My Uncle Asa carved off all the richest and thickest crackling skin for himself, but dug out tidbits for the rest of us here and there. It was the Christmas season. Holly and mistletoe hung high. Bay-berry candles shone and sputtered. So did my Uncle Asa. Pig's-head has been the proper dish for Yuletide for over a thousand years. And Uncle Asa went irrevocably and inevitably with pig's head. He had the cheeks and the nose for it. We had no Latin carols. But Uncle Asa sang in a deep bass some pretty good English ones, after he had got outside of, say, two-three pounds of mahogany-brown pig jowls. And Uncle Asa's checks blushed like the wild briar rose from that afternoon on all through the January snows.
Uncle Asa had a nose, too, in the turning of other heads on our pigs into cheese. He helped my mother prepare this dish of dishes for cold weather and caroling uncles. He dug out the eyes, cut off the ears, and slashed their cartilages into thin strips. My mother boiled the head and the fragments of ears hard in her pioneer-sized iron kettle, in very salty water, until all the meat fell from all the hones. She saved the stock as the cement of this cold dish.
Then Mother ran all the meat through her applewood chopping tray. Or rather, she let me run it through, as I was good at the chopping tray, with our double-handled and double-bladed chopper, and could read the Leatherstocking Tales and chop for hours without missing a word of Indian fights or a hunk of pie meat. I chopped my way through all of James Fenimore Cooper and halfway through Nathaniel Hawthorne, in my time. Cooper went better with the rhythm of the chopper, I recall, than Hawthorne, except for The Scarlet Letter. That last story had the right pitch to go with a boy's arm at the meat bowl.
Into the hashed meat my mother threw bundles of sage and marjoram she brought down from the witchbrooms of dried herbs in our open chamber. 1 chopped in these, too. And I chopped in last raw onions galore. My mother poured the hot stock into the minced meal and herbs in a vast, flat earthen crock, and she put the dish down cellar to cool off and age.
Down there on the shelf in the wintry glooms, and in the ruby light coming through dim jars of wild raspberry preserves, something very transcendental took place. The gelatin of the stock solidified around the bits of suspended pig, permeated the meat, glorified it. and turned into a precious variegated marble of magnificent eating. Mother brought her crock up, after days of silent growth and developing in the red light of raspberries, and Uncle Asa seized the butcher knife and cut himself a giant slab through the middle of the pan. He always did that with each cheese, to see whether it was aged properly and had the right texture. If it had. then he usually, if Mother wasn't looking, cut two thin slabs on each side of his first, to make absolutely sure.
If Uncle Asa could have cut into a live pig as artistically as he cut into a pig's-head cheese, he would have been the champion pig-sticker of the community and would have made himself a fortune. But his philosophical hand was too light for such heavy work.
I don't know of any tastier things than slices of this green-gray-brown symphony of cold toothsomeness of hog's head stellified in jelly. Cheese is a poor skim-milk word for this rich cream of pig. This cheese that was meat went as a side dish all through the Christmas holidays. Between thick wedges of homemade bread we ate the cheese out under the January spruces, under the blazing sunlight on iced trees, under the blue north wind. We ate it between screams of our crosscut saw as it ate its way through red oak and maple. It was worth sawing up a cord of red oak to make room in us for such outdoors sandwiches, stout as oak itself.
My Uncle Asa wasn't out there under the north wind, of course. Not my Uncle Asa. Trust him to keep clear of the hot handle of a crosscut saw in wood-cutting time! No, Uncle Asa was sitting snug at home curled up beside a whole crock of our hog's-head cheese all by himself. Eating his way right through it and out on the other side. Honest. I have seen him start at the port side of a five-quart crock of headcheese and come out smiling on the starboard at one sitting, with only two pipefuls of tobacco, to sweeten his digestion, amidships.
My pig's-head uncle never had any children. It was a great sorrow to him. He even wanted to adopt me at one time, after a whole headcheese. But I am glad my patents objected. For I should likely never have gotten any but the shelving side-slices of hog's-head cheese, had I grown up in his house. And I would have been a very thin man now. I tell you.
There are other fine extremities to the pig. His feet, for example. Here again, most people act like fools and shy away. But there is a resiliency in their gelatinous substance unmatchable in other meats. Even skates' fins have less magic of delectable resistance to the teeth. It is the meat that resists the teeth that delights the teeth and tongue and soul most, or why should wise people love to chew the small legs of the Steamed lobster for tidbits so small that they could be put in your eye?
Uncle Asa could account for two pigs at a sitting, eight trotters, that is. It was his bare minimum. So when he was at our table when pig's feet were in the air, as he jolly well saw to it that he was, my mother did the trotting extremities of four or five pigs at once. She washed the sixteen or twenty feet in cold water, made Uncle Asa carve off the hoofs, and then she cooked the feet slowly in her biggest iron kettle, the one that had the bulge in it that fined deep down into the birchwood coals. She cooked the feet until they were tenderized and would let a fork sink into their bones, and salted all to taste. When the meal was done, she added slices of twenty or so large mild onions. She let them cook twenty minutes until they had permeated the pork. Then it was time for Uncle Asa to blossom.
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