Pigs, People & Thanksgiving (an introduction)

Thanksgiving in 1789’s Maine

How did Martha Ballard celebrate on the Maine frontier? To find out, please join me on Saturday November 12th as I talk with the Culinary Historians of Southern California about Martha’s diaries and what she reveals about food, cooking, gardening, Thanksgiving, and all sorts of related subjects on the Maine frontier in the late 18th century. It’s free to all but you’ll have to register to get a Zoom link, which you can do right here: https://www.chsocal.org/mec-events/martha-ballards-diaries-a-kitchen-and-a-garden-on-the-maine-frontier-by-nancy-harmon-jenkins/

Memories of Pigs & People

In Cortona a month ago, for the first time in three years, I looked for Vera’s little salumeria on the main highway heading north out of town. Alas, it was empty and there was a For Rent sign—“Affittasi”—in the grimy front window. No one could tell me what had happened to Vera but I assumed that in the long, cruel months of Covid in Italy she had been forced to close down and quite possibly was never able to re-open. It even struck me that she might have been a victim of Covid herself, but since I never knew her last name, I couldn’t begin to find out.

I met Vera about ten years ago, curiously enough through some people who rented my house for a month and had discovered her shop while exploring the somewhat meager gastronomic offerings of our territory. They raved about her selection of salumi, most of it sourced locally—prosciuttos straight from the farm where pigs were raised and hams cured, Tuscan salamis with their characteristic chunks of clear white pork fat, capocollo from the neck of the pig, pancetta (like bacon but unsmoked), fennel-flavored finocchiona, biroldo (blood sausages from the hills of the Garfagnana), mortadella from Prato (so different from the Bolognese variety), and fresh sausages to take home and throw on the grill in the big fireplace.

Vera didn’t stock all of this variety all of the time but it quickly became a habit of mine to stop in whenever I was heading past her shop to see what was offered on any given day. I was never disappointed. Some of her selections were from the local Cinta Senese pigs, which have gone from near extinction to overwhelming popularity in recent years, but most were from a more common breed Italians call, to my amusement, Lahrredge Wait—say it quickly and it comes out Large White, a standard breed for porksters all over the world. (A Cinta Senese, by the way, with its distinctive white belly band, is part of the pageant in Lorenzetti’s 14th-century fresco, “The Allegory of Good Government,” in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. Look over to the right, as you face the wall, and you will see a smart little Cinta Senese trotting up to the city gate, presumably on his way to a future as prosciutti, salame, and perhaps biroldo too.)

As it turned out, Vera knew exactly who I was, or who we were, because she was the daughter of Gino, whom the people in our mountain village called Bossolo (the name, I was told, means “spent cartridge” in the local dialect, though I could never confirm that) and whom everyone referred to as il vostro contadino, “your peasant,” as if he came as part of some feudal legacy with the land we had bought.

He did not, of course.

Gino was very much his own man though he did exert a sort of proprietal interest in our farmlet. He would often show up in my kitchen late in the afternoon as I was starting to fiddle with supper. An offer of a glass of wine was always happily accepted, but only one. And then he would settle down at the table and tell stories. About his time in England as a prisoner of war, where he learned two phrases: “Come! Here! Boy!” and “I like you very much.” Or about his actual battlefield experiences in Africa where apparently—and fortunately—he was never required to display much valor. Or about the things he saw, the treasures he collected, as he roamed the steep forests that carpet both sides of our valley, looking for mushrooms. He was an expert porcini hunter and often emerged from a forest prowl with an overflowing basket of fat, healthy boletes and occasionally other funghi too, like the treasured amanita caesarea, ovoli buoni to Italians. His best friend was the local carpenter, Mezzanotte (“midnight”—but that was his real name and not a nomignolo or nickname as Bossolo was), and the two often sat together outside the village shop, exchanging greetings and wisecracks with whoever passed by.

Short and bandy legged Gino was invariably good-humored, his weathered features quick to break into a grin. He treated everything that happened, that had happened, as a joke, or at least the basis for a funny story, even being in battle, even being a prisoner-of-war—a funny story or, even more, a chance to learn something new. For a man with little education and barely literate, he had a wide-open curiosity about the world that, when I think back to him, was refreshing. Every encounter seemed full of fun. He delighted in voting a straight Communist ticket to counter his boss’s right wing leanings. But he drove my ex-husband crazy. It was that masculine thing about competition, I concluded. For instance: One day L. was trying to chop down a tree that interfered with our landscaping plans. He hacked and hacked to no effect, the ax bouncing off the tree trunk, barely scarring it, when Gino came along, strolling down the cart track to our house, picked up the ax, gave the tree trunk three whacks and the tree fell over. Faced with Gino’s triumphant grin, the husband said: “It wouldn’t have budged if I hadn’t done all the work already.”

What I didn’t know about Gino until I met his daughter was that he had spent time in South America, in Argentina to be precise, where he had gone between the wars, looking for work, looking for a better life than was available to an uneducated contadino in Mussolini’s Italy. And then when he came back and married and had a child, she said, he named her Argentina. “That’s my real name,” Vera said, “because he loved his time there so much.” But it was a difficult name to carry and so she adopted her mother’s name in the end.

At the time we knew him, Gino lived with his own mother, Margherita, in a small stone cottage linked to the more imposing farmhouse of Franco Valli. In that sense Gino was indeed a contadino, and when Dr. Valli, who was a veterinarian, undertook to build a long building that would house immaculate pig stalls for his experiments in scientific pig raising, Gino was his number one man for the task of overseeing it. The whole operation lasted barely a year when all the pigs fell to an overwhelming disease. Was it Gino’s fault, had he failed to monitor the pigs’ health profiles? Or was it inevitable that any sort of enterprise up there in the mountains, any practice, any intervention, any food even, that was not sanctioned by at least three previous generations was regarded with overwhelming skepticism, and even suspicion?

Like most Tuscans, the mountain farmers were experts at raising pigs; most kept a half dozen or so to provide for the family larder and create more little pigs for the following seasons. Not for nothing is porchetta considered the masterpiece of the local culinary achievement. I’ll have more to say about that

later, but for now I want to point out that, although gourmets and food enthusiasts can get quite emotional about la bistecca chianina, the Tuscan porterhouse steak that’s traditionally cut from the carcass of a Chianina beef, in fact the true foundation, at least in terms of protein, of the Tuscan kitchen is pork. Another fact: there are far more pigs than there are beef cattle in the Valdichiana, (where Chianina beef originated as a rugged work animal), actually more pigs than people so they tell me.

Maiale al Latte (a recipe)

I am personally quite hooked on pork, enough so to have created a dietary category called porcovegetarian, meaning a vegetarian in all things but pork. One of my favorite ways to prepare—well, I have so many favorite ways that I hardly know where to begin. One of these years I intend to write a pork-centric cookbook. But for now, let me tell you about pork braised in milk, maiale al latte, which I learned about many decades ago in Marcella Hazan’s first publication, The Classic Italian Cookbook. I had a little trouble with it the first time but I discovered, after a conversation with Marcella herself, that the secret is to prepare the pork in a smallish casserole or cooking pot, in order to confine the milk around the pork.

I always thought of this as a Tuscan technique but, even though there is a recipe in Artusi (#538 in La scienza in cucina--more on that later, too), it’s also claimed as a regional tradition by almost every kitchen from Napoli to Venice. Be that as it may, it is a delicious and rather surprising way to approach a piece of pork.

For four people, you will need a piece of boneless pork loin, tied if necessary, weighing about 2 pounds, plus olive oil, a small onion or a couple of shallots, some dry white wine, a few bay leaves and a sprig of rosemary if you wish, the usual salt and pepper, and about 3 cups of whole milk.

In your smallish cooking pot, brown the pork loin on all sides in 2 or 3 tablespoons of olive oil, turning it frequently to make a nice bronze crust on the outside. Remove the pork to a plate. If there’s a lot of fat in the pot, remove it to leave just about 2 or 3 tablespoons, then add the thinly sliced onion and let it soften in the fat over gentle heat. When the onion is starting to turn golden, turn up the heat, add about ¼ cup of dry white wine and reduce it, scraping up any bits (the fond, in French culinary terms). Nestle the pork back among the winey onions and add at least 2 cups of whole milk, along with the bay leaves and/or rosemary. Bring to a simmer, then turn the heat down so the pork cooks at a steady, slow simmer. Cover the pot but not tightly, leaving it slightly ajar so the liquid has a chance to evaporate. Now let the pork cook for 1½ to 2 hours, until you can pierce the meat easily with a skewer or a cooking fork. (Pork is done at 145 – 160ºF., so no problem here. The milk bath will keep the pork from drying out.) Check the meat from time to time and if the milk is reducing too much, just add some more. I have occasionally added as much as 3 ½ cups of milk in all.

When it’s done to your satisfaction, remove the meat to a board and let it cool until you can slice it. Meanwhile, turn to the milk which will have coagulated in the pot. Add a couple of tablespoons of water and raise the heat, cooking and scraping up all the coagulated bits and the cooking residues. Here’s Marcella’s fine phrase: “The milk, as such, disappears, to be replaced by clusters of delicious, nut-brown sauce.”

And this is what it looks like:

And Just a Word About Seasonal Vegetables

Driving out along a back road to White Oak Corners yesterday, I passed a beautifully kept farm with fields recently harvested—brassicas of all kinds, the farmer told me, broccoli, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts. He’d had a good season in the end, he said, after a tough, drought-y summer. But he was happy it was over and looking forward to a couple weeks of rest.

It’s the season for all those winter-y vegetables, the Brassicas, and I love them all, even kale. At first. By March, the flavors begin to sag and I’ll start longing for spring greens but for now these are what I want on my table.

I’ll tell you a secret, though: I have tried all the “modern” ways of cooking Brassicas, especially roasting on a sheet pan in a very hot oven and I just don’t think that method does them justice. Whether cauliflower or broccoli or Brussels sprouts, it seems to me, high heat brings out an unfortunate bitterness that no amount of olive oil and lemon and chili and garlic will conceal. Far better, to my palate, is steaming them just for four or five minutes in heavily salted water, then draining and setting them aside. When I’m ready to serve, I’ll toss the whatevers in hot olive oil or butter if it seems to warrant it, just enough to warm them through. Then add minced garlic, grated lemon zest, maybe a sprinkle of not too spicy chili peppers, and that’s it. Period. You can still taste the innate sweetness of the vegetable, the cabbage-y nature of it, enhanced but not overwhelmed by the additions, with no bitter aftertaste of burnt cabbage. That’s the way you’ll find your brassicas next time you come to my house for dinner.