Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig (6 page)
Read Lesser Beasts: A Snout-to-Tail History of the Humble Pig Online
Authors: Mark Essig
In the next chapter of the Second Book of the Maccabees, the pork-related punishments continue. A mother and her seven sons are arrested and told they must eat swine’s flesh, but they too refuse. On the king’s orders, a guard cuts out the tongue of one of the brothers, scalps him, and chops off his hands and feet. Then a large pan is heated over a fire, and the king orders his guards to take the brother, “still breathing, and to fry him in the pan,” which they do.
After he is dead, they kill another brother in the same way, and then another, until all seven brothers are dead, at which point Antiochus orders the mother slain as well.
Although these episodes occurred hundreds of years after the laws of Leviticus were laid down, they comprise only the second recorded instance of pork eating among the Jews. The first occurs in the book of Isaiah, when God expresses his fury at a few people who have eaten “swine’s flesh, and broth of abominable things.” They have done so in secret, hidden away in gardens and graveyards, and their sin is known only to God.
It is a matter between the Lord and his people, and God promises to destroy the offenders.
In Maccabees, the situation is public. Infuriated by the Jews’ desire to remain a separate people, Antiochus has outlawed the most visible symbol of their difference: their refusal to share a table with their neighbors. Here eating pork is not simply a matter of ritual purity, of remaining holy in order to keep the temple pure. It has become, instead, the key to cultural identity. The Books of the Maccabees provided a model of what it meant to be Jewish: even in the face of death, a Jew must refuse pork in order to remain true to his people.
Greek rulers killed the Jewish elder Eleazer because he refused to eat pork. For centuries, the scriptural prohibition played little role in Jewish life because all of the Israelites’ neighbors rejected pork as well. Only with the arrival of pig-loving Greeks and Romans did pork abstention become a crucial aspect of Jewish identity.
Pork eating hadn’t carried much significance as a marker of Jewish identity before the Greek conquest of Persia because most others in the region didn’t eat pork either. Since the Israelites’ return from exile in Egypt, abstaining from pork simply had been one way that they remained pure in order to preserve their relationship with God.
Now, however, it also became a way that they drew boundaries between themselves and those they lived among. Indeed, when pork-eating Greeks ruled over the Jews, refusing pork became a key element of what it meant to be Jewish. You are what you eat, the saying goes, but the Jews were what they didn’t eat.
The Jews rebelled against Antiochus and in 142
bc
won control of Palestine and reconsecrated the Temple, an event commemorated in the celebration of Chanukah. Their independence lasted less than a century: in 63
bc
the Romans conquered Jerusalem, and the Jews once more fell under the rule of pork eaters. Unlike the Greeks, the Romans responded to Jewish pork avoidance not with violence but with puzzlement and feeble jokes. Juvenal, the Roman satirist of the first century
ad
, noted that in Palestine “a long-established clemency suffers pigs to attain old age” because
Jews “do not differentiate between human and pigs’ flesh.”
It was said that Caesar Augustus, after hearing that King Herod of Judea had executed one of his
own children, joked that he would “rather be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son.”
There was a reason Jewish dining habits attracted attention: Romans loved pork with a passion matched by few people before or since. They developed the most sophisticated farming and breeding techniques that the world had ever seen and created elaborate—occasionally obscene—recipes to prepare pork for their lavish feasts. Such ostentatious pork consumption would only reinforce the divisions between Jews and Romans, and it would eventually establish pork as the meat of choice in the religion the Romans would help disseminate throughout Europe: Christianity.
A
n enormous pig, belly up, is wheeled into a banquet room in one scene of Federico Fellini’s
Satyricon
. Trimalchio, the host, accuses the cook of roasting the animal without first gutting it and orders him whipped as punishment. The guests call for mercy, so Trimalchio demands, “Gut it here, now,” whereupon the cook swings an enormous sword and slashes the pig’s belly. The guests recoil in horror, but the steaming mass that pours forth is not the pig’s viscera but cooked meat.
“Thrushes, fatted hens, bird gizzards!” one character calls out. “Sausage ropes, tender plucked doves, snails, livers, ham, offal!” The dispute with the cook has been all in fun. The guests applaud, then grab hunks of meat and begin to gorge themselves.
Fellini’s film, released in 1969, stays true to its source material, a work by Petronius written not long after the death of
Christ. In depicting Roman dining, Petronius satirized but did not exaggerate: there was no need to embellish the extravagant reality. The dish portrayed in the film, a medley of meats hidden within a whole hog, was known as
porcus Troianus
, or “Trojan pig,” a nod to another great act of concealment.
Petronius also describes a whole roast pig served with hunks of meat carved into the shape of piglets and placed along its belly, “as if at suck, to show it was a sow we had before us.” Another feast featured what appeared to be a goose and a variety of fish, all carved from pork.
“I declare my cook made it every bit out of a pig,” the host exclaims. “Give the word, he’ll make you a fish of the paunch, a wood-pigeon of the lard, a turtle-dove of the forehand, and a hen of the hind leg!” Why he should do so is left unexplained.
In cuisine, culture, and mythology, Romans delighted in concealment and disguise, metamorphosis and transformation, and in this they could hardly have been more different from the Jews. The Roman Empire formed a vast, cosmopolitan civilization that embraced and absorbed dozens of cultures. Few identities—whether of meats or of people—remained fixed. Trimalchio, in
Satyricon
, is a former slave who has won his freedom and then attained great wealth. A man calling himself a Roman citizen might have been born in northern Europe, Africa, or Asia Minor. Jews, by contrast, were dedicated to marrying among themselves, defending their small homeland, and preserving their ancient ways.
The differences between Romans and Jews extended to food. One people defined itself by rejecting pork, the other by embracing it. One called the pig abominable, the other miraculous. One saw the pig as a carrier of pollution, the other as a sign of abundance. Between them, Jews and Romans set the terms that would define the pig throughout the history of the West.
P
igs were the most common sacrificial animal in both Greece and Rome. They didn’t pollute—they purified.
In Greek mythology, after Jason and Medea kill Medea’s brother, the enchantress Circe captures a piglet from “a sow whose dugs yet swelled from the fruit of the womb,” slits its neck, and sprinkles its blood over the hands of the killers to remove the stain of murder.
Similarly, a painted vase shows Apollo holding a sacrificed piglet, still dripping blood, over the head of Orestes, who has killed his mother. Priests killed a suckling pig to honor the gods before every public gathering in Athens.
Romans killed pigs to seal public agreements, such as contracts and treaties, and to mark important private occasions, such as births and weddings.
Although the pig served as an all-purpose sacrificial animal, it carried a more specific meaning as a symbol of fertility. Demeter, Greek goddess of wheat, was honored with pig sacrifices. With her daughter Persephone—who was condemned to spend a third of each year in Hades—Demeter symbolized the circle of life, of death in winter followed by rebirth in spring. At Thesmophoria, the most widespread festival in ancient Greece, priestesses cast piglets into a pit and later retrieved their rotting carcasses and placed them on the altar of Demeter.
The rotted pork was then scattered in the fields to ensure a good harvest.
In Greece young pigs were known by the terms
khoiros
and
delphax
, both of which also could refer to women’s genitalia, and the Latin
porcus
carried the same dual meaning.
Aristophanes makes some horrifying puns on this double meaning in his play
A
charnians
, where a starving man disguises his two daughters as pigs and sells them in the market.
The scholar Varro noted that Romans “call that part which in girls is the mark of their sex
porcus
” to indicate that they were “mature enough for marriage.”
A swine, a sheep, and a bull are led to their deaths on a Roman altar. Whereas Jews rejected pigs as unclean, Romans sacrificed them to the gods and feasted on them with abandon. These two attitudes—Jewish repulsion and Roman embrace—have defined Western attitudes toward pigs ever since.
The use of pigs as fertility symbols traces back to the region’s first farming communities. Just north of Greece in the Balkans, archaeologists have found early Neolithic statues of pigs studded with grains of wheat and barley. Like a seed germinating in the soil, a sow giving birth to many piglets demonstrated the bounty of nature.
Sacrificing pigs honored the gods and ensured that the fields, and the people themselves, would enjoy abundant fertility.
M
ost people in the ancient world ate vegetarian diets heavy on grains and beans.
This was the cheapest way to feed large populations. Rome was different. Although meat was expensive, Rome was rich, and a sizable class of people had enough money to eat it regularly.
Romans ate beef, lamb, and goat, but they preferred pork. Hippocrates, the Greek physician, proclaimed pork the best of
all meats, and his Roman successors agreed.
There were more Latin words for pork than for any other meat, and the trade became highly specialized: there were distinct terms for sellers of live pigs (
suarii
), fresh pork (
porcinarius
), dried pork (
confectorarius
), and ham (
pernarius
).
According to the Edict of Diocletian, issued in 301
ad,
sow’s udder, sow’s womb, and liver of fig-fattened swine commanded the highest prices of any meat, costing twice as much as lamb. Beef sausages sold for just half the price of pork.
After the Punic Wars, the percentage of pig bones in Carthage doubled, just as it had in Jerusalem under Roman occupation: Romans kept eating pork even in arid climates such as North Africa and Palestine, where pigs were more difficult to raise.
The richest source on Roman cuisine, a recipe book known as
De re coquinaria
, or
On Cooking
, confirms this love of swine. Pork dishes far outnumber those made with other meats. The section called “Quadrupeds” contains four recipes for beef and veal, eleven for lamb, and seventeen for suckling pig.
Other sections of the book offer recipes for adult sows and boars and nearly all of their parts, including brain, skin, womb, udder, liver, stomach, kidneys, and lungs.
Archeology confirms that Romans carved up pigs more carefully and thoroughly than they did other creatures: pig skulls found in Roman dumps contain far more butchery scars than the skulls of sheep and cows, evidence that butchers excised the tongues, cheeks, and brains of pigs but not those of other beasts.
More than half of the dishes in
On Cooking
are relatively modest—barley soup with onion and ham bone, for example—and within the means of much of the urban population, but others demanded greater resources.
Apicius is credited with inventing the technique of overfeeding a sow with figs in order to enlarge the liver, much as geese were stuffed with grain to
create foie gras. In Apicius’s recipe, the fig-fattened pig liver is marinated in
liquamen
—a fermented fish sauce central to Roman cuisine—wrapped in caul fat, and grilled. The recipe for pig paunch starts with this salutary advice: “Carefully empty out a pig’s stomach.” The cook is then instructed to fill the stomach with a mixture of pork, “three brains that have had their sinews removed,” raw eggs, pine nuts, peppercorns, anise, ginger, rue, and other seasonings.
Finally, the stomach is tied at both ends—“leaving a little space so that it does not burst during cooking”—boiled, smoked, boiled some more, and then served.
Some of the more elaborate dishes in
On Cooking
fall under the heading
ofellae
, which literally means a morsel of food. In one recipe, a skin-on pork belly is scored on the meat side, marinated for days in a blend of
liquamen
, pepper, cumin, and other spices, and then roasted. The chunks of meat would then be pulled from the skin, sauced, and served, forming bite-sized pieces that a diner could eat by hand while reclining, the preferred posture for Roman feasts. Another of the luxury dishes involves boiling a ham, removing the skin, scoring the flesh, and coating it with honey, a preparation that would not be out of place at Christmas dinner today.
Romans had a taste for blended milk, blood, and flesh that could make even a Gentile shudder.
The Roman poet Martial had this to say about a roasted udder of lactating sow: “You would hardly imagine you were eating cooked sows’ teats, so abundantly do they flow and swell with living milk.” (
Elsewhere, after a meal, Martial suffers the glutton’s regret and remarks upon “the unsightly skin of an excavated sow’s udder.”) This preference veered into the bizarrely cruel. Some cooks, Plutarch claimed, stomped and kicked the udders of live pregnant sows and thereby “blended together blood and milk and gore,” which
was said to make the dish all the more delicious.
The womb of this poor sow was eaten as well, with the dish called
vulva eiectitia
, or “miscarried womb.”
Seneca, the Stoic philosopher and statesman, decried such dishes as “monstrosities of luxury,” and he was far from the only critic. Roman rulers passed sumptuary laws limiting the amount that could be spent on meals and forbidding the consumption of items including testicles and cheeks. But the wealthy flouted such rules because the social hierarchy couldn’t function without feasts: feasting provided the only way to learn who had grown richer and who had lost money, who was in the emperor’s favor and who had been cast out. To curtail extravagance was to deny the very reason to feast.
Eating well had become central to the Roman self-image, and not just among the elite. Meat was so important that the empire got into the business of supplying it to a broad swath of the population free of charge. The emperor Augustus had started the practice of distributing free grain and bread as a way to ensure that the citizens remained well fed and peaceful. In 270
ad
the emperor Aurelian started handing out free pork to those citizens already receiving free bread.
By 450
ad
about 140,000 citizens—a quarter or so of the city’s population—were receiving the pork dole, five pounds a month for five months a year.
Free meat kept citizens happy but put heavy pressure on the empire’s food supply: Rome’s butchers had to process and distribute 20,000 pounds of pork every day. The emperor ensured an adequate supply by imposing a tax, payable in pigs, upon certain forested areas of Italy south of Rome. In some years these regions sent more than 30,000 pigs to Rome. Producing and distributing that much pork was no simple matter, but the empire’s farmers managed it with relative ease.
T
o feed the empire’s expanding population, Rome created the most sophisticated agricultural system the world had ever known. Previously, farming had been a local affair. Even in the great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, production and consumption occurred within a fairly circumscribed area defined by irrigated river valleys and surrounding rangeland.
By contrast, imports from outside the Italian Peninsula constituted three-quarters of Rome’s food supply.
Rome brought all of the Mediterranean world and much of Europe within its orbit, pulling in grain from Egypt, cured meats from Spain, olive oil from Syria, and spices from further east. The wheat that satisfied Caesar’s bread dole was mostly imported from North Africa, where it was collected as tax.
Grain sufficient to feed hundreds of thousands of people moved around the region by ship and filled large granaries that provided insurance against famine.
Although Romans imported grain by ship, they raised nearly all of their livestock within Italy. They kept sheep primarily for wool and secondarily for milk and cheese. Goats were rare, though sometimes raised for milk. Cows offered dairy products, and oxen pulled plows in the fields and carts on the road. Meat from these animals was eaten, but it was usually a by-product rather than the principal reason for raising them. Archaeologists tell us that most butchered cattle show stress injuries to their leg bones, meaning that they worked hard before ending up in the pot.
Beef and mutton came from older animals—ewes and cows whose udders had dried up, rams and bulls who had become infertile, and oxen that could no longer pull a plow.
Only pigs were raised exclusively for food. They were eaten when young and therefore were far more tender than worn-out oxen.
A popular saying held, “Life was given them just like salt,
to preserve the flesh”—meaning that pigs had no reason for living other than to feed people. Given how much Romans loved to feast, this was no small consideration.
According to Varro, Rome’s most important agricultural writer, “the race of pigs is expressly given by nature to set forth a banquet.”
Romans created the first detailed farming manuals, which devoted special attention to pigs. The authors likely adapted farming techniques from Greece, but Greek writers were too refined to dirty their hands with practical advice. The best glimpses into Greek farms therefore appear in literature:
The
Odyssey
describes Ulysses’s swine farm, a large operation that involved fifty sows tended by the beloved swineherd Eumaeus. Romans, by contrast, were generous with explicit husbandry advice.
Varro devoted more attention to pigs than to cows, sheep, or goats and suggested that to do without pigs was unthinkable: “Who of our people cultivate a farm without keeping swine?” Pigs were the perfect meat-producing animal. Because they were raised only for food, they could be bred for flavor and weight-gaining ability rather than strength or milk production.
Columella, writing in the first century
ad
, extolled their versatility: “Pigs can make shift in any sort of country,” finding suitable pasture “in the mountains and in the plains.” The writers offered feeding advice for each stage of a pig’s life, from piglet to lactating sow.
Roman writers paid special attention to breeding.
Boars, Columella tells us, should possess “huge haunches” and be “as lustful as possible when they have sexual intercourse.” He specified similar qualities for sows and described how to build their sties and provide clean bedding for comfort. They were bred twice a year, gestating for just under four months, nursing for two, then starting over again. Some farmers kept herds of three hundred or more sows, which meant they produced thousands
of pigs for market every year.
With that sort of production, farmers had the incentive—and the means—to breed the perfect pig.
Or, as it turned out, two perfect pigs. Bones from Roman dumps indicate that most pigs stood sixty to seventy centimeters at the withers. Another group, smaller in number but larger in stature, stood about eighty centimeters. The shorter pigs were
scattered all across the Italian Peninsula, while the taller type clustered around Rome. Roman writers confirm the existence of the two types.
The smaller looked like a downsized wild boar: rangy, long-legged animals with what Columella called “very hard, dense black bristles.” This type lived in the regions south of Rome that produced pork for the public dole, wandering the forests to eat acorns, nuts, and other wild foods. They liked to “root about in the marsh and turn up worms,” Columella wrote, and “tear up the sweet-flavored rootlets of underwater growths.”
The best feeding grounds for such pigs, he advised, were forests with “cork oaks, beeches, Turkey oaks, holm oaks, wild olive trees,” as well as plum and other fruit trees, for such trees “ripen at different times and provide plenty of food for the herd almost all the year round.”
Columella also described the larger variety, “smooth pigs and even white ones.” This latter type lived in sties, so it didn’t need agile legs for running through the woods or thick bristles to keep warm. Farmers fattened these pigs on wheat, barley, lentils, and chickpeas.
Varro reports that nursing sows were fed “two pounds of barley soaked in water” daily.
These fat white pigs were kept closer to Rome to feed the city’s gourmands: a feast in
Satyricon
features “three white hogs.” The white sows also birthed the suckling pigs that Roman diners prized.
Columella advises that on all farms “near towns, the suckling pig must be turned into money” by selling it to elite households. Adult white pigs were sacrificed to the gods; sty-fed and slow
of foot, they were more docile than forest pigs when facing the priestly axe.
And they made impressive offerings, not only because they were expensive but also because they were white, the preferred color of the gods.
The gods demanded white because white suggested purity, and the way Roman pigs lived helps explain how they could be considered pure. In the Near East many pigs lived as scavengers on city streets, devouring garbage and human waste, and earned a reputation for filthiness. Rome was a cleaner place: aqueducts brought clean water, and sewers carried away filth. The Italian Peninsula, moreover, enjoyed enough rainfall to create marshes and oak forests, and trade networks brought an abundance of wheat and barley. Rather than eating carrion and garbage, Roman pigs spent their days devouring nuts in the woods or grains in the sty.
