1950s Archive

Extremities of Pig

Originally Published December 1951

If there had been no pig under the barn, there would have been no Emerson on the sofa in the parlor. It sounds sweeping, but it is the truth. For the pig, even more than the whiskered codfish, created brainy New England. He was the foundation of Transcendentalism and of Yankee ships out of Newburyport and Bath circumnavigating the globe.

Pig was the only meat our ancestors could count on regularly. Salted and smoked, he lasted through our iceless springs and summers. He was the Plymouth Rock on which our baked beans were founded, as he was, and is, the bottom of all our best Maine dishes—chowders and soups and dried fish—still.

When I say pig, I don't mean just his substantial midregions. I mean the pig's extremities as well, tip of nose to tip of tail. My father would not have been the peerless pioneer he was without that curlicue, that love knot that comes last on the occidental end of a pig properly oriented. No one in our family ever dared dispute him in his claim to that last flourish to a pig, fried.

No meat critter going has so many good-eating ends as a pig. He is an animal whose flavor increases the farther you get away from his center. Head and feet are the finest flowerings of his anatomy.

No one knew this fact so well as my Uncle Asa. Uncle Asa was up on his vital facts. He was a perpetual ornament to our slaughtering season. But Uncle Asa as a butcher was a mere mistake. Brought up under the impression that he had missed his calling, as most artists are, believing that he should have been a butcher rather than the second-flight carpenter he was, Uncle Asa manhandled more porcine members of our family than any three other amateur pig-stickers who gathered thick about us when pigs' squeals thickened the frosty air. He knew next to nothing about the middle anatomy of Paul Q. Pig. Yet he probed hopefully about in him. He failed to hit the vital places. And he cut himself regularly into ribbons. Each November found him a walking massacre, self-inflicted. You couldn't trust him with even the dullest butchering knife.

Yet my Uncle Asa was an artist in the anatomy of a pig's extremities, and in the cooking of them. He hung about the farm, bandaged up from his wounds, until the last of the extremities had vanished from the shed. That was about three-four weeks after New Year's. For we usually had enough pigs hung up like cherubs on stretchers out in our woodshed to keep Asa in ears and jowls and trotters till near Candlemas Day. Just about the time that John Henry Woodchuck came out of his hole to see whether there was to be much more to the winter, Uncle Asa left us. But he had kept holed up close with us until then. He had taken us through the Christmas feasts. He had seen us over the hump of snowtime, and he had seen us over the humps of pig's feet and pig's-head cheese. And he left Lost Paradise Farm with a hump at his midriff that was to last him through till next extremity time.

I don't know why people nowadays shy away from the ends and corners of meats. A thousand years ago, only emperors could nibble the necks of swans and geese. Only dukes had the rights to the head of the boar. They served in the head, on salvers of silver, with trumpets and poems by their paid minstrels. Today, butchers tell me they can't give a pig's head away. Mine gave me two, in these days when meat is another name for platinum, just the other week. I recalled enough of the art of Uncle Asa to get the family together, we bad a mountain of a feast, and we all lifted our thanks to the memory of our uncle.

Sometimes I don't wonder that our human IQ's are steadily falling, as the psychologists keep reminding us. It stands to reason that the avoidance of the delicate extremes of meats should spell disaster. It stands to reason that they who feast on the part of the pig that does the traveling and thinking for him should become the philosophers among us.

That was what my Uncle Asa was, a philosopher. At least, he took the loss of his ten-acre farm philosophically. It was eaten up by the mortgage on it. But this uncle of mine needed no farm of his own. He was at home on ours, in the season when eating was best.

And this was, as the bokes me remembre,

The colde frosty seson of Decembre.

Uncle Asa was always with us at Yuletide. He was always with us when meats were stout. No one could fool Uncle Asa. He knew good eating when he smelled it hot in the oven or simmering in the stew. Uncle Asa was always delegated to do the pig's heads. He had the artist's way with them. He gouged out the eyes, trimmed down the snout into decorum to make it bristle-free and sightly, put the head into a deep baking pan and rubbed saffron and salt into it, and plopped it into a hot oven, with beech wood coals leaning on its lining, for three hours. The crackle of the roast, in that last hour, was a thing to drag small boys from play and old men from the Old Farmer's Almanac. Let alone pious aunts from Deuteronomy and Judges. And the aroma of it spread along the Maine coast.

At last the moment came. Uncle Asa brought out the head sweating nectar and brown tears of fat down over its jowls. He stuck red cranberries into it for eyes. He placed a ripe lemon, for color, into the jaws. Unbeknown to us, in the last hour, he had put in a diadem of apples, Northern Spies and Winesaps, around the head, Now they came out hissing at their cracks and sweetening the stout smell of the roast. Uncle Asa crowned the head with bay leaves and brought it smoking to table. Aunts dropped the Bible, boys dropped their popguns, and the old men their corncobs, and they all came stumbling tableward.

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