittite Texts,”
The Biblical Archaeologist
58 (2012): 109.
87
a sort of olive tree on the hoof
:
Ari Weinzweig,
Zingerman’s Guide to Better Bacon
(Ann Arbor, MI: Zingerman’s Press, 2009), 30–38.
87
For medieval Europeans, the seasons were a bumpy cycle
:
Bartlett,
England Under
, 643; Dolly Jørgensen, “Pigs and Pollards,”
Sustainability
5 (2013): 387–399.
87
Many proverbs indicated that a supply
:
Jean-Jacques Hémardinquer, “The Family Pig of the Ancien Régime,” in
Food and Drink in History
, ed. Robert Forster and Orest Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 58.
Chapter 7
90
The patron saint of animals expressed no sympathy
:
Thomas Okey Francis and Robert Steele,
The Little Flowers of St. Francis
(New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1910), 134–137.
90
“Cursed be that evil beast”
:
Saint Bonaventure,
Life of Saint Francis
(London: J. M. Dent, 1904), 85–86.
91
According to the New Testament, Christ was
:
John 1:29, RSV.
91
The Christian Bible picked up this theme
:
Psalms 23:1 KJV.
91
According to the Second Epistle of Peter
:
2 Peter 2:22, RSV.
91
The prodigal son, after squandering his inheritance
:
Luke 15:16, KJV.
91
Those husks, incidentally, were likely pods
:
John Russell Smith,
Tree Crops
(New York: Harcourt, 1929), 33–34.
92
He said to the demons, “Go”
:
Matthew 8:32, KJV.
92
In the words of one bestiary
:
Richard Barber,
Bestiary
(Woodbridge, UK: Boydell, 1993), 81.