Ours was a classic romance: First came love, then came marriage, then came deer liver prosciutto held together with hardware-store zip ties.
Allow me to explain: Among my husband John’s many enthusiasms is cooking. John is fearless in the kitchen. There isn’t a restaurant entrée he won’t reverse-engineer, and there isn’t a Cook’s Illustrated premise he isn’t willing to test. He’s an architect by training but an explorer at heart. In fact, when I met him, part of what attracted me was his mix of adventurousness and agency. He was a man who got stuff done, who showed up when things were easy and when they were hard, and who had hobbies he pursued with a passion and vigilance I found equal parts reassuring and irresistible. So it was no surprise, a few years into nuptial bliss, that when our neighbor—let’s just call her The Instigator—called from a yard sale to say she’d found a smoker and wouldn’t John like to keep it in our driveway (instead of hers), he immediately began formulating plans on how to put the well-worn (but only $25!) contraption to use.
Bacon was his first foray into cured meat. On well-marbled pork bellies procured from the local Korean supermarket, he pressed spice rubs and brushed maple syrup pastes. The bellies lay in zip-top bags in our basement fridge for about a week, and when John deemed the time right, he put them out in the smoker on a cool evening and let them sit overnight until they developed a pellicle—a shiny and tacky air-dried exterior onto which the smoke could stick. Then he set the alarm for early the next morning so he could fire up the smoker for an eight-hour treatment, periodically stoking the fire with more hickory.
Right from the start, the bacon turned out well, and we became a popular stop on weekend mornings for friends and family who were between errands. “Coffee?” I’d offer. “Bacon?” they’d answer. One batch might be sweeter, one a little on the salty side, but it was all edible. Highly edible.
John, riding high on his breakfast meat success, itched to smoke something else. “How about sausage?” asked The Instigator, who just happened to have a French math professor friend (“The Professor”) who knew a lot about leaf lard and owned a single-horsepower meat grinder. Forty pounds of Boston butt later, our kitchen had been transformed into a sausage factory. John and The Professor were joined by her Czech grad student and two former restaurant cooks, one who’d turned antiques dealer, the other poet.
Half of the results were left as loose sausage, turned into patties and cooked for a 60-person open house party we held later the same day. The other half was squeezed into casings, distributed among its creators and given over to various fates, including thick stews with cannellini beans and kale, straight pan-fries with parsnip or potato mash and John’s version of a picture he’d seen in a book 20 years before, of sausages served with whole, seared grapes.
John, a lily-gilder, decided to let the next round of meat cure. Fresh sausage was child’s play, as he saw it; he wanted the challenge of layering in this more sophisticated technique. I heard him grumble now and then about humidity and temperature concerns—both hard to control in our drafty 1906 house—but beyond that, I paid little mind. Until the beagle went missing.
The beagle, a rescue dog with separation anxiety, was the ultimate Velcro pet, sticking by my side wherever I went, sleeping by (if not on) my bed, lying in wait by the shower, pressed up against my leg as I sat at my desk. So it was no small concern when I looked away from my computer screen one day and realized she was nowhere to be found. Maybe she was stuck in the basement, I thought, or had been left out in the backyard. Eventually I found her on our third floor, parked in front of the guest bedroom door. She looked as bewildered as I felt, until I opened the door. In the center of the room, sitting squarely on the hand-knotted wool carpet, was my wooden lingerie rack, spread open and draped with strings of meat cased in pork intestines. A humidifier hummed at full blast; a space heater kept the temperature at a steady 60 degrees; and the room reeked of spice and curing flesh. I could almost feel the upholstery and mattress fibers absorbing what was surely to become their permanent perfume. We had guests coming that very weekend. Vegetarian guests.
As soon as my glasses defogged and I could read the numbers on the telephone keypad, I called John at work.
“So, honey,” I said. “I was just in the guest room.”
“I know,” he sprang back, as if he’d been waiting for the boom to drop. “I’ve gone a little too far, haven’t I?”
Out of the original band, only John and The Poet carried on, becoming close friends and curing compatriots. The Poet, born and raised in Mexico, introduced John to subtle distinctions between peppers, and suddenly our spice cabinet and our sausages featured carefully calibrated blends of ancho and poblano, chipotle and serrano and habañero. The men found they spoke a common language, debating the virtues of Thomas Keller’s dry rub, discussing massive shopping lists for the local restaurant wholesale market and poring over Sausagemaker.com.
On a side note, this enthusiasm was a boon to me in terms of spousal gifting opportunities. I had not quite married the man who has everything, but he still didn’t want more crap cluttering up his aesthetic or his life. And yet, now, for a good two- to three-year run, I hit it out of the park on every holiday.
Valentine’s Day? A vintage Hobart deli slicer. His birthday? A 1-HP grinder to call his own. Then there was the canon, a core library of must-have reference books that quickly showed signs of usefulness: dog-eared pages, food matter smears of unknown origin, Post-its sticking out in every direction.
John and The Poet ventured deep into the world of pancetta and prosciutto, salamis and the hams that John had grown to love during his North Carolina childhood. When the local parks system began a deer cull to control overpopulation, John brought home a young buck, a giveaway from a volunteer bow hunter who was only interested in sport, not consumption.
Complete inexperience in butchering did not intimidate John, and on an ad hoc plywood table set up in the driveway, he took to the carcass with every saw and knife he had. The Poet took his turn, as did The Instigator, who discovered that a Sawzall is not the best method for detaching a deer’s head from its body (another gifting opportunity! I thought as I watched from a safe distance).
We had venison steak and venison stew, seared venison loin and pork fat–infused venison sausage. John roasted the entire skeleton, boiled the bones to make a stock and then reduced the stock. Yield: one cup venison demi-glace.
The deer, it turned out, was merely practice.
“I need to butcher my own hog,” my husband announced one day. Several new books and one sleek, arced butcher’s knife later, John found a nearby Mennonite farmer who raised heirloom pigs known to have good ratios of fat to meat.
John picked up the 200-pound pig from the farmer at a designated rendezvous. With its higher per-pound valuation, the pig got to be broken down indoors, on the kitchen counter. With The Poet again in attendance, the two men took turns: John had enthusiasm, The Poet had kickass knife skills. No one lost fingers.
Hocks were smoked, sausages were ground, and the pig’s head was stored away to be roasted as the grand finale to a garden barbecue. The Poet’s four-year-old daughter was seen lifting the lid on the cooler that held the pig’s head. “Don’t be sad, Mr. Pig,” she was heard to say. She wants to be an animal rescuer when she grows up.
Not every foray into curing has had a happy ending. John bound the pig’s liver with plastic zip ties, wrapped it in a tea towel and left it to sit on the back porch for months. The result, which resembled a sinister and desiccated insect, would most kindly be described as “intense.” On another occasion, John had to chuck an entire batch of salamis, garlic sausages and soppressata that he’d hung on our back porch when they developed mold. It’s not that he was against mold, but he wanted the white, powdery kind, not the greens and blacks that are long and hairy and wave at you as you walk by. Those, apparently, can kill you.
Which brings me full circle back to the bonds of matrimony. While we spoke our own vows when we tied the knot, implicit was the understanding—the sincere hope, anyway—that we will be together until death do us part. I can only hope that moment doesn’t come by way of botulism.
The Sausage Canon According to John
Charcuterie, by Michael Ruhlman and Brian Polcyn
Charcuterie and French Pork Cookery, by Jane Grigson
Nose To Tail Eating, by Fergus Henderson
Home Sausage Making: How-to Techniques for Making and Enjoying 125 Sausages at Home, by Susan Mahnke Peery and Charles G. Reavis
Great Sausage Recipes and Meat Curing, by Rytek Kutas
Basic Butchering of Livestock & Game, by John J. Mettler, Jr., DVM
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, by Harold McGee
Lise Funderburg, the author of Pig Candy: Taking My Father South, Taking My Father Home, is a writer based in Philadelphia, a city that knows its bacon.