Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [77]
There were two other problems with this prosciutto. First, it was expensive. No one in my family hunts, and although by that time we had acquired some ducks, I was done with slaughter. At $18.99 per pound for duck breast, after shrinkage my duck prosciutto cost about as much as real prosciutto di Parma, which we all liked a lot better. And that was the second problem with duck prosciutto: we all liked prosciutto di Parma a lot better.
And so one morning I drove to Marin Sun Farms in Point Reyes, California, and bought a $97, fourteen-pound pork leg. I paid extra for a pastured pig because, as Ruhlman writes, “The quality of the end result is entirely dependent on the hog, where it lived, what it ate, how fat it grew.” The pigs at Marin Sun Farms supposedly feed on wild acorns, and what could be more toothsome than wild acorns? I have no idea, but wild acorns sounded right. I brought the haunch home and promptly submerged it under five pounds of kosher salt.
“You’re wasting a lot of salt,” Owen said, looking up from Archie and Veronica. “We don’t have an endless amount of salt in the sea.”
“I think we might,” I said.
“We do?”
I thought for a minute. “I don’t know.”
“What are we going to do with all that?” Mark asked.
“Eat it,” I said. “We’re going to save buckets of money.”
He watched me for a minute. He said, “It’s like we need a ride and you’ve decided to build a car.”
After I had refrigerated the salted meat for a few weeks, I brushed it off, slathered it in lard and peppercorns, wrapped the meat in cheesecloth, tied it with twine, and hung it from a pipe in our crawl space. Every few weeks, I would go check on the prosciutto to make sure it hadn’t been chewed down by a rat or attacked by flies. It was always just hanging there peacefully. After six months, I cut it down one afternoon, laid it out on the kitchen counter, unwrapped its bandages, and beheld a monstrosity: a bulbous hunk of what might have once been meat, covered with luxuriant chalk-green mold and cracked peppercorns that resembled small black beetles. It was too odd to be disgusting. It now weighed nine pounds, some of that bone, some of it mold. I put it on the dining table and there it sat, worrying me, until the next morning, when after several cups of coffee, I recklessly sawed off a hunk.
Inside, the flesh was beautiful, camellia pink swathed in plush white fat. I took a bite. It tasted exactly like prosciutto. Spectacular. I had done it.
About a minute later, I began Googling “botulism homemade prosciutto” because Ruhlman’s recipe does not, like some, include pink salt. After forty-eight hours, when it was clear I was not going to die of botulism, I began Googling “trichinosis homemade prosciutto.” A few weeks later, when I showed no symptoms of trichinosis, I began serving the prosciutto.
It was wonderful—once I got past my fears. Let’s say that buried inside that rind I can slice out six pounds of prosciutto. Including the price of salt, pepper, lard, and cheesecloth, I’ll have paid about $17 per pound for prosciutto. A deal, given that even the mediocre supermarket brand prosciutto sells for $31 per pound. There are problems, though. This is a lot of prosciutto and I suspect it will be hulking in our already overcrowded refrigerator for months to come. Moreover, I cannot slice it neatly and I do not plan to buy a slicer. When I cut the prosciutto, the slices resemble slices of Christmas ham—thick. All things considered, unless you are a staunch and serious hobbyist and also a pig farmer, I think you should buy your prosciutto.
Make it or buy it? Buy it.
REUBEN SANDWICH
As with a lot of iconic American dishes—the martini, the French dip sandwich, Crab Louie—the history of the Reuben sandwich is widely disputed. Was it invented in New York City in 1914? Or in Omaha in the 1930s? In Lincoln in 1937? Disputed as well are