MEDLAR LUCAN and Durian Gray, in their infamous and lurid The Decadent Cookbook, describe decadent food as making your mouth water and your hair stand on end. Perhaps that is why, when one of our editors emailed me one morning a few weeks ago asking if I wanted to go butcher a pig’s head—adding, “you’ll get to bring it home and play with it”—I accepted without hesitation. This invitation, to dismantle the most emotionally charged and personal part of an animal—the vessel of its senses, feeling, and knowledge of itself, as well as the face that advertised its soul—seemed to be something of which weird old Medlar and Durian would approve.
A few days later, I found myself on the #75, dressed in ragged jeans and a dryer-burned work shirt that I figured could take a little more staining, heading downtown. The setting of this venture into decadence was more antiseptic than depraved: I joined 10 other students—a few white-clad cooks, an older French woman in a smart leather jacket, a couple of outstandingly comfortable Asian women—in a gleaming kitchen prep space, around a massive glass table strewn with plates, handsome butchery books, stemware, and curious legal paperwork.
Camas Davis, of the Portland Meat Collective, taught the class. Davis is a veteran-food-writer-turned-pedagogic-butcher, and the willowy, serious woman made small talk while we signed forms that said ominous things like (I’m paraphrasing, but only a little), “this animal was alive until you signed up for this class,” and “…at the time of its death, it belonged to you.” The language was somber and serious. It put in clear terms that I was a killer, a commissioner of death—but it also implied that I was a cook, and if diligent, a feeder of many people. The grand responsibility of it all was carefully codified into the beginning of the evening, and imbued the rest of it with a carefulness and sense of purpose.
From there we were led to 10 gleaming cutting boards, each set with a fresh, scalded pig’s head, intact but for the insides of its ears and the rings around its eyes (these can harbor parasites and legally they must be removed). The tongue lolled out of the mouth of the one I’d chosen, and it had been bit. I was too far along in the process of accepting the carnality of the task ahead to let the implication of this detail get to me—though I must admit that out of context, I wouldn’t have liked to dwell on it.
Davis began to expertly bone out the skull, as we would be making a porchetta di testa—a rolled pig’s head—which is tied, roasted, and sliced thin like a lunchmeat after hours of careful cooking. Her teaching style was easy, her blade was fast, and our attention was rapt.
After she tied and presented her handsome masterpiece, it was time to begin our own. Pig heads are tricky anatomical landscapes, and it requires a great amount of careful trimming to take out the skull, remove the nebulous pockets of unpalatable lymph glands, and roll them together so that the whole head cooks evenly and presents well. Wrestling my own pig’s face-flaps together, after cutting them open and slathering them with mustard, vinegar, and spices, was like mating two shaved, doped cats between my hands. The final product—ugly, lumpy, and covered in yards of extra twine—looked more like something a madman mails to a helpless police force than a classic piece of charcuterie. The porchetta of the woman across the table from me looked like something you’d slip into the breech of a German warship’s cannon.
I was unfazed, though. My finished pig, though unphotogenic, was something hard-won, and it was going to cook just fine.
After a few days of letting the spices set in the refrigerator, I placed the porchetta in a slow oven and let it cook overnight. Ten hours later the skin was a burnished brown, and the hair follicles had released more white stubble as the flesh had shrunk. Beautiful and ghastly, it was mouth watering with its caramelized tips, chicharrón edges, and plump folds of succulent jowl meat. It was a grand and timeless roast as appealing and delicious as any reptilian brain is likely to encounter; it also had five o’clock shadow and an unmistakable snout. It was Lucan and Gray’s very definition of decadent, in its primal appeal and intellectual revulsion. Unable to wait for it to cool, I took a serrated knife to an edge of it, sawed off a bit of crackling skin and warm, melting fat, and took the plunge.
If there are five basic food groups, there must surely be more that are too cerebral and unquantifiable to make it into the federal labeling process. I often like to say pleasure is a food group we shouldn’t discount; this carved out new territory beyond that. Or rather, it exposed long-buried territory we see only flashes of when we get our hands dirty and cook: involvement, pride, and understanding. It also, in a decadent fashion, was a challenge, a risk, and a thrill, made all the more satisfying for its sensual reward.
Let me start off by saying that I eat meat. Let me add that I don’t think that working in the meat department at a grocery store makes you a bad person by any stretch of the imagination. If my neighbor prides himself on BBQ ribs- more power to him (and pass the cole slaw). I have known many fisherman, but none made a fetish of the entrails.
At the same time- making a fetish of stripping the meat from a pigs head as art, entertainment and as a public act is just plain creepy. Not dissimilar from her public butchering of animals widely considered as pets.
There is something a bit off about this story, perhaps a whiff of sadism. Good luck with that.
Are there any normal hunters or backyard chicken raisers reading this comment? Please chime in. There’s stuff you gotta do, that no normal person enjoys, like killing mice. Then there’s Ms. Camas getting into death for fun, and that is creepy… Let’s not normalize this stuff.
Dear Oregon Mamacita, I’m not keen on getting into a food fight online, as I’ve personally experienced the ways in which these forums devolve into mean-spirited, largely unproductive fights. I am not here to start one of those. But I absolutely have to respond to this.
Your response to the notion of making food out of a pig head (let alone someone teaching others how to do this) is a common one. And I think that a lot of people would make the assumptions that you’ve made in your comment in response to this article (which, by the way, I think is very beautifully written–nice work Chris). Making food out of a pig head–something that used to be quite common and “normal” here and elsewhere, and which still is “normal” in many parts of Europe–most definitely turns a lot of stomachs of meat eaters and non-meat eaters. So I understand, at least partially, where you’re coming from. But I want to explain why it is I teach this class, and hopefully expand your understanding of what it is I do and the philosophy behind it.
The reason I teach people how to make porchetta di testa and headcheese and guanciale and pate and rillette out of a pig head is to teach people how to use the whole animal. As it so happens, there’s a lot of useable and edible meat and fat in the head of a pig. As it so happens there’s also a lot of useable meat and fat and organs in the entire pig. Which is why I, as well as my other instructors, also teach people how to utilize the feet, the hocks, the intestines, the belly, the blood, the heart, the liver, the spleen, the lungs, the ears, the bones, the skin, the fat, and yes, the pork chops and hams and shoulder roasts. I firmly believe that if I am going to eat meat, I need to be able to use every part of an animal. Absolutely everything. Nothing should go to waste and I shouldn’t value one part over the other. In other words, I’ve no interest in fetishizing any part of the animal. And I don’t find that the process of utilizing the whole animal has anything to do with the fetishization of meat or meat-eating. It’s interesting, however, that such utilization has become something so exotic, so abnormal, (read: creepy, sadistic, off) to so many people who eat meat or not.
In fact, what should be interpreted as exotic, and outrageous, and creepy, and sadistic and off is the way in which we’ve normalized the system of meat production and meat consumption in America.
Once you learn to prepare and eat every part of the animal, your relationship to eating meat changes drastically. In fact you begin to eat a lot less of it. And you begin to realize how long a whole animal can be made to last. You also see that we are a society that would rather not be reminded that meat comes from an animal—funny how that face, those legs, that heart, those feet creep so many people out….and yet they still eat meat!
What’s the consequence of that attitude in which we deem only the un-animal-like parts of the animal edible and the rest creepy? The consequence is that we have a whole lot of people only wanting to eat pork chops and bacon and ground shoulder. And if we have a whole lot of people only wanting to eat pork chops and bacon but no other part of the animal, then we need to produce a lot more pigs to satisfy all those people. And since farmers can’t make money on any other parts, they have to sell more pigs to make enough money on the parts they can sell. And the best way to efficiently produce a lot more pigs just for pork chops and bacon? Factory farms, CAFOS, and other horribly inhumane, industrialized, and scary methods of meat production.
What’s sad, and wrong, and creepy is a society that believes its normal to only use certain parts of the animal and throw the rest to the dogs (literally). A society that raises a pig only for lean porkchops. That raises a chicken only for the white, tasteless breast meat. A society who deems someone who decides to transform a pig head into an edible meal sadistic and creepy. A society so unwilling to SEE and THINK (REALLY think) about what it is they are eating, where it came from, that we feel more comfortable just looking the other wayfrom a system of meat production that’s WAY MORE DISTURBING than a porchetta di testa could ever be.
So, again, this is not fun and games. This is not butchery as entertainment or art. And this is not the fetishization of a pig head or entrails or intestines (which by the way are what all sausages are encased in). I do what I do in the name of change, and in the hope that we can start to create a more sustainable, less destructive approach to meat production and consumption in this country.
It’s one thing if you want to argue that we shouldn’t eat meat at all. But among meat eaters, when did using the entire animal for food turn into a fetish, into something mean and sadistic and creepy? How is it that just buying porkchops and roasts from the local meat counter is somehow interpreted as the better thing to do, the moral thing to do? How is it that a “normal” hunter and fisher is supposed to not utilize all parts of the animal? But a weirdo, creepy hunter or fisher or meat eater for that matter does? These are questions that I think are worth exploring if we choose to eat meat. And I encourage you, Oregon Mamacita, to come watch a class and get a better sense for what it is we are doing and why we do what we do. There’s a much bigger picture here than you’ve imagined.
Yours,
Camas Davis
Owner, Portland Meat Collective
http://www.pdxmeat.com
info@pdxmeat.com
Very educational and rational response Ms Camas. While this would not be something I would personally do (not vegan or vegetarian, just a personal choice on this), I agree completely with your motive. Thank you
Not a meat eater, and I feel sorry for those that are. Seriously. I respect their right to do what they choose, but ending the life of another living and breathing creature so that I may dine…NO, not in this lifetime. For those that eat meat, but don’t want to know the reality of how their dinner was “raised”, maybe some research is in order. “Farmed” and “Processed”…a real pig in a poke!