Never Just a Pig

Yesterday we made 120-pounds of sausage from the pig we killed the day before. It was a huge day; I was chopping and mixing herbs and spices and whatnot by 6 a.m., and we finished cleaning up at 8 last night, with only a few short breaks for chores and other tasks related to the ongoing well being of our smallholding. A lot of what takes us so long is that we like to make cased sausage, rather than loose, and stuffing is a time-consuming process. But by gum and tarnation there’s something about a good cased sausage, especially a chorizo or maybe a nice little fennel, the way it gets all plump and juicy on the stove, the insides steaming a bit from the wine we mixed in, even as the outside sears against the hot surface of the pan.

Generally, from kill to sausage is a three-day affair. You kill on one day, usually in the afternoon, let the carcass hang over night to stiffen and cool (otherwise, it’s too mushy to cut with any precision), butcher the second day and maybe grind your sausage meat, and then actually make the sausage on the third day. Of course, in a week or so, there’s another day devoted to smoking the bacons and hams that have been brining since slaughter, but that’s another story.

Anyhow, this weekend I had a mind to compress the process into only two days, so Rye and I were down at the pigpen by 8 on Saturday morning, .22 and sticking knife in hand. It was just a few degrees above zero, but dressing a pig is surprisingly physical work, particularly if you don’t use an electric saw, which we don’t. Rye shot the pig, I stuck her, and we got the girl hitched up to the bucket of the tractor and hauled up to a nice sunny spot in the yard by the time the half-hour had rolled around. It was up to about 5 degrees, with the sun was building in the sky, and other than my hands, which I had to keep sticking in the bucket of warm knife-washing water, I was perfectly comfortable. By 10:00, the pig was dressed and halved; I moved the tractor into a shady spot so she’d cool quicker and bopped over to our friend Jim’s place, who’s a woodworker by trade and gifts us his shop shavings to use as animal bedding. Kiln dried hardwood shavings: One of those things that’s hard to truly appreciate until you have livestock in need of bedding.

By 4:30, we deemed the carcass sufficiently cool to cut, so Penny and I humped it into the kitchen, and with the help of the boys got it hoisted onto the big cutting block that’s built into the island in the middle of our kitchen, one of the few truly intelligent design considerations in our entire house, the others being… um… wait a sec… it’ll come to me… oh, forget it. We had a fire going in the cookstove and yet more Isbell cranking, and we were in fine fettle. I mean, really, how could we not be? We had literally eaten the last package of sausage from the last pig we did only the morning before, and now we had something like 300-pounds of fresh pork at our disposal, a sweet and gentle girl whose very life would be absorbed into ours. As I’ve mentioned before, we don’t feel called to overt expressions of gratitude and/or sorrow when we take the life of an animal. But if you can’t approach the process with a certain lightness of being and good humor, a spring in your step for all that is right in this imperfect world? Well, hell. Far as I’m concerned, you might’s well just hire it done. Or not do it at all.

It took about two n’ half hours or maybe a wee bit more to get both halves chunked for grinding and also to fashion any cuts we wanted. From the loins, we cleaved a passel of chops and a few roasts; the hams were of overwhelming girth, so we cut one in half and dropped it into a brine bucket. The other we chunked for grinding. Both bellies were cut into slabs and went into the brine; both shoulders went to sausage. A couple packages of ribs. The tenderloins. We cleaned the trotters and put them in a bag for future processing. The liver got soaked in milk for mellowing before becoming pate. The heart and kidneys went into the sausage mix. Ditto the jowls. Rye has some sort of deal going with Nate for the brains, so he took an axe to the skull and scooped them out and now there’s a container in the freezer that reads “Pig Brains” in his careful lettering.

This is not a pig

This is long, and I haven’t even got to the sausage making part, though of course I’ve written of it a time or two before. Suffice it to say, we made chorizo, a simple salt/pepper/garlic for drying, maple breakfast (and lunch and dinner), sage/garlic/ginger, and a sassy little fennel number. Besides the sausage, we have all the aforementioned cuts, and in a week or so, we’ll have a mess of smoked bacon and ham. We made ten cups of real good pate. Even Daisy dog made out, as there’s a bag o’ bones in the freezer with her name on them. And Nate’ll get his brains. Thank goodness for that.

Never doubt the inherent generosity of a pig. For six or maybe seven months, I had the great pleasure of feeding the one we killed this weekend, of stopping by Jimmy and Sara’s farm every couple of days to pick up buckets of organic colostrum, which can’t be put in the tank. Most often, we stand and chat for a few minutes as the cows shuffle and chew and we talk about the minutia of our days on the Vermont hill we all call home. In this manner, we have slowly become not just neighbors, but friends, and all for a little pig food. Furthermore, over the weekend, I got to watch my younger son’s confidence and sense of responsibility expand as he lodged a bullet in precisely the right spot and the pig whumped to the ground, suddenly knowing nothing. Or perhaps knowing everything. I got to spend all of yesterday with Penny, the boys flitting in and out of the house, or retreating to the couch to read, occasionally stopping by the kitchen to do some grinding or fry up a sample or two.

And of course, all that meat, to be eaten at our table and shared with family and friends, the pig’s generosity doing precisely what all generosity is meant to do: Not be corralled, but allowed to slide through our fingers, on its way to places we can only imagine, its passing being at least as significant as whatever portion remains with us.

Once upon a time I might have seen a pig, that humble creature of snout and hoof, and thought to myself “hey, it’s just a pig.”

But now I know the truth: It’s never just a pig.