Farm City_ The Education Of An Urban Farmer Part 17

I glanced at the gates: they were all open, including the main pig door. As I rounded the corner I saw one of the monks, Chao, in his full burgundy robes, holding an orange parking cone. He was speaking pig. "Uh-uh-uh-huh," "Uh-uh-uh-huh," he grunted. The pigs were capering around 28th Street. he grunted. The pigs were capering around 28th Street.

When they cavort, things break. Big Guy plowed into a garbage can, and it toppled. Little Girl was trying to get into the garden by ramming into another gate with her tremendous shoulders. A bull in a china shop would have been remarkably calm compared to these two. Another neighbor, Sandra, who had recently remarked that my farm reminded her of her childhood home in Puerto Rico, lofted a broomstick, with her daughter a.s.sisting.

This wasn't the first time this had happened. A few weeks earlier, I had heard someone outside say, "Is that a pig?" and then I saw Big Guy headed for the busy intersection of Martin Luther King and 27th Street. (Little Girl, being nice, was in the pen, eating like a pig princess should.) I trailed him, yelling and pleading, but he had a date, apparently, or a bus to catch, and he merely glanced sideways at me, grunted, and trotted faster. Even trapped within a well of fear, I couldn't help but enjoy the clicking sound of his hooves on the city sidewalk, his ears flopping in the wind.

As cute as this pig outing was, if Big Guy had made it to 27th Street, he would have turned into inedible bacon, not to mention that I would have had some pretty steep body-shop fees to pay. He weighed about 175 pounds.

Luckily, I spotted some of our 28th Street neighbors up ahead, returning from the corner store. "Can you stop the pig?" I asked.

"What?" a young man with cornrows said.

"Just, uh, you know, scare him," I suggested. The man got in front of the pig. Big Guy stopped.

The man clapped his hands. I could see Big Guy's tiny brain working on how to solve this problem, and whether it was worth all the ha.s.sle-and exercise. With a soft bouf, bouf, he turned his curly tail and trotted back to the 2-8. Me chasing behind, yelling encouraging things. he turned his curly tail and trotted back to the 2-8. Me chasing behind, yelling encouraging things.

The guy with the cornrows wanted to process what had happened. As I shut the gate behind Big Guy he asked with a smile, "Do you think G.o.d made pigs to eat? Cuz when I saw that pig, I thought, yum, ham and bacon."

"I don't know," I said, "but I think the same thing. We bred them to be like this, so maybe they become what we want."

Cornrows grinned. "Well, I've never seen a pig before. That was really something."

Feeling like an experienced pig wrangler after that experience, I walked outside feeling relatively calm about the two pigs now cavorting in the street. I went first to Little Girl, who was trying to break down the fence to the garden, and yanked on her ear. She sat down. Tugging two hundred pounds by the ear is remarkably ineffective. "Can you hit her b.u.t.t with the stick?" I called to Sandra. She came over and gave Little Girl a short smack. The pig budged, a little.

Sandra's daughter and Chao built an impromptu herding area out of fallen garbage cans so that the pigs could be trapped at the end of our dead-end street. The monk worked on Big Guy, who finally got sick of the man in the robes making the grunting noises and went into the pen without anyone touching him. I broke out a bag of bread and lured Little Girl with it-she followed me into the gate.

"Thanks, you guys!" I said from behind the gate, sweating and feeling frazzled by the escape. These people were so nice.

The monk pointed to the schoolyard field to which the pigs had beelined. "They want to be free," he said.

I had to agree.

The next week, on a sunny August morning, I arrived at the restaurant for the first day of my salumi apprentices.h.i.+p. I made sure to wear a new white s.h.i.+rt and clean shoes.

Chris greeted me, drinking a milky cappuccino-did I want one? I nodded, and a woman behind the bar pulled me a frothy cap. I met Chris's wife, who was arranging flowers at the bar. "Here to steal Chris's secrets?" she asked, smiling. I shrugged. Before we started, Chris told me his one ground rule: I must never share his recipes with another person. These salami recipes represented years of training and fine-tuning. I nodded. All that tradition felt a little weighty, as if I were being indoctrinated into a secret society.

We went to the back kitchen to set up. He had pulled out several raw pork shoulders and a large slab of back fat. We were going to make salami. When Chris bustled out to get a hotel pan, one of the prep cooks, a skinny twenty-year-old, asked me how I had heard about Eccolo and Chris's salumi-making skills. "I Dumpster dive here," I began to tell him. He shrieked with laughter and high-fived me.

Maybe I've read too much Anthony Bourdain, but I had imagined that the back of a restaurant would be a crude, uncivilized place. I expected to get groped, not high-fived. Everyone who pa.s.sed through this kitchen seemed intelligent and kind.

Samin, the sous-chef and Chris's right-hand woman, arrived and began to slice turnips. She looked about twenty-six and had thick, dark hair. "What are you doing?" I asked.

"Making pickled turnips," she said. She told me that everything served at the restaurant was homemade. The mustard, stewed tomatoes, mayonnaise, pickles, sauerkraut, walnut liquor, and obviously the salumi, which includes all the cured meats, like salami, coppa, prosciutto. She was what she called the grandma of the place.

"I'll show you my pantry sometime," Samin promised, adding that she sometimes made spicy pickled vegetables in the style of her Iranian grandmother.

No one seemed to think it was odd that a Dumpster-diving urban pig farmer was in their midst. In fact, I came to learn that the restaurant industry was filled with other obsessive freaks like Samin, who would never buy a factory-made pickle. I was just another one of the freaks.

Chris came back and put the meat on ice, then we took a quick tour of the cold rooms where the salumi were aged. The whole ceiling was filled with hanging meats, hundreds of salumi stalact.i.tes in various shapes and stages of decay.

"We make a finocchino salami, made with fennel," Chris said, and grasped the end of a mold-dusted salami. "Here's a soria, made with hot peppers. Coppa-" He pointed at smaller, more circular parcels of meat. Though it was cold, I could still smell the place-a wonderful combination of mushroom and meat.

"What's that?" I asked, pointing at a gigantic salami about three times the size of the others.

Chris smiled. "That's my special one. I call it the Pet.i.t Jesus," he said. "I have to secure it with a net, see?" I could see a raised checked pattern on it-like it was wearing fishnet stockings. The Pet.i.t Jesus, he told me, hangs in supplication for many months before it is ready. A waiter came in, consulted the metal tag hanging from a coppa, and then took the meat away to be cut paper thin and served on a large wooden plank decorated with olives. I stood gazing up at all the meat in awe. How many pigs did it represent?

Chris and I walked back into the prep room, and I noticed two prosciuttos-two salted pig legs-hanging near the doorway. They looked exactly like my pigs' legs, but dry and hairless. "Watch your head on these," Chris said, pointing but not looking at them.

Without ceremony, he began to trim a pork shoulder. He set the hunk of meat on a cutting board and cut it in one-inch chunks. These he tossed into the hotel pan (which was sitting on ice), separating them by degree of fat: extremely fatty in one corner, no fat in another. Each shoulder, with back fat added, would make about ten salamis, Chris said.

Salumi are never cooked, he explained as he trimmed the pork shoulder. The meat instead is "cooked" by salt, a bacterial enzyme, nitrates, and time. "So a raw-food person could eat salami?" I asked.

"But we won't let them," said Chris, smiling. Focused on his work, his head bowed over the project, his careful hands deconstructing the shoulder, he rattled off the names of the main muscle groups that made up the pork shoulder and what jobs they'd done for the pig. He told me that his pork came from Oregon and had grazed on hazelnuts.

After weighing and dicing up some pure white back fat, Chris sent the meat and fat through an industrial meat grinder. He had me weigh out the spices and curing agents that went into each kind of salami. We used a digital scale, and everything was measured in grams. I felt as if I was back in one of my college science labs.

We added the spices to the ground meat. "Look in here," Chris said. A whirling mixer was whipping the meat and spices together. It looked like some sort of ghastly cookie dough. "It'll reach a perfect point-there!-when it starts to hold together. This is very important," Chris said, exhaling, and turned off the machine.

Samin peeked her head into the room. "Your son is here," she said. And then a skinny punk-rock teenager slouched in. He was prep-cooking at the restaurant for the summer. Leaving father and son alone for a moment, I ran out to the kitchen to get the salami stuffer, a giant red metal machine. I pa.s.sed by the line cooks, who were sweaty and concentrating on making pasta and roasting chickens.

I had never worked in a real kitchen before. In college I was a dishwasher for a few months, but the place was just a Mexican joint. This kitchen, in contrast, was amazing. There was an entire wall of spices in mason jars. The pastry chef, a wholesome Chinese American woman, had her own realm, with a Sub-Zero freezer and all manner of sauces within easy reach. A long wooden counter that stretched between the line cooks and the servers held vases of fresh herbs, wooden bowls of eggs, and a million utensils. There were three walk-in refrigerators.

Back in the meat room, I met Chris's son, who also wanted to watch the salami-making. I handed Chris the stuffer, an old-fas.h.i.+oned Italian contraption, which he placed on the counter.

"This is a beef middle," Chris said, showing us the beef intestine we would stuff the meat into. It had been soaking in water and looked like a large condom made of skin. It looked even more like a condom when Chris attached it to the salami stuffer, glopped a load of the mixed-up meat into the hopper, and began to turn the crank. The intestine grew plump with meat. It was mesmerizing.

"This is when lots of dirty jokes get made," Chris said. Acting unimpressed, his son wandered off to prep lettuce for the salads.

After the casing had stretched to about three feet long, Chris popped the meat onto a metal tray and tied the end with string. "There you go," he said after all the salamis had been stuffed and tied.

After we painted a different batch of salamis with penicillin culture, we had a little extra time. Chris said we should make a coppa. He trimmed one of the shoulders into a perfect heart of meat about the size of a football. This we rubbed with smoked paprika and some other fiery spices. Chris brought out a veiny cow intestine, called the beef bottom, and we slipped the heart of meat inside. Then we went around to the cook line and dipped the coppa into boiling water.

"Smell it," Chris said. I leaned in-it smelled like a barnyard.

"I like it." I grinned.

"You would," he said, like we were old friends.

"Let's try one," he said, and brought out an example of what the finished product would look like after four months of aging. The coppa had gone from football to softball size, a white mold had formed around the whole thing, and when Chris cut into it, the meat was a deep red, as if it had been cooked. He handed me a piece. This is food that honors the pig, I thought as I chewed and the subtle flavors filled my mouth. It wasn't like the turkey or a rabbit-merely a delicious and sacred thing to eat; this pig, through alchemy, had been transformed into something higher, almost immortal.

Chris stared at a slice, then we both chewed thoughtfully. It was so good, smoky and rich, earthy. "So that's my deal," said Chris.

In his book About Looking, About Looking, John Berger wrote, "A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an 'and' and not by a 'but.' " I felt well on my way to peasantdom. But I needed Chris to teach me more-and I secretly hoped he would help me when it came time for my pigs to meet their maker. John Berger wrote, "A peasant becomes fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork. What is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements in that sentence are connected by an 'and' and not by a 'but.' " I felt well on my way to peasantdom. But I needed Chris to teach me more-and I secretly hoped he would help me when it came time for my pigs to meet their maker.

Every week throughout August, I returned to the restaurant to learn more: How to make pancetta, which is the pork belly rubbed with spices, rolled, and tied. How to make the Pet.i.t Jesus, Chris's specialty salami, modeled after the Spanish soriano-large chunks of spicy pork and coa.r.s.e herbs.

Over that time, as I learned about salumi, I also learned about Chris. He grew up in Illinois, where he learned to cook, but he went west in the early 1980s when the whole California-cuisine scene started to happen. Specifically, he went to work for Chez Panisse, the world-famous restaurant in Berkeley. During some of his almost twenty years there, Chris was a forager-a person who goes out to local farms to find the freshest, most delicious ingredients possible.

Chris was ten years younger than my parents, on the tail end of the hippie generation. Like my mom and dad, who built their own house and raised their own food, Chris had the urge to make a connection to something tangible, something real. One day, as we trimmed some meat, he told me that he had considered starting a farm, too, but in the end decided that he had too much to learn from the city. His craft would be cooking. When he discovered the art of curing meat, it became his lifelong obsession.

It was the 1980s, and a law in America had banned the import of bone-in prosciutto, so Chris began working on making his own for his customers at Chez Panisse. "My first prosciuttos were too salty," he said. "They tasted too meaty, not flavorful like the ones from Italy." Then he got his hands on a small booklet of guidelines for Italian prosciutto. ("There were no books then, as there are now," said Chris.) Though it wasn't a recipe, it did help him figure out that the pig legs he was using were too small. He had to source bigger pigs than his regular supplier provided. He found a farmer in Oregon who raised pigs fed on pasture. The booklet specified that the animals must weigh more than 240 pounds, so Chris asked the farmer to grow them to full size. Also, the booklet said there should be only 3 percent salt-Chris had been using too much.

His experiment was a painfully slow process: it would be eighteen months before he would know whether it had been successful. He remembered at one point looking at tiny flies on the prosciutto hanging in the Chez Panisse curing room that he had built. He fretted about them. But when he went on a tour of prosciutto makers in Italy-where the restaurant had sent him to learn traditional methods from the salumi masters-he realized that the flies were a good omen.

"I remember standing in this world-cla.s.s prosciutto maker's drying room-it was just ma.s.sive, just ma.s.sive s.p.a.ce-when I saw the same little flies," said Chris. "I didn't want to be rude, pointing out the flies, so I waited." When the tour was over, he pulled the guy aside and asked about them. "I said, 'What are these?' " The ham maker explained that the flies were a normal part of the curing process, nothing to worry about. Chris was exhilarated.

Next came salami making. Again, through trial and error, trips to Europe, and an apprentices.h.i.+p with a master salami maker, Chris finally solidified his process and recipes.

Chris said that when some Italian customers found out the salumi plate was made in house, they were "surprised, then dubious, then surprised again. I had one guy say, 'This is very good, but this is not prosciutto.' " Chris laughed. Hard-core traditionalists say you can't make prosciutto in a place so close to the sea. They say it must be a hundred kilometers or more from the ocean, which Chris thought was totally arbitrary.

He cut into the soriano-the Pet.i.t Jesus-and held it up to the light. The slice was almost four inches in diameter, with clear distinction between the larger chunks of meat and the finer ground meat. Zingy and meaty, with a spicy start from the smoked paprika and a hot finish from the bird's-eye pepper, this was clearly his favorite. n.o.body else in America made this salami.

Chris said if you cut into most salami, you'll see the silver skin, the air pockets, the too-uniform, hot-dog-like look that marks a ma.s.s-produced product. This one made by Chris was like a stained-gla.s.s window-fat alternating with meat in an inconsistent, artisa.n.a.l way. It was truly beautiful. And delicious.

Near the end of August, and the conclusion of my apprentices.h.i.+p, Chris agreed that I could bring one of the pigs to the restaurant after the kill. We clearly amused each other. During my training, Chris had shown me knife moves and I had told farm stories and made jokes. He said it would take two days to deconstruct Big Guy and make, with my clumsy help, salami, coppas, and prosciutto. All I had to do was find someone to kill the pigs.

"There's an Anthony Bourdain quote I love," Chris told me as he trimmed some pork bellies, evening them up so he could show me how to roll them into pancetta, another thing we would be making with my pig: "Every time I pick up the phone, something dies."

"Yeah, I gotta find someone to execute those f.u.c.kers," I said.

As the time grew closer, my attempts to hire an a.s.sa.s.sin were getting desperate. No one wanted to come to Oakland to kill my pigs. One traveling butcher laughed. "We do farm kills," he said, "but you don't have a farm." Maybe he sensed, over the phone, my hackles rising, because he started to backpedal. "I mean, you have a farm, but n.o.body's going to go all the way down there."

After I hung up, I went out to the pigsty and poured a fresh bed of sawdust. The pigs loved it and rolled around happily. I had to dash out of the pen quickly, though, because lately they had started to scare me a little bit. Little Girl would pull urgently on my s.h.i.+rttails-not because she wanted to tell me something but because, I think, she wanted to drag me down and eat me.

Every other farm animal had taken a backseat to the pigs. I didn't know how many rabbits we had or whether the chickens were getting enough food-I could only think of the pigs. Even my family and friends had taken second place behind the pigs. I hadn't talked to my mom or sister in weeks. Willow went Dumpster diving with Bill and me sometimes, but I could tell her heart wasn't in it. Bill and I had grown closer, though. After a sweaty night of summer Dumpster diving, we would share the bathtub, wash each other's backs, and marvel at the treasures we had found that night, and the porcine treasures that were growing larger and larger in our backyard.

The pigs had grown so big, the other animals were scared of them. The chickens avoided them. I kept the young turkeys, suddenly fairly large, in a separate pen so they wouldn't be eaten.

And though I wanted to kill the pigs myself-perhaps with Bobby's a.s.sistance-I recognized that this might be a job for a professional. To harvest a thirty-pound turkey, to kill a three-pound rabbit-in retrospect, that seemed so easy. Done at home, with simple tools. But to kill two animals that weigh more than I do-for some reason, this fact was significant-made it a big deal. Finis.h.i.+ng the pigs was to be the pinnacle of my urban-farming experiences. And the nights were growing longer and colder. It was getting to be hog-killing time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE.

After a few more days of phone calls and e-mails, I found a killer, and a woman at that.

A butcher named Jeff, whom I had found up north, had agreed to break down the smaller pig and directed me to a slaughterhouse close to his shop. Sheila's slaughterhouse. I dialed her immediately. I needed to get a firm date so I could tell Chris when Big Guy would arrive.

"Oh, I hate the Bay Area," she told me when she heard that I lived in Oakland. But she agreed-all I had to do was get the pigs to her ranch, and she would take care of everything.

"I do kills on Fridays," she said, "so just bring them by on a Friday." Any Friday. It seemed rather cavalier. I told her I would be there on a Friday in September, and felt rea.s.sured that all was well.

As the date approached I would remember unanswered questions-Where was her slaughterhouse exactly? Should I starve them the day before? Could I get the offal?-but when I called, I would get her answering machine. The outgoing message was in Spanish and English. I left long messages with my questions but received exactly zero calls back, which made me nervous.

Her butcher friend, Jeff, was a bit easier to contact. He had three phone numbers and always answered. He promised that the pig would be butchered to spec, wrapped, and ready to pick up the following week.

"But I want the heads," I said. Chris had told me about the most amazing book, The Whole Beast The Whole Beast. The author, Fergus Henderson, pointed out that all parts of an animal should be eaten, not just the prime cuts. Eating livers and kidneys and brains was a tasty way to not waste an animal's life. The book begins with "Seven Things I Should Mention." Henderson's number one: "This is a celebration of cuts of meat, innards, and extremities that are more often forgotten or discarded in today's kitchen; it would seem disingenuous to the animal not to make the most of the whole beast: there is a set of delights, textural and flavorsome, which lie beyond the fillet."

I was very eager to try all kinds of delights-head cheese, pig's ears, trotters.

"Oh, you'll have to talk to Sheila about that," Jeff said.

"And the blood," I added, remembering boudin noir, French blood sausage.

Sheila.

But she wasn't answering. On Labor Day, after leaving three messages in as many days, I again called the Wild Rose, her slaughterhouse.

"Novella, we're barbecuing," Sheila said. "We're open Monday through Friday."

"But I need to have a few questions answered," I said, shocked that she had picked up and struggling to remember what my questions were.

"How long does it take?" I asked, finally, lamely.

"Half an hour for each pig," she said.

"And can I watch?" I said, rummaging through my bag.

"Yes. OK, Novella, we'll see you on Friday," Sheila said, and hung up the phone.

Listening to the dial tone, I found my list: * what time to arrive? what time to arrive? * * does she cool them off? does she cool them off? * * what about the head? what about the head? * * should I bring buckets for the blood and offal? should I bring buckets for the blood and offal? * * directions directions Oh, well.

The Sat.u.r.day before I would take the pigs to get killed, my neighbor-the husband of the beautiful Vietnamese woman who had handed Harold to me across the fence-approached me as I took out the trash.

"Excuse me," he said. We'd mostly just waved at each other, never had a conversation. "Your pigs"-he pointed behind the gates where the pigs were biting each other and squealing over some toothsome bucket of slop-"are smelling very bad."

I nodded. I had cleaned out the bunny cages and thrown the soiled straw into the pig pen, thinking that the pigs would enjoy it. Surprisingly, they didn't touch it. Big mistake. The ammonia smell from the rabbit pee festered in the sun and blended with six months' worth of pig s.h.i.+t to cause a reeking smell. "My little girl," he said, and gestured at a little munchkin wearing pigtails, "almost vomited the other day, it smelled so bad. Can you move them over to the garden?"

"I'm really sorry," I said. "I'm going to have them out of here next week. I'll make sure to put down more sawdust. I'll get on it right away," I stammered.