Tara nurses Squishy at night in the room that contains our cookbooks. As a result, some mornings I find some book or other open to a recipe that sounded great to Tara at 4 am. Not so long it was “Chicory, sorrel, and crispy pig ear salad” from Nose to Tail Eating by one of Britain’s patron saints of simplicity, Fergus Henderson. I thought this was a great idea. Pig ears are practically offal (and all the cool kids like offal) without actually being some gooey bit whose function was described in college biology.
A phone call to Paul at Violet Hill Farm and I had a pair of pig ears the size of dinner plates waiting at the farmers’ market the next Saturday.
I cleaned them thoroughly in the sink and simmered them with rough-chopped carrots, onions, celery, and some herbs for a couple of hours, then set them on a rack in the fridge to dry out for a couple of days. At dinner time I sliced the ears very thinly and heated an inch or two of oil in heavy pot.
Now, the recipe has a line that says “Be careful, as even if the ears are dry they’re likely to spit.” It’s easy to imagine why. The bubbling you hear when frying is the sound of water in the food boiling away; too much water and the little pockets of expanding steam makes the oil spatter. Or, if you’re as unlucky as I was, big pockets of steam make the oil pop and spatter and spray absolutely everywhere. (Everywhere, really—I had to clean it off the ceiling.) To add insult to injury, the ears were inedible, turning from unpleasantly chewy to dry and tough in a matter of moments.
Like a good academic, I tired to turn my failure into a learning opportunity by doing some research but couldn’t figure out how I’d managed to let the side down. Then, a week or two later, I saw a crispy pig ear salad on the menu at The Spotted Pig, the closest thing we have in New York to a gastropub. The dish, apparently, works better with smaller ears, which come out crisp on the outside and unctuous and gelatinous inside, like a fritter filled with demiglace. A plate of bitter greens, and a sharp, mustardy vinaigrette makes for an understated riot of texture and flavor.
(P.S. Fergus Henderson has a new book coming out, and the promotional videos on the restaurant’s website are funny as hell, though I’m not sure he’s entirely joking.)
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