The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [204]
Wednesday morning I drove into San Francisco to pick up the meat from Angelo at the forge. To get to his walk-in cooler you pass through a sequence of loftlike spaces of an almost Dickensian novelty and clutter, filled with metal scraps of every description, stacks of iron rods, ironworking tools and pieces of machinery, a small blast furnace raging heat and light, and, growing beneath an opening to the sky right in the middle of the forge, a fully grown fig tree. In the back there’s a sunny kitchen with an industrial-duty espresso machine, a meat grinder, and a pasta machine and, to relieve the industrial clutter and clatter all around, big vases of fresh wildflowers. Industrial and domestic, hard and soft, metal and meat: The place was a lot like Angelo himself.
The carcass was hanging alongside a couple of others in the walk-in, amid racks holding prosciutto, pancetta, and salami in various stages of curing. Just outside the walk-in stood more racks holding oak barrels of wine and balsamic vinegar, hundreds of unlabeled bottles of wine, and fifty-pound bags of wheat, both durum and semolina. Angelo carried the stiff carcass out to the kitchen table and, with a cleaver, began expertly to disassemble my pig. We trimmed and salted the hams for prosciutto and, with a few well-placed blows of the cleaver, Angelo separated the rib cage from the spinal column and then the loins, one on either side of the spine like saddlebags of meat. Eyeing the mounting pile of trimmings—chunks of dark red meat and strips of snowy white fat—Angelo had an idea.
“Hey, you know, we should make a nice little ragout with all these scraps. For our lunch.” And so we did, pushing the scraps through the grinder, stewing the ground meat with a can of tomatoes, and, while the ragout bubbled on the stove, making a batch of fresh pasta on which to serve it. Angelo showed me how to cut handfuls of the yellowy ribbons of fettuccine as they extruded themselves from the slots of his machine.
Ready or not, this would be my first taste of my pig, and I was a little taken aback at the speed with which it had just gone from hanging carcass to ground-up scraps of meat to lunch. But the ragout was delicious and, eating it at Angelo’s kitchen table, even amid the raw cuts of meat arrayed on the counters around us, I suddenly felt perfectly okay about my pig—indeed, about the whole transaction between me and this animal that I’d killed two weeks earlier. Eating the pig, I understood, was the necessary closing act of that drama, and went some distance toward redeeming the whole play. Now it was all a matter of doing well by the animal, which meant making the best use of its meat by preparing it thoughtfully and feeding it to people who would appreciate it. Later, when I looked up the spelling of the word “ragout,” I learned that it comes from the French verb ragoûter: “to restore the appetite.” This one had done that, restoring my appetite for this meat after the disgust I’d felt cleaning the animal. I was reminded of what Paul Rozin had written about a traditional cuisine’s power to obviate the omnivore’s dilemma by clothing the exotic in familiar flavors. I left Angelo’s with two gorgeous cuts of my pig neatly wrapped in butcher paper.
By the end of the week all the meal’s raw ingredients were in place: I’d picked a gallon of cherries,