On The Use of Whole Animals

About every other week we purchase a whole pig from Rainbow Meadows Farms. It comes in six or seven giant boxes and weighs over two hundred pounds. It’s a half day project to butcher the thing and make use of it all. At the end of the whole process the cook is left bedraggled and harried with a dull knife and a giant pile of raw pork that still needs to be cooked. He has to ask himself on occasion, “Isn’t there an easier way?” Couldn’t we just order pieces of pork, already butchered and neatly cryovaced for our convenience? What’s the point, anyway?

The first and foremost benefit is economy. Local, pasture-raised pork is not cheap. It generally costs about fifty percent more than “commodity pork”- the antibiotic injected, corn-fed, confinement kept animals that end up on grocery shelves and restaurant menus across the country. When we buy the whole pig directly from the farmer, we bring that cost difference down by about half. It still costs more, but it makes it much more doable from a business standpoint because we get the “premium cuts” like the chops and the tenderloins for the same (relatively) low price as the hams and shoulder.

The sheer variety of stuff one can make from a whole pig is staggering. The hind legs become hams for the Croque Madame we serve at brunch. The loins get smoked and served with choucroute garni, or roasted whole and served by the slice over polenta. The tenderloins we cure and rub with smoked paprika to serve as lomo. The bellies get cured into bacon for brunch or pancetta that we use in our pasta dishes. The shoulders are ground up for sausage, ragu or pate, or braised for a ravioli filling. The liver goes into our country pate. The head and feet are boiled for several hours and made into coppa di testa (that’s head cheese to you). The bones boil into stock, the fat renders into lard or is added to frankfurters or mortadella. The heart goes into sausage. We even use the skin in the Italian sausage called cotecchino.

At Piedmont we sometimes feel like archaeologists researching the eating habits of the past. We’ve discovered that all the weird pork preparations that are traditional in Europe exist for the simple reason of not letting any protein go to waste. And before refrigeration, that meant curing and preserving as much as possible. Thus the invention of prosciutto, pancetta, salami, mortadella. All those fancy imported European delicacies are actually just clever ways of not wasting what nature gives us.

Not too long ago, meat wasn’t a commodity we all took for granted. It was hard work raising an animal of that size, and people made sure they got as much benefit from it as possible. Now we raise so much meat so cheaply (and under such poor conditions) that we don’t appreciate it at all. It’s so cheap that we can blithely chuck out all the “weird bits” and fat. We want only the leanest chops, the easiest parts to cook. Using the whole animal is a good life lesson: you can’t have the chops without the liver.