A Pig in Provence (8 page)

“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 few
minutes 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 gallbladder. It’s full of bitterness and will spoil the liver if it gets on it.” The morning mist had begun to clear, and the sky showed pale blue as the men finished removing the innards.

I went back upstairs to help the women, and soon parts of the pig began arriving. The onion and blood mixture I had left behind was now snugly packed into casings, and the sausages had been pricked and were poaching in big pots of simmering water. “This one’s ready,” said Marie’s mother, called Mémé Schiffino by almost everyone, who was standing next to the poaching pots. “Take it away,” she directed, as she lifted a whole row of sausages out of the pot, where they had hung from strings tied to a willow branch balanced across the rim. Marie’s cousin, Bernadette,
took the branch from Mémé Schiffino and fastened it onto rope strung around the perimeter of the kitchen. Soon the kitchen was festooned with dangling sausages, and the women were hard at work chopping meat and fat for
pâté
. Oliver was crying to be fed, so I simply watched the process while I nursed him. At the same time, potatoes were being boiled for lunch, and a loin, well rubbed with garlic and sage, the traditional seasonings for pork, was roasting in the oven. Just before noon we were done with the chopping, a pan was on the stove ready for frying up the boudin, a salad was made and sitting on the sideboard, the table was set, and I, for one, was exhausted.

The men started to come in, and Ethel and Aileen joined us. Oliver had contentedly gone back to sleep in the bedroom. Fifteen minutes later, at exactly noon, we were all sitting at the table as Marcel sliced the traditional cured sausage reserved from the previous year’s
fête du cochon.
Copious amounts of wine were poured and bread was passed while Marie tended to the boudin sizzling behind us on the stove top. Soon the table was laden with a heaping platter of the crispy, reddish brown
boudin,
bowls of mashed potatoes, and warm applesauce. Starving after our hard morning’s work, we quickly devoured the first course. Next came the roast, more vegetables, the salad, cheese, an apple tart that one of Marcel’s cousins had made, and, thank goodness, coffee. Then, it was back to work, with the men spending the rest of the afternoon butchering part of the pig and getting it ready for salting, and the women preparing
caillettes.

My first encounter with
caillettes
had been just outside Arles late one afternoon when I was a student in Aix-en-Provence. Donald and I were with two friends visiting from Germany. We were hungry, but it was too early for a restaurant and too late for a sandwich at a
café
. As we drove through a village, we spotted a
boucherie-charcuterie
and pulled up in front with the idea of buying a few slices of ham. Once inside, I spotted a tray of richly browned, ready-to-eat hamburger patties, which I thought looked absolutely delicious and quite substantial. I could hardly wait. I bought two, and once we were back in the car, I broke them in half and passed them out. What a shock! At first bite, I knew I had made a terrible mistake. They were dense, not crumbly like hamburger, with a strong liver taste and tiny squares of fat, all heavily seasoned with garlic. And there was a bit of something green as well.

I didn’t know then that I was sampling part of the culinary patrimony of Provence, one that goes back with certainty to the 1800s and perhaps, in an earlier version, to the 1600s. The rounds, about the size of a hamburger, but shaped more like a ball than a patty, are made from cubes of liver and fat, and occasionally spinach or chard, and then seasoned with salt, pepper, garlic, and spices. Sometimes the preparation is marinated in wine, and sometimes an egg is added. Each round, or
petit ballot,
is then topped with a sprig of sage; wrapped in a square of
crépine,
the lacy caul fat that covers the stomach; and baked for about half an hour in a medium-hot oven. Old recipes indicate that the throat meat of the pig, sometimes called pork sweetbreads because the throat is where sweetbreads are located in a bovine, was used in combination with the liver. Although
caillettes
appear to have originated as humble family fare, the famous Curnonsky includes them in his classic
Le trésor gastronomique de France
as a regional specialty. They are found outside Provence, but are never- theless considered a
charcuterie
typical of the region. The most illustrious of the Provençal
caillettes
are said to come from the Var, the département, or province, where we were living, and are sometimes called caillettes varoises. Not surprisingly, different villages each have their own way of preparing them.

In Cotignac, where Marie’s family settled after leaving Calabria in 1946, the
caillettes
are made with the kidneys and lungs as well as the liver, and that was how we made ours that day in Marie’s kitchen. Once they were done, we put them on platters to cool, and Bernadette spoke up, “Save the
jus,
too. Don’t pour that out.”

She then turned to me. “In the old days the
jus
was a special treat. You can see how the fat has melted, and when we were children we would grill pieces of bread in the fireplace to soak up the
jus.
” She tore off several pieces of bread from a leftover
baguette.
“Here, try this.”

She dipped a piece into the juices and handed it to me. “Ethel, Aileen,
venez ici!”
she cried, calling the girls from the back bedroom where they were playing, and handed them each a piece of bread. “Go on, dip it in.” She tilted the baking dish toward them.
“Non! Je veux pas!”
Aileen, at three years old, knew her own mind, and clearly wasn’t having any. It wasn’t until she was a young woman that she became as appreciative of her mother’s cooking as everyone else was, and there are still a number of things she won’t eat. Among them is her grandmother’s chocolate cake made with pig’s blood, which I can attest tastes wonderful, though I can understand how others might be reluctant to eat it again once they know why it is so moist. Ethel, on the other hand, took a big dip of the warm
jus
and smacked her lips. I don’t think she could be enticed so easily today, but when she was little she would usually eat anything as long as it was good. The hot
jus
was delicious, richly flavored with garlic and seasonings and tasting faintly of liver.

J.-B. Reboul’s classic
La cuisinière provençale,
a cookbook first published in the 1900s in Marseilles, includes a recipe titled
Crépinettes de foie à la villageoise ou gayettes. Gayettes
is another
spelling of
caillettes.
You begin by putting the cubed fat in one plate, the cubed pork liver in another, and then seasoning the fat well with a mixture of salt, pepper, spices, and three or four cloves of minced garlic. Next, you lay squares of caul fat on the table and layer each one first with cubed fat and then with cubed liver. You repeat this twice. The caul fat is tied with string to make a packet, and the
caillettes
are baked in a
gratin
dish for about half an hour. They are typically served cold and sliced, like
pâté
.

A fine
caillette
is still much appreciated at local dinner tables, but since few people make their own anymore, it is necessary to find a
charcutier
who not only makes his own, but also makes good ones. M. Desmoulins is just such a butcher. He no longer has his fixed shop in Aups, a neighboring village, preferring instead to keep only his traveling shop. It is a special van outfitted with an upper panel that folds up to reveal a long, refrigerated, glass-protected counter filled with house-made
charcuterie,
roasts, shanks, and various cuts of pork, beef, and lamb. A large selection of sharp knives and cutting boards is visible and the interior is gleaming, bright white. M. Desmoulins stands behind the counter ready to serve, take orders, chat, and answer questions. I have often bought
caillettes
from him when he makes his Sunday morning stop in front of the
bar-tabac
in Tavernes, the closest village to my house, about five minutes away by the back road, and have served them to local guests who say, “Ah, are these from Desmoulins? They look like it.” The moment I confirm their suspicions, they take an ample slice.

While we were making our
caillettes
at Marie’s that afternoon and sampling the
jus,
the men were setting up the
saloir,
the wooden box with sloping sides that I had seen earlier downstairs. The
saloir
is where meats are packed in salt for curing, and Marcel’s was an old one. I could see the hand-carved wooden pegs
holding it together as I watched him pour a thick layer of coarse salt into the bottom. He laid the fresh hams and pork bellies on top of the salt, but before covering them with more salt, he pushed down around the ham joints with his thumb, packing the area with salt. A trickle of clear pink fluid came out. “Don’t want any blood in there. Spoils the meat. Do this twice a day. Turn the meat too. Have to.” He poured on more salt until the meats were buried. According to tradition, I shouldn’t have been in the salting room that day because the old lore surrounding the killing and preserving of the pig alleges that the presence of women in the salting room will cause the meat to spoil.

Marcel had been orphaned when he was little, his parents felled by a flu epidemic, and he had stopped school at ten, when he was sent to work as a farmhand far from Nice, but he had his own mind about things. He has never been afraid to stand his ground about what he thought was right, in spite of the village hierarchy that once put him and Marie very near the bottom because they were tenant farmers and “foreigners,” the latter ascribed to anyone less than second or third generation in the village.

“Best place in the whole village for hams,” he said as he looked around the room and smoothed the salt over the meat. “I’ll hang and season the legs in thirty days.” He indicated the hook in the middle of the vaulted ceiling with an upward jerk of his head. “Stays cool here, got air.” This time he motioned with his head to his left in the direction of a small, barred window over the old stone sink. It had a piece of screen nailed over it. When the room later became our kitchen, we left the hook in the ceiling but glassed in the window. By that time, the curing of hams in the sixteenth-century vaulted room had passed into memory, with only Marcel and a few others remembering the days when they killed pigs and hung hams there to provision the family.

Although thirty years ago preserving parts of the pig was a necessity of rural life, the
jour du cochon
has disappeared from most of the villages.
Charcuterie,
however, still figures large in the appetites and traditions of Provence. Every village has a butcher or two, and the larger towns and cities have many. Locals know which day which butcher makes
boudin maison,
which one makes the best
pâté
de campagne, and which one sells the most tender jambon. The measure of the importance of
charcuterie
in the culinary life of Provence, and of all of France, can be measured by the amount of shelf space devoted to it in supermarkets. You can even buy multiple versions of
boudin
in supermarkets: large fat ones, slim or plump medium ones, whole long rolls, single links. There is even an
apéritif
version spiced with seasonings from the Antilles that is grilled and served speared on a toothpick with before-dinner drinks. The kinds of
pâtés,
certainly from pork, but from other meats as well, seem countless, as do the dried and fresh sausages and pickled preparations.

Anne, my longtime friend from my student days in Aix-en-Provence, who helps me now with my cooking classes, loves
museau de porc.
“It reminds me of being a little girl in Marseille, when my father, who was a schoolteacher like my mother, would bring us home a treat on his way back from school. We’d all gather around the kitchen table and he’d cut slices of fresh
baguette
for us and make
museau
sandwiches,” she once told me, passing me a little plastic box of thinly sliced pickled snout, onions, and
cornichons
as we sat at a café on market day in Salernes. “I got this across the street.” She indicated a small butcher shop with red tile trimming its windows. “They make it themselves, but only once in a while. I always look for it.” She picked a slice out of the box and began to eat it. “I eat too much bread,” she laughed, “so now, just the
museau
on its own, not a sandwich.” We picked the box
clean, then washed the impromptu snack down with a
café crème
for me, tomato juice for Anne.

Another
charcuterie
item,
saucisson d’Arles,
is, like the
caillette,
particular to Provence, but now is famous all over France. As with any special food or dish with a history, many legends surround it, but we do know that the rose-hued sausage of Arles has been made since the seventeenth century. Traditional wisdom varies on just how it was first prepared. Some say that the original sausage was donkey meat, others that it was a mixture of pork, beef, and donkey or horse meat, and still others that it was made from the meat of the wild cattle of the Camargue. Not one of these theories has been confirmed. What is known is that today the sausage is made from lean pork, lean beef, and pork fat, all chopped separately. Then they are mixed together with wine, herbs, salt, and pepper and stuffed into large beef intestines, which are twisted into individual sausages and dried for three to six weeks under controlled conditions.