The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food (20 page)

Placido and Rodrigo produce only the best
jamón ibérico de bellota.
Their business is neatly divided, with Placido managing the curing process and Rodrigo in charge of raising the pigs.

When we arrived at Cárdeno, it was Placido who greeted us first. He wore tinted glasses and had the faint outline of a mustache. He ignored the suggestion that we tour the seven-hundred-acre farm and instead brought us to a picturesque field littered with oak trees. The savanna-like expanse looked like a postcard picture of the
dehesa
. (In fact, later that afternoon I was handed a Cárdeno postcard showing the exact place where we had been standing.)

“Beautiful,” I said.

“Oh, no, no,” Placido said, shaking his head and looking down at the ground. “This is the ugliest you’ll ever see the
dehesa
. You have to come back when it’s green and lush.”

Placido explained that Cárdeno had produced
jamón
as early as 1910, on land that was originally owned by his maternal grandmother. “My mother, she came from aristocracy because she had the land,” he told me. Raised in a small town, she met Placido and Rodrigo’s father in grade school. They fell in love, which, according to Placido, was when things got complicated. Their father didn’t own land and, though his family operated a
jamón
-curing business, without land he was deemed unworthy of their mother. “They became a little bit of a Romeo and Juliet story,” he told me. “But they were in love. So they won.”

Their father raised the pigs and cured them himself, until Placido and Rodrigo joined the business in the 1960s and split the chores. The brothers’ deep devotion, and perhaps their sibling rivalry, brought the quality of the hams to new levels.

We walked to an embankment and saw fifty or so Iberian pigs dunking themselves in a pond and running out to dry on the surrounding grass. The older pigs lay in the sun, dozing. It looked like a porcine version of a Sunday afternoon in the Tuileries. No one appeared more content than Placido.

“Funny, isn’t it?” he said, as if seeing the scene for the first time. We all pointed and smiled, except Eduardo, who was off examining an oak nearby, his large frame diminished by the width of the old trunk.

As we walked among the trees, Miguel and Lisa discussed the history of the
dehesa
, a place that until recently, I discovered, had been more famous for producing wool than hams.

The
dehesa
system originated during the Middle Ages. By 1300, the Christian Reconquista of Spain had reclaimed the area of Extremadura from the
Muslims. For the burgeoning wool industry, the uncultivated landscape represented thousands of miles of potential pastureland. Suddenly the victorious Christians had a vast new resource for their prized Merino sheep. The subsequent influx of livestock prompted the destruction of the area’s thick forests, resulting in the sparse oak population we see today. Peasant farmers built stone walls around the sheep’s grazing areas—the word
dehesa
comes from the Latin
defensa
(defense), which refers to lands protected against wild animals and predators.

To be a Spanish sheep breeder at that time was to belong to a powerful union, with outsize influence in creating policy. Between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, the number of sheep in the
dehesa
grew from 2.5 million to 5 million. The importance of wool to the economy allowed for the organization of sheep breeders into an elite guild called the Mesta. Laws were passed to protect the grazing areas. Removing grass from any part of the
dehesa
, for example, was outlawed. These laws—a reflection of the economic and political power of the Mesta—did more than establish a legal framework for protecting the sheep breeders’ assets. They helped inculcate a reverence for the land.

A law passed in 1548 codified the rights of the oaks. Harvesting even a branch was illegal:

Any person caught chopping down, conveying or loading a holm oak tree or coppice in our dehesa will be fined five hundred maravedis in benefit of the council; and for a branch as large a man’s body, the person will pay a fine of three hundred maravedis; and for a branch as large as a man’s thigh, two hundred maravedis, and for a branch the size of a man’s calf, one hundred maravedis; and for a branch the size of a man’s wrist, twenty-five maravedis, and for smaller branches ten maravedis.

The eye-for-an-eye philosophy makes it clear that the Spanish people had come to see the region as a living organism, a part of themselves. Its success
was their success. To diminish the
tierra
—to remove any part of it for personal use—was to diminish the rising fortune of the Spanish people.

It was the prosperity of the
dehesa’
s wool industry that eventually subsidized Spain’s explorations of the New World. An intense period of colonization followed—in the Americas but also in Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, all of which quickly grew into major centers of wool production. The Spanish wool industry eventually collapsed as the new colonies came to produce it more cheaply. But the investment in maintaining the
dehesa’
s ecosystem didn’t stop paying dividends. It adapted to the changing times with other breeds of animals—especially the black Iberian pigs, which were exquisitely suited to the land.

“If the pigs weren’t famished by the fall, none of this would work,” Miguel told me, describing the region’s long, dry summers.

Evolved to thrive on very little, the Iberian pigs feed on grass, seeds, and grain naturally found in the
dehesa
—just enough calories to grow larger but far fewer than in conventional operations. By late October they’re ravenous, which, conveniently, marks the beginning of the
montanera
phase, roughly between November and March, when the acorns have fallen from the trees. In the space of four months, the pigs gorge enough to put on 40 percent of their slaughter weight, acquiring a band of fat as thick as a down comforter.

Eduardo raised his eyebrows as if to say,
Sound familiar?

“It’s very simple, really,” Miguel said, and then looked out over the oak-filled landscape and added, “but it’s also very complex.” In his effort to demystify the process, he was careful not to debunk the aura of the ham.

The black, bristled, stocky animal inhaling the undergrowth in voracious pursuit of acorns is not just a hungry pig. It’s a pig that’s found the perfect conditions for gorging. And the perfect conditions for gorging are specific to the
dehesa.

It starts with the quality of the acorns, Miguel explained. There are two common types of oak trees in the
dehesa
: the holm oak and the cork oak. Holm oaks produce the sweeter acorn—the pig’s preferred meal—but cork oaks produce later in the season, extending the supply. Both acorns are unique for their large size—another credit to the
dehesa’
s ecology. The original intent for spacing the oak trees may have been to provide shade cover, but it also allowed for the development of deep root systems. Without competition for soil nutrients and water—and this is key, since water is a scarce resource—the oaks grow to be enormous and robust, producing larger and sweeter acorns. To further encourage acorn production, the trees are pruned periodically.

A ravenous pig working a carpet of sweet acorns is the endgame of a long series of preparations. But the pigs have to work for the feast. Because the trees are so well spaced, a lot of grass foraging happens along the way, which makes the acorns taste even sweeter.

“There’s a physiological component to this,” Miguel said. “Grass plus acorns makes acorns inordinately sweeter for pigs. So they eat more acorns.”

Eduardo shook his head. “Not just for the pigs, my friend. For the geese, too.”

The requisite hunt, a trot from tree to tree with mouthfuls of grass along the way, is intense exercise for the pigs. By the standards of conventional American pork production, that’s wasted energy. More exercise means more expended calories, which means more feed. Fortunately for confinement producers, Americans have industrious spirits, heroically overcoming dry, stringy hams with sweet glazes and candied pineapple. But in the
dehesa
, it’s the exercise that creates oxygenated muscles, and thus the deeper flavor.

It’s a lesson I learned from Craig Haney long before I ever laid eyes on the
dehesa
. The year Stone Barns opened, I asked Craig to sit for a tasting of pork from a favorite local producer. The couple who raised these pigs were exceptional farmers. I hoped Craig would come away determined to raise pigs at Stone Barns that surpassed the flavor.

“I’m not convinced,” Craig reluctantly said, after thoughtful bites of several different cuts. “It’s nice and soft, but my pigs have more flavor.” I gathered several cooks later that night and did something I had never thought to do before: a side-by-side comparison of Stone Barns pork versus the local producers’ pork. Craig was right; it wasn’t even close. The soft, almost flabby meat from the local producers could be cut without a knife, but if you ignored the butter-like texture—and that’s key, because a soft texture is so often mistakenly confused with quality—there was little to savor. Craig’s pork, on the other hand, had a deeply rich pork flavor.

Many years later, I learned that the local farmers intentionally curtailed the pigs’ exercise, creating muscles that were less oxygenated, and therefore less chewy. Which is why Craig’s pigs, raised in the forest surrounding Stone Barns, were so superior.

Exercise not only deepens flavor; it also creates space within the muscles for fat deposits. It’s that space, and the muscle mass itself from all the exercise, that enables the meat to integrate the oleic acid from the acorns.
*
When Eduardo held the
jamón
up to the light that afternoon and declared it the inspiration for his foie gras, he was celebrating the process by which the fat becomes integrated into the meat. That rich tapestry of fat and muscle is essential for creating the ham’s extraordinary flavor.

We were interrupted on our walk back by Rodrigo’s son, Ringo—Placido’s nephew—who approached us in full stride from across the field. He was tall and thin, with long, wavy brown hair and a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. With the forest as a backdrop, he looked like a medieval hunter.

“My name is Ringo,” he announced as he approached. “I have come to welcome you to Cárdeno.”

I introduced myself and thanked him for having us. Eduardo did the same. Upon hearing Eduardo’s name, Ringo straightened his shoulders. He stared. “Eduardo Sousa?” he asked. “From Fuentes de León?”

Lisa laughed as she translated the formality of Eduardo’s response: “Yes, I am he.”

As we arrived at Cárdeno’s official tasting room, Miguel explained that Ringo was training with his uncle Placido to learn the art of curing
jamón
, and that Placido’s son, currently in veterinarian school, might one day join Rodrigo to learn the art of raising pigs. I asked Ringo if he thought a nephew training under his uncle was more sustainable than a son training under his father.

“What I know,” he said, artfully dodging the question, “is that I have the very best teacher in the world.”

Miguel nodded and turned to me. “This is the classic
dehesa
tradition, and absolutely necessary for the long-term sustainability of the whole system.”

Rodrigo appeared. He was larger than his brother, with a weathered, leathery complexion that hinted at long days out in the sun. Whereas Placido was mild-mannered, with a laconic demeanor, Rodrigo seemed brusque and uninhibited. He shook hands with everyone in the room, including several of his coworkers, helped himself to a beer, and sat at the end of one of the couches to smoke a cigarette. We gathered around, small white plates of
jamón
placed on a coffee table in front of us.

Rodrigo spoke first, assuming we wanted to know how such great ham was made. “You need to start with great legs!” he blurted out to no one in particular, and then took a long, slow drag of his cigarette.

Embarrassed by his younger brother’s abruptness, Placido said softly, “It’s true. I could never cure a brilliant
jamón
without a great pig. It’s impossible.”