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.
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.
And Uncle Asa blossomed. He ran up a batch of his dough-devil dumplings and threw them into the stewpot. He made them as you would make cream-o'-tartar biscuits and cast them, raw, into the kettle. In there, catching fire and inspiration from the pig's trotters inflamed with onion, the dumplings exploded into airy flowers of wheat, slick and moist on their outsides, but aerated with bubbles and bone-dry at their centers. Then my mother and uncle together marched the soup to the table and poured it out into our largest green tureen. Somebody blew the dinner horn toward the oakwoods, and the sound of its winding brought a dozen men and boys running for dear life and pig's feet over the crusts of the snow. And we fell on those feet and heaped the bones of them in hills around our soup plates.
No one has ever counted the bones in a pig's foot, for no one has ever had time to stop for such foolish and dry statistics when he has had his nose to a plateful of such pleasures. Who counts the flowers of the newly popped corn in one batch of the stuff smoking from the coals? 1 know a professor who docs things like that. But he is a professor of physics and sat all one day of his life on the side of the sea to disprove my theory that every so often a larger wave than the rest comes in. I don't know what happened that day, but apparently no especially large waves came in at all, just to make a fool of me and other poets. I wish a tidal wave had come in and swept him away, but my luck was out that time.
There are plenty bones, anyway, in a pig's foot. You think you have found them all, and you bite into another. And around every last little knob of a bone there is an envelope of such sweetness that your eyes water. Each bite is a new surprise. The bones are never in the same place. They seem to bed in the jelly of flavor where they will, and each one tastes sweeter than the one before. Uncle Asa, at the end, was walled in by a circle of bones. And his eyes were closed in peace.
I swear when we used to bite into those resisting bundles of jelly and meat on Lost Paradise Farm, and into those stewed biscuits of my Uncle Asa's, we all felt like Ponce de León in Florida and on the brink of the bubbling Fountain of Youth.
I know my Uncle Asa felt like Ponce, anyway. For Uncle Asa never grew old or—as my father used to say when he tired of Asa's being one of us boys and taking us all off to the Sagadahoc County Fair and riding us on the merry-ground, when we should have been digging potatoes—never grew up. It may have been that our stewed pig's feet were a Fountain of Youth to him. Being with us children at Christmastime always probably helped keep him young, too. Uncle Asa was just another one of us boys the sad year, in his ninetieth winter of pig's extremities, when he ate his last pig's knuckles and died. He had that last blessing—he left us after the last pig's feet were gone.
And if Uncle Asa's mother had still been around the day he died, I am sure that she would have said what an old mother said, in her hundredth year on the Maine coast, when they came and told her that her eighty-year-old fisherman son was no more: “By golly, 1 always knew I would never raise that boy!”