Category: Food & Drink

Countdown to slaughter

On my calendar, on the square for Feb. 28, it says simply “Kill Pig.”

Nine months ago, I held a two-day-old piglet in my hands. She was about the size of a chihuahua. The pig was clean, warm and soft. The pig struggled a little because I wasn’t her mother, and her hooves, not yet worn smooth, were sharp against my bare forearms.

Still, before this month is over, I will have killed her.

When I called to arrange the date, I had expected to do some convincing. I was surprised how unfazed he was when I called to set the date and said I wanted to shoot and stick the beast myself. To him, of course, this is the way of the world: animals become meat just as blossoms become fruit. To the man standing next to me when I do just that, it will be another day at work.

Still, butchers distance themselves from their work. They have their own euphemisms: animals, for example, aren’t slaughtered, they’re harvested. They joke about the blood and guts.

On the one hand I hope I can distance myself in the same way. On the other, I hope I feel the full impact of my intended action.

NPR on slow cookers

I wrote about the necessity of slow cookers in every Midwesterner’s kitchen. NPR’s Web site has an ode to the device (text only, no audio).

There’s something incredibly satisfying about coming home hungry on a snowy winter’s day and breathing in the savory scent of pork braised in wine — especially when it’s ready to eat when you walk in the door.That’s the beauty of the slow cooker.

Recipes, too.

Death of a Pig by E.B. White

Today’s post isn’t news; it’s exactly 60 years old this month. But because of the blog’s name, it gets a lot of hits from people looking for E.B. White’s essay “Death of a Pig,” the forerunner of his children’s book Charlotte’s Web. It is rightfully held up as a example of how a writer doesn’t have to use flowery language to convey personality.

The opening paragraph:

I spent several days and nights in mid-September with an ailing pig and I feel driven to account for this stretch of time, more particularly since the pig died at last, and I lived, and things might easily have gone the other way round and none left to do the accounting. Even now, so close to the event, I cannot recall the hours sharply and am not ready to say whether death came on the third night or the fourth night. This uncertainty afflicts me with a sense of personal deterioration; if I were in decent health I would know how many nights I had sat up with a pig.

Anyway, I recently dug up a link to the full text for a class and offer it up — and implore you to read it. 60 years old and it’s still beautiful prose.

Augusta in Oxford

Two guys who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina made life there unbearable, Scott Attias and Ben Halperin, have opened a restaurant called Augusta (after the street it’s on) in Oxford, Iowa. I have heard good things in the week and a half since it opened.

My friend Emily Grosvenor wrote a nice story about the latest piece — well, the only piece — of the Oxford dining scene. My impression is that it’s going for the same type of business and atmosphere as Mount Vernon’s Lincoln Café (locally focused food in a restaurant that they hope becomes “ a destination — but also be a place locals can come to for good food,” as Scott, a former co-worker of mine, told Emily) .

Good luck to them.

Killing is killing is killing

The sentiments expressed in today’s letters responding to last week’s piece on the importance some chefs place on animal slaughter aren’t surprising. (I had a similar discussion with a reader in the comments section.) The meat-eating debate often seems to be the gastronomic equivalent of the abortion debate: both sides so entrenched — and not even arguing over the same basic points — that there is no way to reach a middle ground.

Anti-meat-eating letter writer Kathryn Dalenberg is right: “Killing innocent life is killing is killing is killing.”

But so is pro-meat-eating Mary Hammett: “If you can not look a Mediterranean daurade in the eye, you have no right to eat it!”

The problem is that often we have a hard time understanding how someone can both respect an animal and kill (and eat) it. Doug Havel has been butchering for over two decades, beginning on disassembly line and now in his own small abattoir (and I’m glad that Heritage Food USA partner Sarah Obraitis points out that small slaughterers are the vital connection between family farms and consumers). The first pig he ever slaughtered his dad’s pet Fred: “Then he was Dead Fred.”

It is possible to respect animals and still kill and eat them. But yes, it is still killing. And killing is killing is killing, no matter how humanely or carefully or respectfully it is done.

Not a bad recipe — for a copy editor

John McIntyre, The Baltimore Sun‘s assistant managing editor for the copy desk (he does wear a bow tie but not a green eye shade), is a Kentuckian by birth. His blog usually deals with the precision of language, but today it offers an imprecise recipe for his mama’s fried chicken. The tricks, as far as he could tell (remember, he is a man of the copy desk, not a man of the kitchen), are small pieces of chicken, cracker breading and a well-seasoned cast-iron skillet.

I may just have to give it a try.

Of mice and maggots (La Quercia, part 3)

Herb Eckhouse has been praised for the cured meats he’s producing at his two-year-old Norwalk, Iowa, plant. Julia Moskin’s piece in yesterday’s New York Times mentioned Eckhouse and La Quercia near the bottom (I’ve written two posts about La Quercia) and sparked some interest. I wanted to share another story from my fall visit.

Five years ago, Eckhouse was a former seed-company executive with a Harvard MBA who had never cured a single leg of pork.

His experiments began in February 2003 when he salted four hams, put them in a silver two-door refrigerator in his garage for six months and then hung them in his finished basement for another three. Eckhouse had moved the white acoustic ceiling tiles so he could hang the meat from hooks in the wooden floor joists.

He checked the drying pig legs almost daily. Taking the room’s temperature. Adjusting fans.Opening and closing the air vent in the ceiling. Checking each ham for mold. Letting fresh air in through a window. He kept his records in an Excel spreadsheet.

After one ham had been gnawed by mice, he hung paper plates on the strings holding the meat.

First thing one morning, during the summer three years ago, Eckhouse went down to check his second batch of hanging meats. For whatever reason, he didn’t turn the light on as he began his daily machinations. The cool, moist air came in with the sunlight through the basement window well. And then, as he moved within a foot of one ham, he saw the undulating white mass.

When he realized it was his precious ham crawling with maggots, Eckhouse lost it.

He bolted back upstairs, implored his wife Kathy and their three children not to go into the basement and, eventually, settled his nerves. Then he returned to the basement, found and repaired a hole in the window screen, cut out the affected meat and left it to hang another three months.

“That,” Eckhouse said “is when Kathy decided we were truly nuts.”

I’m sick of Michael Pollan

Does the guy make good points? Yes. But in the last week, since his book can out on Jan. 1, I have grown sick of hearing from him (NPR has had him on three times — wait — four, going out of its way to fit him in) and reading about him (Slate’s done him twice, Salon once, and Serious Eats has mentioned him three times). And that’s just from my RSS feed reader. Is he the only guy who can talk about this stuff?

He speaking in town this Sunday. I’m not sure if I will go.

Reader mail

Last summer, I did a cooking demo at which I read some scenes of livestock death. I wrote about it here. Yesterday, from visitor Artfulhome, came this comment:

Big of you to want to have a connection to the poor animal who died painfully and fearfully for your “fatty, juicy and delicious” dinner. I hope it was worth it. Anthony Bourdain has disgusted me with his macho bullshit where he seems to think that watching an animal’s brutal, violent killing somehow elevates him, and the pleasure he takes in eating its remains. It is a radical idea in this country, that perhaps we should be more advanced than to torture and kill to live well, when we really don’t have to. I love eating and cooking too, but am this close to becoming a raving vegan. The meat counter at my local supermarket has begun to smell like death to me, no matter that they sell free range, organic meat; that the animal had perhaps a slightly healthier, more pleasant life than most in its place is scant comfort. Maybe it’s getting older and having a closer relationship to my own mortality, maybe it’s looking in my terrier’s eyes and realizing that she is sentient, and that she, but for a slight accident of birth, could have been your panicked, scared, tortured pork chop.

I have a few points.

First: It should come as not surprise that the meat counter smells of death. It is death. The problem is meat eaters for whom it does not have any meaning of death. My point is that understanding, as a meat eater, the meat-is-death connection is valuable and important. Recognizing the sacrifice (of both human and animal) can encourage more care and less waste.

Second: Torture is a tricky word to use when talking about the meat we eat, especially when talking about all meat.The amount to which an animal knows it is going to die when it goes to the slaughterhouse can be debated, but I caution against the over anthropomorphizing of livestock.

Third: I, too, look at my dog and think about the similarities — I’m fascinated by how pigs can seem so dog-like when given the chance to run around and play. It doesn’t stop me from eating meat, but it does make me care about who is raising my meat.

Fourth: There is something macho about publicizing your willingness to watch of animals die. I’m no Anthony Bourdain apologist, but if a reader learns a little more about the violence involved, I think it has a value.