Food
Michele Roberts thinks it's OK to pig out
Published 14 July 2003
I love all kinds of pork dishes. My taste for them goes back to childhood
Driving into Yvette's farmyard recently, I saw a fork-lift truck hoisting up a pig by its hind legs. The pig's throat having just been cut by the local butcher, a serious-looking man in gold-rimmed spectacles, blood was gushing forth in a violent jet. Later, the butcher set to with a blowtorch, singeing the hairs off the skin. People here in the Mayenne used to slaughter their pigs in great wooden tubs, in which they could collect the blood. Then the blood went into those delicious sausages called boudins, the French version of our black pudding.
Once the pig was cut up and safely in the freezer, Yvette put the bones and bits into a cauldron as big as a hip-bath and simmered them for rillettes. She let me help with the stirring, which involved wielding, in both hands, a spoon the size of an oar, moving it gently this way and that. Clunk, clunk. Hours later, the meat having floated off the bones, it was pulled apart, shredded with two forks, put into special one-handled earthenware pots, sealed with melted pork fat poured on top, then stored in the cool back kitchen. Le Mans in the Sarthe claims to be the home of rillettes, but in our departement next door, we think of it as our own speciality. It's our favourite snack on the village picnic for 14 July. We commemorate the fall of the Bastille by going for a long communal walk and then feasting on bread and rillettes and cider.
I love all kinds of pork dishes. My taste for them goes back to childhood. We infuse the earliest landscapes surrounding us with our first experiences of joy and bliss and desire, and so it is with food. It carries our most tender memories of love and nurture. The dull suburb of north London in which I grew up was transformed by the presence of Nana, my English grandmother, who lived with us, and who cooked dishes like suet pudding, apple-and-blackberry pie and grilled kippers. Nana made feather-light Yorkshire pudding, puffed up to a towering crust, and sometimes she would take this masterpiece to further heights by transforming it to toad-in-the-hole for Saturday lunch. That was back in those days before people panicked about cholesterol. Sausage toad, Nana called this triumph. The sausages came up blackened and shiny. Nana also cooked a mean roast pork, coated in rich crackling, which we ate with our fingers. She let us have the dripping as a treat, spread on toast and sprinkled with salt.
Sausages were a staple. Tiny sausage rolls to be handed round at drinks parties, sections of frankfurters on sticks next to the pineapple chunks hedgehog, beef sausages cooked at Girl Guide camp in the rain. In order to gain your cook's badge, you had to light your fire, rain or not, with just two matches. Similar in texture were some bizarre, dumpling-like lumps called dampers, made simply of unflavoured dough, toasted on peeled twigs. What adamant digestions we had.
On holiday, visiting our grandparents in France, we bought saucisson a l'ail from the pork butcher in the village, pale but very juicy and good. One home-cooked delicacy was saucisse en brioche, the French version of toad-in-the-hole, a single large sausage baked in a pastry made from a yeast dough. Another was pork chops with apples in butter and Calvados. But Brigitte and Grand-mere, with their notions, stricter than Nana's, of le regime equilibre, did not serve us sausages or other pork dishes too often. A little bit of what you fancy does you good, Nana would say: enough is as good as a feast. But she erred on the generous side.
Elizabeth David includes an intriguing recipe for pork chops a la Sainte Menehould. You dip the chops in melted butter and fine breadcrumbs, then grill them. Sainte Menehould similarly pops up for grilled buttered strips of breast of lamb. Why should she be the patron saint of this method of grilling? Butler's Lives of the Saints gives her as Manechildis but adds no biographical details. I fear she must have been a virgin martyr, on the pattern of St Laurence on his gridiron, who scorched her way into heaven.
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