Read Online A Pig in Provence by Georgeanne Brennan - Free Book Online

while the butcher quickly looped a block and tackle over his rear feet and hoisted him up. Once he was secure—it took only seconds—the butcher carefully sank a knife deep into his throat, cutting the jugular vein. The men held the jerking pig as steady as they could while Marie caught the fountain of pumping blood in her yellow basin, stirring it constantly with a wooden spoon so the blood wouldn’t coagulate, until no more blood came.
    It all happened so quickly and with such swift, sure movements that I barely had time to register the emotion I felt at the passage from life to death. At one moment the pig was a living, breathing, heaving animal, one I had known for the last year as I helped Marie feed him, and in the next moment he was an inanimate object, ready to become food. With the release of blood, I saw his life slowly leaving and his eyes beginning to fade. My heart was pounding and I turned my head. When I looked back moments later, it was over and the transition from life to deathcompleted. It was time to begin the transformation of the pig into
pâté
, sausages, and hams.
    Marie left the courtyard and headed upstairs to the kitchen, and I followed. Oliver was sleeping quietly in a nearby bedroom, so I joined Marie and three or four other women, including Marie’s mother, in her sixties then, a beautiful Calabrian with pure white hair and the profile of a Roman emperor. “Here. Start sautéing these,” Marie said, handing me a cotton sack full of minced onions. I chopped them last night, but they need to cook now in the
saindoux.” Saindoux,
I learned, was the very fine, delicate fat surrounding the pork kidneys. Once rendered, it was stored and then used for certain sautés and, most importantly, for making pastry crusts, as is rendered back fat. You can still buy saindoux at some butcher shops, but none of my French neighbors render their own fat anymore, not even Marie.
    Someone came over to the stove to help me hoist the five pounds of onions into pans of melted fat, and we stirred them until they were just beginning to color. Then we put them into a big pot on the table and stirred in the blood. Marie was pounding fennel seeds, coarse salt, and peppercorns together in a mortar. “Not everyone uses wild fennel, but we do.” She rubbed some fennel seeds between her fingers and smelled them before passing them to me. “It’s better than garden fennel. More flavor. I cut bunches of the wild fennel stalks in the fall and keep them in the
cave.
” She added a little nutmeg and allspice, and then stirred the mix into the blood and onions.
    “Marie!” shouted Marcel, pounding up the stairs. “Where’s the salt?”
    “Downstairs!” At first, I had been startled by how much Marie and Marcel shouted at each other, but I finally figured out that it was how they communicated. I followed him a fewminutes later to see what was going on in the courtyard. Marcel was downstairs in the large vaulted room, the same room that a few years later would be my kitchen, setting up a low wooden box on a table.
    The pig, now most of it scraped smooth, was the palest pink. Donald was ladling a panful of boiling water over the last bristle-covered leg while someone else scraped it. I stayed to watch as the animal was hoisted up and its hocks pierced by the hooks hanging above the courtyard arch. As the butcher made a clean slice down the belly, a torrent of steaming intestines spilled into the big basin held by one of the men, exposing the lungs and heart. It was a primeval scene as the men worked in unison, each understanding the task at hand: pulling on the intestines, cutting in exactly the right place to release them from the stomach wall, cutting again at the bunghole, gently gathering the rest of the fat around the kidneys and putting it into a bowl, cutting out the kidneys and then the liver, and placing them, still steaming, in another bowl.
    “Be careful,” someone warned Donald. “Don’t cut into the