The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [148]
Felisa also remembered. She was only three but recalls standing on a mountain watching the planes. “Then my Grandmother took us to the soldiers and they took us away.”
The lard from around the kidney was carefully removed, the lacy lining, the caul, was set aside, as was the liver, and the heart. The lungs were hung on a hook by the esophagus, eventually to be fed to the dog who had by now lost all interest in the former Pepe because he no longer detected the scent of fear or death— or Pepe; there was only food.
The intestines were taken out and handed to the women, who received them with unhappy smiles. After Julián removed all of the organs, he opened the back and the men hoisted the legless carcass on a chain and hung it from a beam. While Julián carefully carved the fillet into thin medallions, the women were working on the intestines: emptying them, washing them over and over, soaking them in salted vinegar.
Then they went to the kitchen, where only a single row of last fall’s choricero still hung from the ceiling. The men sat at the long table, where crusty bread and bottles of Rioja wine had been placed. The kitchen had both an electric and a wood-burning stove, but only the wood burner was used. First, porrusalda, a hot leek and potato soup, was served, followed by salt cod and red pepper salad with slices of garlic in olive oil. Then came slices of Pepe’s grilled liver, followed by grilled sliced fillet of victim, and then brazo gitano, a custard-filled sponge cake. Then coffee, brandy, Cuban cigars.
They laughed and joked in Euskera and in Spanish. One of the neighbors complained that he could not understand “these Euskaldunberri and their Batua.” He could understand Guipúzcoan or any of the other dialects, “but this Batua, maybe if I listen to something twice I could get it.”
The neighbor’s son, Igor, with his dark hair and black eyes, his long straight nose, his thin face, strong chin, and thick eyebrows, looked like a portrait of a Basque by a romantic painter. Igor had no intention of a life on the farm. He worked in a factory where he made as much money in a month as he could in three months of farm work. But he learned his part at the txarribodas. Julián worried about preparing someone to take his own place so he could be certain that a time would not come when there would be no more txarribodas in the community.
After lunch, the women chopped the greens off twenty leeks, then cooked the chopped whites over a slow fire so that they poached in their own juices. They did the same with five chopped onions. Then they cooked three and a third pounds of rice until it was overboiled porridge. They diced the lard and put it in a basin, mixing it with the cooked and drained ingredients, a pound of chopped parsley, a dozen chopped guindillas, two large handfuls of coarse salt, and they slowly added the pig’s blood until the basin was filled with a bright red mush.
Then the women crossed themselves. They say this is the only insurance against the intestine skins breaking. With the help of an aluminum funnel, they stuffed the skins and tied them off into sausages. They then cooked them for twenty minutes in a pot with the leek greens, which help protect the blood sausage from breaking. Cold water was constantly added to keep the boiling down, since a strong boil also would break the skins.
Meanwhile, with the skillful use of Julián’s knife, the men reduced the former farmyard animal into a series of cuts of meat. The head was removed, and the ears and cheeks were cut off for eating. They had slabs of fatback, slabs of bacon, legs ready to cure into ham, chops, loins. The meat for the chorizo would soak for a day, and then the sausages would dry for another week by wood-burning fires.
They had a week of continuous pork feasting ahead of them. To sell any of this would be a violation of health laws. The entire txarriboda might be illegal; it’s not certain. But they just eat among themselves